I found myself nodding at this short essay by Mandy Brown on the tradeoffs between work, life, time, energy, responsibility, and art, particularly this bit about what happens if you can make the leap from not having enough time for the essential things in life to having more time in your life because you're doing the essential things.

Then one day they say fuck it all. They eat leftover pasta over the sink, drop mom off at her mahjongg game, and go sit in the park to draw. They draw for hours, until the sun goes down and they're squinting under the street lights. And, lo and behold, the next day they plow through all those lingering to-dos. They see clearly that half of them were unnecessary when before they all seemed critical. They recognize a few others as things better handed off to their peers. They suddenly find time for attending to that one project they'd been procrastinating on for weeks. They sleep better. Their skin looks great. (Okay I might be exaggerating on that last one, but only mildly.)

It turns out, not doing their art was costing them time, was draining it away, little by little, like a slow but steady leak. They had assumed, wrongly, that there wasn't enough time in the day to do their art, because they assumed (because we're conditioned to assume) that every thing we do costs time. But that math doesn't take energy into account, doesn't grok that doing things that energize you gives you time back. By doing their art, a whole lot of time suddenly returned. Their art didn't need more time; their time needed their art.

I don't know if this is related or what, but a few years ago I shifted my thinking around time & energy. I noticed that when I thought or said "I don't have time for this", what I really meant was "I don't have the energy for this". Obviously I have time to do all sorts of things — I spend many hours during the week in front of the TV or on my phone watching/reading garbage — but it's actually the energy that's the issue. (All that TV/phone time is because I don't have the energy to do much else.)

Brown goes on to say that this has little to do with art or drawing...each person draws energy from their own particular essential activity: spending time with family, volunteering, biking, photography, lifting, cooking, going to the movies alone and eating too much popcorn and shushing people when they get too loud — what?, taking a drive, etc. A few weeks ago in a post about the flow state, I wrote about rediscovering something that I require to make more energy in my life:

While I am not feeling particularly in the groove today, over the past several weeks I've been in the flow state a lot, working on a couple of projects for the site. It's been a long time since I've had that feeling for more than a couple of hours every few months and booooooy does it feel good. There is almost nothing that fills me with as much joy as the "effortless engagement" of being in the flow state. I'm very glad it's back in my life — I'd been afraid it was gone forever.

I had indeed been putting off doing this kind of work because I didn't have the time and energy, but once I was able to make space for it in my day, it became clear that it was an essential thing that I need to do so that I can create time for everything else.

What a privilege it is to have that time/energy though, particularly in the US, with our low minimum wages, poor healthcare, and lack of a social safety net. Making time for your art so you can have more energy is not actually possible when you're working two jobs six days a week and filling the rest of your time with childcare, housework, and (hopefully) sleep while fighting upstream against sexism, racism, classism, and the like. As a nation, I think we'd all be a whole lot happier and healthier if everyone had the chance to spend time on, as Brown puts it, "some thing that when neglected siphons time and energy away but when attended to delivers it in droves".

• Mandy Brown
• working

Yesterday, there was yet another school shooting on a college campus, this time at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A UNC graduate student walked into a classroom building and murdered a science professor with a gun. The campus was on lockdown for hours. The front page of The Daily Tar Heel today consists of text messages sent to and from students during the lockdown:

An incredible and powerful design — on Mastodon, Steve Silberman called it "the tombstone of democracy, courtesy of the NRA". As a nation, we've spent more than 20 years and trillions of dollars fighting the "War on Terror" but won't do a damn thing about the self-imposed terrorism of gun violence. The people sending and receiving those texts — they are TERRIFIED. And this happens regularly in the US, in pre-schools and on college campuses alike. We are a sick nation.

• crime
• design
• guns
• journalism
• murder
• Steve Silberman

Oh, this is delightful: a short documentary about a group of Mayan women in the tiny town of Hondzonot in the Yucatan peninsula who formed a softball team called Las Diablillas (Little Devils).

