When did people stop being drunk all the time? Up until the Industrial Revolution, alcohol accounted for “around a quarter to close to half of the calories in their diet”.
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Entries for July 2023
How Many Dinosaurs Remain Undiscovered? On average, one new dinosaur species is discovered every two weeks. “We’re in the golden age of paleontology.”
“What would the internet of people look like now? Maybe we just ditch the algorithms.” Reminds me of that business adage: “the only way to make money is bundling and unbundling”. Maybe that’s the way to make culture too.
Why Pac-Man Became a Big Hit
I’ve gotta say that I was a little skeptical when Phil Edwards started out this video saying that he wasn’t going to talk about Pac-Man’s gameplay as a vital component of why it was such a huge success when in came out in 1980. He allows that, of course, the gameplay was very compelling but other factors truly pushed the game beyond the competition and into its own category, including the decline of pinball (profit per square foot), its family friendliness, and some legal & financial maneuverings.
Oh, and here’s the playable keychain-sized Pac-Man that you can see in the video. Didn’t even know that was a thing!
Paul Reubens (aka Pee-Wee Herman) has died at the age of 70. Man, fuck cancer. I *loved* Pee-wee’s Playhouse when I was a kid…I never missed it.
It’s been 40 years since her debut album; here’s a look at Madonna’s 40 greatest hits, ranked.
Is This the First Rap Song? (1946)
The roots of hip-hop and rap are various and stretch back in time to the antebellum South and from there to Africa. But by some accounts, a song called Noah by gospel group The Jubalaires was the first instance of recorded music that sounded like rap. Listen for yourself…the relevant bit is right around the 35-second mark:
I’m not a music historian by any stretch, but that sounds 30 years ahead of its time. There are several bad remixes of Noah on YouTube…this one is maybe the best at pairing their singing with a rap beat.
Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t. Erin Kissane asked folks why they had disengaged from Mastodon; they described reasons like a hostile response from regulars, poor discoverability, and too serious/boring.
A bleak account of a Greyhound bus ride across the US. “Gone are the small, clean, cheap motels in the centre of cities, gone are public spaces where anyone can find a water fountain, a bathroom, a place to nurse a cheap cup of coffee and human company.”
I think about Little Bobby Tables once a week, minimum.
Rules for design in the real world: “If it looks neat, people will want to take a photo with it. If it looks comfortable, people will want to sit on it. If it looks fun, people will play around on it.”
New Writing Shed Desire: A Detachable Studio on Rails
Designed by Olson Kundig Architects, the Maxon House features a studio that’s attached to the main house but can be rolled away on railroad tracks to be closer to the trees. From Dezeen:
The two-storey structure was based on the design of the “traditional caboose”. A workspace sits on the first level while the second, accessible via a steel ladder, serves as a cupola for taking in views and functions as a “calmer zone for creative exploration and restoration”.
The control panel that operates the rails was taken from a Burlington Northern locomotive, while the door colour and the wood used were directly informed by colours and materials commonly found on American trains.
The railroad ties for the track were repurposed from the Great Northern Railroad line, though the studio noted the steel tracks “are a much larger gauge than is typically used”.
There’s even a Wes Anderson connection (because of course there is):
Inspired by Wes Anderson’s love of trains in cinema, Maxon Railway takes some visual cues in the form of on-board artifacts and props from The Darjeeling Limited.
You can read lots more about the house and the railway, including more than you’d probably want to know about the history of rail travel and commerce in the Pacific Northwest.
While visiting relatives in the Chicago area, a video game historian stumbles across a rare Discs of Tron arcade cabinet in amazing condition.
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Recreated in Wisconsin
In 2006, photographer Mark Preuschl recreated Georges Seurat’s famous impressionist painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte in Beloit, WI with a group of volunteers. Here’s the original for reference:
From My Modern Met:
In conceiving this tableau vivant, the organizers wanted to keep things modern. Thus, all participants are wearing contemporary clothes with umbrellas substituted in for the 19th-century parasols. Though the team was organized, they weren’t quite prepared for what mother nature threw their way the day of the shoot. Preuschl recalls winds of 20 to 25 mph coming off the river, as well as clouds that didn’t allow for the shadows they were so desperately looking for. Luckily, there was a window of about 25 minutes when the sun came out and cast those shadows.
He really couldn’t have scouted that location any better…it matches the original pretty well. Who knew you could find Belle Époque Paris in southern Wisconsin?
As temperatures increase during the summer in the US, public swimming pools are becoming harder to find. “A legacy of segregation, the privatization of pools, and starved public recreation budgets have led to the decline.”
“The Biden administration on Tuesday announced a proposal meant to force health insurers to cover mental health and addiction care as comprehensively as they cover treatment for physical health conditions.” Good.