As a girl, Ay Ay loved playing sports at school. But, when she asked her parents' permission to go out and play after school, they would say no — that only boys could do so. The custom in Hondzonot was that girls would stay busy inside, get married (some as young as twelve or thirteen), and have a family. Ay Ay always thought differently, she told me, but she had no choice but to obey her parents, and later her husband. One day, a mobile health unit came to town, and the doctor taught some local women to play softball with a wooden stick and a tennis ball, as a way to combat the risks of diabetes and hypertension. After the doctor left, the women kept playing, and the health benefits of the sport eased the community stigma. Little by little, Ay Ay asked permission from her husband to go out every day. "I felt it was necessary. I wanted to distract myself," she told Fajardo, "from the routine at home."

The women purposely wear the traditional huipil tunic as their uniform and play with an infectious spirit of camaraderie. Major League Baseball made their own short documentary about Las Diablillas:

"The question isn't, 'Who will give me permission?' It's, 'Who's going to stop me?'" says Geimi Santa Ofelia May Dzib, the team's left fielder, in the opening scenes of MLB Originals' latest short film, "Las Diablillas," which explores how these women have found empowerment through sport.

The NY Times also published a piece about the team a few years ago:

"Here a woman serves the home and is not supposed to go out and play sports," said Fabiola May Chulim, the team captain and manager of the Little Devils, known here as Las Diablillas, their name in Spanish. "When a woman marries, she's supposed to do chores and attend to her husband and kids. We decided a few years ago that's not going to impede us anymore from playing a sport when we want."

• Mexico
• softball
• sports
• video

Ahh, it seems like only yesterday that I read the news about David Fincher's upcoming film The Killer. And it was. So now here's the teaser trailer — interest piqued. What will tomorrow bring?

The Killer stars Michael Fassbender and will make its premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Sept 3, then a limited release in theaters, and then will be streaming on Netflix on Nov 10. As a refresher, here's what Fincher has been up to lately-ish: directed Mank (2020) & Mindhunter (2017-2019), executive produced Voir and Love, Death & Robots (also directed one episode). Fun Fincher Facts: he was apparently an assistant cameraman for Return of the Jedi and did "matte photography" for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

• David Fincher
• movies
• The Killer
• trailers
• video

From the Journey to the Microcosmos YouTube channel, this is an exploration of the tiny worlds contained in rainwater puddles and their connection to the discovery of microbial organisms in the 1670s by Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. What a trip that must have been, to be the first person to peer microscopically into some water and observe tiny organisms swimming around. (via @JenLucPiquant)

• Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
• science
• video

A McDonald's restaurant apparently appears in season two of Loki on Disney+ and to mark the occasion, the fast food giant made a commercial featuring a number of other appearances by the brand in movies and TV, including The Office, The Fifth Element, Coming to America ("They're McDonald's. I'm McDowell's."), and Seinfeld. (Perhaps the most famous McDonald's reference in cinema history, Jules' Royale with Cheese bit in Pulp Fiction, is conspicuously missing.)

The ad was created to introduce their As Featured In Meal promotion, which seems to consist of 1100-calorie meals from their usual menu paired with a packet of Sweet 'N Sour Sauce with the Loki logo on it. I thought the commercial was fun and clever but that promotion is a bit Sad Meal.

• advertising
• food
• Loki
• McDonald's
• movies
• TV
• video

The climate crisis has hit home this year for many Americans — its effects have been nearly inescapable in most parts of the country. With that, writes Bill McKibben, has come a sense of unease about the future, particularly about the places we live and will be able to live.

Drawing on his experience as a Vermonter, McKibben argues that no place is truly safe from the effects of the climate crisis, but we can find protection from it by rebuilding our sense of community and social trust. Those things can provide the resilience we're going to need to get though this.

We've come through 75 years where having neighbors was essentially optional: if you had a credit card, you could get everything you needed to survive dropped off at your front door. But the next 75 years aren't going to be like that; we're going to need to return to the basic human experience of relying on the people around you. We're going to need to rediscover that we're a social species, which for Americans will be hard — at least since Reagan we've been told to think of ourselves first and foremost (it was his pal Margaret Thatcher who insisted 'there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women.") And in the Musk/Trump age we're constantly instructed to distrust everyone and everything, a corrosion that erodes the social fabric as surely as a rampaging river erodes a highway.

Update: Here's an example of what McKibben is talking about w/r/t Vermont's sense of community:

Someone called Susan from Hollister Hill brought them sandwiches and brownies every day for two weeks after the flood. Bill from East Montpelier showed up and turned out to be a kind of one-man construction crew, and he's been coming for weeks, pushing river sediment around and clearing out barns.

Over 50 people came to help. And at the end of these days, there were bonfires and pizza.

• Bill McKibben
• climate crisis
• politics
• Vermont

Swiss Post has released a stamp that features concrete, an important material in the history of architecture. But first of all, look at the aesthetics of this thing:

Aaahhh, it looks so nice and clean and Swiss. Love it. Even better: the stamp was designed to feel like concrete:

To give the concrete wall depicted in the design a tactile dimension, cement pigments were added to the ultra-matt finish.

In 2021, Swiss Post made a stamp out of canvas for the same series of stamps regarding art. Not quite as aesthetically pleasing as the concrete one, but still pretty cool.

You can order the concrete stamp from the Swiss Post online shop. (via greg.org)

• art
• design
• stamps
• Switzerland

Now that the 2024 election campaigns have ramped up in earnest (absurdly & obscenely more than a year before the actual election), a good thing to keep in mind is NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen's guidance for how journalists should cover the election:¹

"Not the odds, but the stakes."

That's my shorthand for the organizing principle we most need from journalists covering the 2024 election. Not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for our democracy. Not the odds, but the stakes.

Rosen first articulated this principle more than a decade ago and ever since reading about it a few years ago, I've all but stopped reading and linking to political horse race coverage. Who scored more "points" in the latest debate? Which candidate seems the most Presidential? Will his mugshot bolster his campaign? Come on, this isn't the goddamned Oscars red carpet. Tell us what the candidates' plans are and how they will affect how Americans live their lives. What experience do they have in governance? Or if not governance, in leadership? What do they believe, what actions have they taken in the past and what consequences have those actions had on actual people? What motivates them...power, money, fame, service? Many many people will not give a shit about any of this, but if we want to retain a functioning democracy with a press that's not primarily about entertainment, voters need to know what they are getting into.

1. And I would argue, how they should cover many other important issues. So much of "tech" news reads like horse race coverage instead of focusing what kind of world would result if Company A or Technology B were to succeed. Journalists and outlets that cover the stakes get my attention.?

• Jay Rosen
• journalism
• politics
• USA

From Dell Cameron and Andrew Couts in Wired, Trump's Prosecution Is America's Last Hope:

The Trump administration's ever-broadening palette of ethics violations caused Americans to realize, perhaps for the first time on a national scale, that truly there are few if any laws against some of the most basic forms of corruption; that, instead, conventions and norms — an honor system, essentially — is all that stand between presidents and the gross abuse of their power.

This is a good, short piece, riffing off of the 2018 book by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die. The Republicans, Trump, the Supreme Court, billionaires, corporations, and corporate shareholders are using America's legal system to substantially weaken our democracy. It's not a new thing for the powerful to place themselves above the law, but the pace and openness with which it's happening right now is alarming.

• Andrew Couts
• books
• Daniel Ziblatt
• Dell Cameron
• Donald Trump
• How Democracies Die
• politics
• Steven Levitsky
• USA

On July 4, 2023, a couple thousand people gathered in Alaska to watch old junker cars get launched off of a 300-foot cliff and just get obliterated on impact. (The launching starts at the 8-minute mark.) It's entertaining to watch in a Jackass sort of way, but the whole thing is a metaphor for a particular facet of America: loud, dumb, fun, and wasteful.

• Alaska
• cars
• USA
• video

Jan Hakon Erichsen does weird things with dried pasta, mostly spaghetti but also lasagna. This is goofy and fun. Check out his Instagram and YouTube for more artistic hijinks. (thx, clarke)

• art
• food
• Jan Hakon Erichsen
• video

Great, long piece from Ronan Farrow for the New Yorker on Elon Musk's considerable influence over the US government. This doesn't seem good:

There is little precedent for a civilian's becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space. SpaceX is currently the sole means by which nasa transports crew from U.S. soil into space, a situation that will persist for at least another year. The government's plan to move the auto industry toward electric cars requires increasing access to charging stations along America's highways. But this rests on the actions of another Musk enterprise, Tesla. The automaker has seeded so much of the country with its proprietary charging stations that the Biden Administration relaxed an early push for a universal charging standard disliked by Musk. His stations are eligible for billions of dollars in subsidies, so long as Tesla makes them compatible with the other charging standard.