From Rotten Tomatoes, critics pick the best 25 TV shows from the past 25 years. Breaking Bad at #1? Hmm. Newcomer Succession is #5. Also on the list: Atlanta, Fleabag, BoJack Horseman, and The Americans.
Rebecca Solnit: We Can’t Afford to be Climate Doomers
Rebecca Solnit, writing for The Guardian on the climate crisis:
Many things that were once true — that we didn’t have adequate solutions, that the general public wasn’t aware or engaged — no longer are. Outdated information is misinformation, and the climate situation has changed a lot in recent years. The physical condition of the planet — as this summer’s unprecedented extreme heat and flooding and Canada’s and Greece’s colossal fires demonstrate — has continued to get worse; the solutions have continued to get better; the public is far more engaged; the climate movement has grown, though of course it needs to grow far more; and there have been some significant victories as well as the incremental change of a shifting energy landscape.
I don’t think of myself as a climate doomer, but I certainly feel less hopeful about the situation than Solnit does. She asserts that the main obstacles to meaningful action on the climate crisis in the West are politics and capitalism, which is supposed to make readers feel hopeful. But that’s the part that often fills me with despair. The unpopular extremist party that controls more than half of the political apparatus in the country with the biggest responsibility to fix the planet is not only not interested in doing so, they are actively working against it. And they’ve built up such a wall against public accountability that I don’t know if protest (which they will make illegal if they can) or even voting (which they’ve fought to make more difficult) are meaningful levers with which to try and change the situation.
Ok, maybe I am a climate doomer. But this piece by Solnit is good medicine for folks in despair about the climate. And I’m putting Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility (edited by Solnit and climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua) on my reading list as well. (via @marcprecipice)
Ed Yong has decided to leave The Atlantic. What an amazing body of work he leaves behind there. His Covid reporting was essential. Good luck to him on his future projects!
From Rotten Tomatoes, critics pick the best 25 movies from the past 25 years. Mad Max: Fury Road is a surprise at #1. And The Dark Knight at #4? Also on the list: Pan’s Labyrinth, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Spirited Away.
“Here’s a mindbending etymology fact for you: The word ‘blackmail’ originally had nothing to do with mail as in letters.”
Designer Kelli Anderson is doing a monthly paper invention subscription. As a sometime recipient of her holiday-themed paper experiments, I can vouch for this!
New Woodblock Prints of Hokusai’s Previously Unpublished “Book of Everything”
This is pretty cool: in collaboration with the British Museum, a team led by woodblock printmaker David Bull (who I first wrote about back in 20051) is carving woodblocks and creating prints from a series of previously unpublished drawings by legendary Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai.
The Museum has in their possession a group of drawings by Hokusai that were apparently intended for use in the production of a series of books. For reasons unknown to us now that project was cancelled, but the drawings survived, and we have selected 12 of them for a new subscription series.
For more details of the collection of images, please refer to this page of the British Museum website. But here, we can simply note that the drawings fall into a number of categories, and our set will reflect that diversity. Hokusai’s series was intended to take his readers through aspects of Japanese historical culture, and we will meet Buddhist deities, warriors from ancient China, and historical landscapes, along with more prosaic scenes of the natural world.
The print shown above was the first one to be sent out in January. But look at this original drawing from the collection:
Wow. That is shockingly modern — like a 60s superhero comic or a still from 60s anime. I hope they reprint this one!
Here’s a video from the British Museum of Bull talking about the project:
If you make woodblock prints for a living, you know the name Hokusai, and if you’re a woodblock carver and you hear about original drawings from Hokusai that have never been carved into prints you would most likely do a little happy dance.
(via open culture)
Hooo boy, there are parts of that post that did not age well. Bull, however, is still doing his thing.↩
Singapore is a lovely place to visit, but they continue to hang people for drug trafficking. “Singapore seems to positively relish these cases to demonstrate how hard they are on drugs.”
Amateurs Reached America’s Highest Peak First. Nobody Believed Them.
In 1910, a group of inexperienced climbers claimed to have summited Denali, the highest peak in what is now the United States. Their story was greeted with skepticism.
So when I found out that the first people to reach the highest point in North America (Denali, the mountain formerly known as McKinley) were just a bunch of Average Joes with no climbing experience who went up on a bet, I was flabbergasted. How had I never heard this story? The more I looked into it, the more fantastic the story became. When these guys descended from the mountain, nobody believed they really even made it. And they wouldn’t be the first people to fraudulently claim to have reached the top, with no evidence to offer that they succeeded. This story has all the makings of a blockbuster action comedy. It’s almost unbelievable.
But later evidence suggests that they just might have made it to the top.