In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice. Current and former officials from NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk's influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. One Pentagon spokesman said that he was keeping Musk apprised of my inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official about the matter only with Musk's permission. "We'll talk to you if Elon wants us to," he told me.

• business
• Elon Musk
• politics
• SpaceX
• Tesla
• Twitter
• USA

There's minimalism and then there's these classic movie posters from Michal Krasnopolski. Each poster is based on a simple grid of a circle, a square, and four intersecting lines. It would be a challenge to come up with a poster for every movie in this style, but the ones he picked work really well. (via moss & fog)

• design
• Michal Krasnopolski
• movies
• remix

These railway safety posters from Thailand are kind of amazing — very straightforward, graphic, and often gruesome in their illustration of the dangers involved with improper train travel.

See also The Horror of Vintage Dutch Safety Posters. (thx, chelsea)

• advertising
• design
• Thailand
• trains

Hey folks, a quick word. Newsletter. I've revamped it in recent weeks and now it's a digest of posts and Quick Links from the site, delivered to your inbox twice a week on Tuesday and Friday. It's free and you can subscribe here.

[Brief newsletter colophon interlude because I know people will be curious: I recently moved the newsletter from Mailchimp because it was too expensive, kinda janky for media-ish newsletters, and also they are owned by Intuit now. 👎 I switched to Sendy, which is a locally installed program that sends mail through Amazon's SES.

If you're looking for a new home for your newsletter, Sendy might not be a good choice if you don't want to install software on a server, but I have heard great things about Buttondown and good things about beehiiv. Try to avoid Substack.]

Second thing, two words: Gift links. Online content is increasingly paywalled and even though kottke.org doesn't have a paywall (thanks to a generous membership for keeping it free and open for everyone!), I do link to things on sites that are paywalled. I wish I didn't need to, but that's how many media companies have chosen to pay quality writers, editors, artists, and photographers to produce excellent work these days. It can be easy to get around some of these paywalls — by opening a link in private browsing mode, deleting the site's cookies, or using a site like 12ft, archive.org, or archive.is — but it's a pain in the ass and doesn't work in all cases. While I cannot promise no paywalled links, I have been making a greater effort lately to use gift links when featuring stuff from the likes of the NY Times & Washington Post and finding alternate sources for news items — the AP, Reuters, The Guardian, NPR, The Verge, Vox, Ars Technica, and several other media sites all publish quality content without paywalls and I am happy to link to them more often in appreciation. (And if I do use a paywalled link and you've got a gift link to spare, send it along and I'll replace it. Thx!)

Lastly, three words: Ask Me Anything. I know it's been awhile since I've answered any of the AMA questions, but I haven't forgotten about it and will get back to it soon.

P.S., four words: new thing coming soon. I love to underpromise and overdeliver so I generally don't tease things, but I have been beavering away on something new for the site for a few weeks now. The first iteration is getting close to the finish line and hopefully I'll be able to launch it towards the end of the month or in the first part of September. It's been fun to see it come together and I'm eager/anxious to see if it works once it's out there. But that's all you get for now. ✌️🤐

• kottke.org

Right now, the Portland, OR area is suffering through a heat wave, with high temperatures some 20-25°F above normal. Earlier this year, meteorologist Guy Walton began naming North American heatwaves after oil companies:

Obviously, I'm naming heatwaves to highlight this worsening climate problem and perhaps save lives by getting the public to focus on this weather threat. This year I'm naming major heatwaves after oil companies to shame them in the process and to identify culprits that are exacerbating these deadly systems.

Portland's hot spell, the fourth heatwave of the summer, is named Heatwave Citgo...having been preceded by Heatwave Amoco, Heatwave BP, and Heatwave Chevron. Next up on the list:

5. Conoco (Phillips)
6. Dana
7. Exxon
8. Frontera
9. Gazprom
10. Hess
11. Koch

And several more as needed. Here's Walton's criteria for choosing what constitutes a nameable heatwave (mirroring the scale for hurricanes):

CAT 3: A major level heatwave severe enough such that a few fatalities are reported. A city in a CAT 3 heat wave would be under a heat emergency for a few days. Many heat records would be either tied or broken.

A CAT3 or higher heatwave would be considered to be a major heatwave and would get a fossil fuel corporation name.

The highest category of heatwave is CAT5:

CAT 5. Catastrophic heat wave. Many all-time temperature records would be shattered with thousands of deaths reported. Remember the European heat wave of 2003 in which there were well in excess of 10,000 fatalities? This event would certainly fit my CAT 5 category.

The media should actually start using these more widely. (via @dens)

• climate crisis
• Guy Walton
• language
• USA

Very Expensive Maps is, well, I can't say it much plainer than host Evan Applegate: "Very Expensive Maps is a podcast by cartographer Evan Applegate in which he interviews better cartographers." A podcast about a visual medium like maps is maybe a tiny bit like dancing about architecture, but Applegate makes it work. The archives are a key part of the show...lots of links to the maps discussed during each episode. Here's a sampling of some of the visuals from recent shows:

• art
• design
• Evan Applegate
• maps

This is a lovely, mesmerizing short video made by artist Catherine Chalmers in collaboration with some leafcutter ants. I'm not gonna say why, but you should watch this all the way to the end...there's a bit of a twist that'll make you smile.

Earlier this year, Chalmers was the subject of a profile in the New Yorker:

The work encourages us to empathize with bugs. One reason they disgust us, Chalmers believes, is that they seem immoral, or at least differently moral. "We see ourselves as individuals," she said. "And we see insects as being this uniform, formless mass that will sacrifice themselves and do all these sorts of things." Some of her photos capture a praying mantis eating the head of her mate. "Civilization is a march for greater and greater and greater control over the world," she said. But nature doesn't play by our rules.

You can more of Chalmers' collabs with ants and other insects on her website and Instagram. She's also spoken about her work at a National Geographic Conference and at a TEDx event. (thx, andy)

• ants
• art
• Catherine Chalmers
• video

The other day when I posted about iconic hip-hop samples from the past 50 years, I noticed a name that featured prominently in the early years: Sylvia Robinson. Robinson was the CEO and co-founder of the very first rap record label, Sugar Hill Records. She produced the first rap record, Rapper's Delight, and the seminal The Message, widely regarded as one of the best and most influential rap and hip-hop tracks ever.

From an essay written on the occasion of her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022:

Sylvia Robinson played many roles in the music world — artist, producer, and, most notably, record executive. But as the founder and leader of the pioneering Sugar Hill label, she revealed herself to be something even rarer. She was a visionary.

In 1979, "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang introduced hip-hop to the global mainstream, illustrating the genre's commercial and creative potential. Robinson had overseen the record's backing track, assembled the group members, and arranged their vocals — but fundamentally, it was her idea that rap was even viable as recorded music. Her place in history would be secured by that track alone, though it was far from her only impact on the direction of pop.

Here's a short video that covers the high points of her career:

It's sad that Robinson and her achievements haven't been more widely known — this seems like another case (as in computing and other industries) where women played an early vital role and were then forgotten.

• hip-hop
• music
• Sylvia Robinson
• video

The makers of Alto's Adventure and Alto's Odyssey, two of my all-time favorite video games, are back with a game called Laya's Horizon, which brings the familiar Alto vibe to a 3D open-world situation. In the game, you fly & glide around, navigating different terrain to achieve various goals and objectives. I've been playing it for the last few days and it's a really fun, chill game. Basically, if you loved either Alto game, you'll enjoy this.