People in 1920s Berlin Nightclubs Flirted via Pneumatic Tubes. “Like messaging on a dating app, but with — you know — tubes.”
This recent episode of You’re Wrong About on Sinéad O’Connor is worth a listen, particularly if all you know about her is Nothing Compares 2 U and her SNL appearance.
Some of the Oldest Photos You Will Ever See
In 1842, a French artist and scholar named Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey set out on a tour of the eastern Mediterranean to document sights and architecture via the brand new medium of photography. He started off in what is now Italy and continued on to Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and the Levant (which includes modern-day Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine). The daguerreotypes he took are the oldest surviving photos of those locations (aside from Italy). It’s incredible to time travel back 180 years to see what these places looked like. (via aeon)
Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project. “Although women participated in all aspects of the Manhattan Project, their contributions are either omitted or only mentioned briefly in most histories of the project.”
Rotating sandwiches. It is what it says on the tin. See also Scanwiches.
On creative grief and how to deal with it. “When finishing up a project, feelings of loss, despair, sadness or emptiness may rise to the surface.”
How Streaming Caused the Writers Strike
Vox talked to four television writers about how streaming and prestige TV have changed the financial picture for writers over the past 15 years, contributing to the writers strike that’s been going on since early May.
Companies like Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV+, and more have given consumers an unprecedented array of films and TV shows and opened the door to new voices that don’t have to adhere to mainstream network formats. On the other hand, streaming has also changed how television gets produced, the role writers play, and how they get paid. We interviewed four television writers and showrunners about how streaming has changed how they work, how their incomes have taken a hit, and why it has become harder than ever to build a career.
Colossal Is Taking a Summer Break! Colossal is one of my all-time favorite sites and it’s great to see them stepping away for some time off.
I guess I care a lot about things like Futurama’s collab with Fortnite now? *sneaks away from the computer to go get a Bender skin from the item shop…*
The Louvre Is Thrilled to Announce It Is Rebranding to “UVR”. “Is that an acronym? Maybe. Is it a meaningless assemblage of letters? Perhaps. Is it memorable? Searchable? Do we even own the IP? I’m not telling.”
Medium-Res Pixel Illustrations of Jun Kumaori
I’m taken with the style of Jun Kumaori’s illustrations — they look like drawings of (stay with me here) small JPEGs converted to GIFs and then clumsily enlarged, complete with all of the resultant digital artifacts. This makes me nostalgic for the late 90s web and Photoshop 3.0. (via the fox is black)
The NASA Voyager Golden Record master tapes owned by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan are up for auction at Sotheby’s. Est: $400,000-600,000.
Can a Lego Car Roll Downhill Forever?
I just really love the hell out of these iterative Lego build videos from Brick Experiment Channel and Brick Technology. In this one, a car is repeatedly modified to roll perfectly on an increasingly inclined treadmill. I started watching and in 10 seconds I was 100% invested.
They’re not even really about Lego…that’s just the playful hook to get you through the door. They’re really about science and engineering — trial and error, repeated failure, iteration, small gains, switching tactics when confronted with dead ends, how innovation can result in significant advantages. Of course, none of this is unique to engineering; these are all factors in any creative endeavor — painting, sports, photography, writing, programming. But the real magic here is seeing it all happen in just a few minutes.
See also A Lego 5-Speed Manual Transmission, Designing a Lego Car to Cross Gaps, Engineering a Capable Climbing Lego Car, Making A Solar-Powered Billion-Year Lego Clock, and 20 Mechanical Principles Combined in a Useless Lego Machine.
Here’s what happened after Covid vaccines were made available in the US: “The excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters.” 43% is a *massive* difference in outcome. Literally a death cult.
Four questions that Ezra Klein uses to determine if he has had a good day: “Am I sleeping enough? Am I getting enough time to myself? Am I deeply connected with the people I love? Am I making fairly healthy choices in my body?”
Three years ago, a NASA mission collected a sample from an asteroid called Bennu, and in September, that sample will finally return to Earth to be analyzed.
Alison Bechdel on the Bechdel test for movies: “It was a joke. I didn’t ever intend for it to be the real gauge it has become…”
An organization called Loose Ends helps finish craft projects (knitting, sewing, etc.) that people who are ill or have died have left behind. “We keep your loved ones close by completing the projects they’ve left behind.”
When Elites Stopped Dominating Painting
Traditionally, the subjects depicted in Western art were either religious or rich — wealthy patrons paid for paintings of themselves or of their religions. As Evan Puschak explains in this brief video essay, that began to change in the 16th century as revolution, reformation, and the development of a merchant class shifted who was worthy of depiction and who could pay.