Laya's Horizon is available on iOS and Android and is free to play if you have a Netflix account. Did you know Netflix had a gaming service? (thx, patrick)

• iPhone games
• video
• video games

This started off a little slow for me but once it hit the early-to-mid 80s, I was hooked — and bobbing my head uncontrollably throughout. The visualizations really help you see how the various samples were modified, repeated, and layered to achieve the desired sounds — geniuses at work. Man, watching stuff like this makes me want to learn how to do this. (via waxy

• hip-hop
• music
• remix
• video

Alexey Molchanov, one of the best freedivers of all time, recently set two new world records at a competition at Dean's Blue Hole in the Bahamas:

• An FIM dive that took 4m 42s and went to a depth of 133 meters (442 feet). Molchanov pulled himself down and up using a guide rope without fins.
• A CWT dive that took 4m 13s and went to a depth of 133 meters (442 feet). CWT is when the diver uses a monofin and weight belt to dive and return to the surface.

His complete record-breaking dives are embedded above and are completely suspenseful to watch even though you know the outcome. They're almost like watching someone meditate instead of compete in an extreme sport. Molchanov needs to expend some energy and oxygen getting down and back, but also can't over-exert himself. A lot of it is just being relaxed and calm — this is truly a mind-over-matter discipline.

I've written about Molchanov before,¹ riffing off of this profile of him in GQ.

When Alexey was younger, his mother, Natalia Molchanova, was the world's best freediver, a distinction that she held for many years. She was a pioneer in the sport and the practitioner of a mind-and-body-control technique called "attention deconcentration." She passed her secrets to her son, who perfected them and uses the regimen to reach a state of intense calm. By doing so, he can slow his heart rate, his metabolic rate, while simultaneously slowing the activity of his brain and his body. His focus deepens. He relaxes to the point of seeming asleep. He takes deep, drowsy breaths, like a summer breeze filling a sail.

I will never not be fascinated by freediving.

1. And his mother Natalia, who was probably the best freediver ever and taught Alexey how. Natalia disappeared while diving in 2015 and is presumed dead.?

• Alexey Molchanov
• free diving
• sports
• video

Tom Scott visits the small Swiss ski town of Zermatt, where petrol cars have never been allowed. In the 1980s, the town skipped right from horse-drawn carriages to locally-built electric vehicles, which are made pretty much by hand and are expensive — but they are also easy to maintain and repair and can last for 30-50 years. Because space is at a premium, the town tightly controls who can own a vehicle and most of allowed vehicles are delivery vans, public transportation, or other vehicles with a communal use.

• cars
• Tom Scott
• video

In the Scope of Work newsletter, Anna and Kelly Pendergrast look at various trade secrets and secret ingredients — some that are still necessary, and others that are merely legendary.

When Chicago's Vienna Sausage Company moved from its original premises which were "put together in a Rube Goldberg kind of arrangement" to a brand new state-of-the-art facility, the sausages didn't taste as good. For a year and a half, the company tried to work out the problem to no avail. One day, workers were reminiscing about an ex-employee, Irving, who didn't come to work at the new factory due to the long commute required. Irving's job was to move the sausages from the filling room to the smokehouse, taking them on a half hour journey through a maze of rooms where other products were getting produced. After noting this absence, it clicked that Irving's daily trip was the secret ingredient — on his journey the sausages were getting pre-cooked and infused with flavor. The company was eventually able to recreate the sausages' original taste, building a brand new room onto the factory which emulated the properties of Irving's trip.

(via robin sloan)

• Anna Pendergrast
• business
• Kelly Pendergrast

Craig Mod has my favorite take to date on Oppenheimer: that it should have been more like Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb:

My ideal version of this film would have begun in the 1900s or '10s, with flashes of Relativity and then the steps of Quantum Mechanics with Planck, Bohr, and Heisenberg. Quantum tunneling with Gamow and Gurney. The nuclear shell model with Maria Goeppert Mayer and J. Hans D. Jensen. Chadwick's discovery of the neutron. Anderson's positron unveiling. Hold the camera longer on Lawrence and his cyclotron. What's going on there? (I mean, ya got Josh Hartnett's pretty head, plaster it up!) Shoot in high-grade mega-IMAX-bokeh the oddly simple experimental setups, the beakers, the blips, the radiation tick-tick-ticks, the iterations, the step-by-step expansion of understanding the fabric of everything around us. Give us an hour of this, this arguably greatest moment of human insight. You can still call the film Oppenheimer. Let the man loom, weave him between it all as he makes his way through Europe, sets up at Berkeley, is selected to lead Los Alamos. Ramp up the Nazi threat. Show the diaspora of brilliance more clearly. Believe the audience is willing to sit through more than just "Is it a wave ... or is it particle?" Oh! There is so much excitement, so much incredible science to be mined, and Nolan mined so little.