And here’s an interesting dual review of Oppenheimer and Barbie from Anne Helen Petersen. “Barbie doesn’t argue that the world should look like Barbie’s world so much as dare you to find offense in it.”
Thoughtful dissenting review of Barbie from Maria Bustillos. “Barbie Land is revealed as a dysfunctional, corrupt, duplicitous society, and the story ends with its original autocracy in place.”
The small vehicles of Tokyo, “a slim cataloguing of the rich diversity of small vehicles that help shape street life in the world’s largest city”.
My Recent Media Diet, Barbenheimer Edition
Hey folks. I’m trying to get into the habit of doing these media diet posts more frequently than every six months so they’re actually, you know, somewhat relevant. Here’s what I’ve been watching, reading, listening to, and experiencing over the last two months.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. One of the most visually stunning movies I’ve ever seen. A worthy sequel to the first film. (A)
On Being with Krista Tippett: Isabel Wilkerson. I will take any opportunity to listen to Isabel Wilkerson talk about her work. (A)
Deep Space Archives. Been listening to this album by A.L.I.S.O.N on heavy rotation while working recently. (A-)
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Bleak and powerful, science fiction at its finest. (A)
Asteroid City. I liked Wes Anderson’s latest effort quite a bit. Not quite as much as The French Dispatch but more than many other folks. (A-)
Dunkirk. Rewatched for the 5th time. For my money, this is Nolan’s best movie. (A+)
Beef. I wanted to like this but I only lasted two episodes. Not for me, YMMV. (C)
Antidepressants. It took a bit to home in on the right one, but even my relatively low dose has helped me out of a particularly low point over the last few months. (A)
The Diplomat (season one). Burned through this one in just a few days — an entertaining political thriller that doesn’t take itself too seriously. (B+)
Ooni Volt 12. Ooni was kind enough to send me this electric pizza oven to test out, so take this with a grain of salt, but I’ve been having a lot of fun making no-fuss pizza. Need to work on my dough game tho. (A-)
Silo. This hooked me right away and didn’t let go, although it got a little bit ridiculous in places. I’m eager to see where things go in season two. (B+)
Interstellar. Watched this with the kids and we all enjoyed it. The musical score does a lot of heavy lifting in all of Nolan’s films but in this one especially. (A-)
The Age of Pleasure. My only complaint about this album from Janelle Monáe is that it’s too short. (A-)
Barr Hill Gin & Tonic. The best canned cocktail I’ve had. And it’s turned me into a G&T fan. (A)
VanMoof S3. *sigh* Figures that I finally pull the trigger on getting an e-bike and the company that produces it files for bankruptcy. No matter: this thing is fun as hell and has flattened all the hills out around here. (A)
Átta. You always know what you’re going to get with Sigur Rós: atmospheric, ambient, abundant crescendos, ethereal vocals. (B+)
Air. Ben Affleck has a bit of a mixed record as a director, but this Air Jordan origin story is really solid and entertaining. Viola Davis is great as Michael Jordan’s mother Deloris. (A-)
The Bear (season two). There are aspects of The Bear that I don’t like (the intensity seems forced sometimes, almost cheesy) but the highs are pretty high. Forks was a fantastic episode. More Sydney and Ayo Edebiri in season three please. (A-)
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Solid Indy adventure and I love Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the sidekick/partner. I know some folks didn’t like the climax but seeing Jones get what he’s always wanted was satisfying. (B+)
Rebranding beloved brands. Max? X? No. So dumb. (F)
65. Oh dear. Adam Driver needs to choose his projects more wisely. Interesting premise but the rest was pretty lifeless. (C+)
Pizzeria Ida. The pizza is expensive (esp for Vermont), the ingredients top-notch, and the service rude (if you believe the reviews). We had a great time and this is probably the best pizza you can get in VT; it wouldn’t be out of place in NYC. (A)
Oppenheimer. Epic. Almost overwhelming at times. Don’t see this on anything but a big screen if you can help it. Perhaps not Nolan’s best but it still packs a wallop. (A-)
Barbie. I enjoyed this very much but found it uneven in spots. And no more Will Ferrell please. But it was great seeing people dressed up for the occasion — Barbenheimer felt like the first time since before the pandemic that you could feel the buzz in the audience, an excitement for what we were about to experience together. (B+)
Currently I’m reading American Prometheus (on which Oppenheimer is based) and Wool (on which Silo is based), so I’ll have those reviews for you next time hopefully. I don’t have a TV series going right now and nothing’s really catching my eye. Maybe I’ll dig into season three of (the underrated) The Great — I’ve heard it’s back to top form after a s02 dip.
Past installments of my media diet are available here.
This 211-shot badminton rally lasts almost three and a half minutes.
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