Mod and I both share a love for that masterpiece of a book and I would watch the hell out of an 10-part HBO series (in the vein of Chernobyl) based on it, American Prometheus, and John Hersey's Hiroshima.

• atomic bomb
• books
• Craig Mod
• movies
• Oppenheimer
• physics
• science
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb
• World War II

Produced by Venus & Serena Williams and US soccer star Alex Morgan and directed by Rachel Ramsay & James Erskine, Copa 71 is a forthcoming documentary about a women's soccer tournament that took place in Mexico City in 1971 that was the first, albeit unofficial, Women's World Cup. A short teaser trailer is above. From a piece in Variety about the film:

In August 1971, more than 100,000 football fans packed Mexico City's Azteca Stadium for a historic tournament. Teams from England, France, Denmark, Argentina and Italy flew in for 21 days of matches alongside Mexico's national team, while eager sponsors lined up for a piece of the action. The players, who received a hero's welcome wherever they went, might as well have been the Rolling Stones.

They were, in fact, a group of around 100 women — many of them teenagers — taking part in a pioneering unofficial Women's World Cup. And just as quickly as they tasted fame, it was snatched away as the tournament was all but erased from football history.

Many of the competitors were just teenagers — from Wikipedia:

England's team included 13-year-old Leah Caleb, 14-year-old Gill Sayell, and 15-year-old Chris Lockwood; their captain was 19-year-old Carol Wilson and they were accompanied by referee Pat Dunn as a chaperone and trainer. 15-year-old Susanne Augustesen scored a hat-trick for Denmark as they beat Mexico 3-0 in the final.

Copa 71 is premiering at the Toronto Film Festival in September and then hopefully will find its way into theaters and onto streaming. (thx, meg)

• Copa 71
• movies
• soccer
• sports
• trailers
• video

From Greg Maletic, glamour shots of his collection of calculators from 1968-1983 (and here).

In the 1970s, calculators weren't just for calculating. They were luxury items. In a world before iPods and iPhones, calculators were the first aspirational personal electronics.

Calculators 1968-1983 showcases these remarkable design objects, along with stories behind why they look and operate the way they do. And how, in just a few decades, one of the world's most important products went from indispensable to irrelevant.

You can see the collection in person next weekend in Portland...details are here.

Oh, and if the design of the calculator in the last photo above looks somewhat familiar, the Calculator app on the original iPhone was based on a similar model from Braun. (via @cabel)

• Greg Maletic

Catia Lattouf and an assistant run a medical clinic and rehab center for hummingbirds in her Mexico City apartment.

With dozens of the tiny birds buzzing overhead, along walls and the window of her bedroom, Lattouf explained that she began caring for them a year after surviving colon cancer in 2011. It started with one hummingbird that had an eye injured by another bird.

A veterinarian friend encouraged her to try to help it. She named it Gucci after the brand of the glasses case she kept it in. The bird became her inseparable companion, perching on her computer screen while she worked.

"It wrote me a new life," she said of the nine months the bird lived with her.

I'm not entirely sure I'd like 60 hummingbirds constantly flitting around my house, but I'm not entirely sure I wouldn't like that either.

• birds
• Catia Lattouf
• video

Madeline Miller (Circe, Song of Achilles) got sick in February 2020 with what turned out to be Covid, which then turned into Long Covid. It has profoundly affected her life (gift link).

I reached out to doctors. One told me I was "deconditioned" and needed to exercise more. But my usual jog left me doubled over, and when I tried to lift weights, I ended up in the ER with chest pains and tachycardia. My tests were normal, which alarmed me further. How could they be normal? Every morning, I woke breathless, leaden, utterly depleted.

Worst of all, I couldn't concentrate enough to compose sentences. Writing had been my haven since I was 6. Now, it was my family's livelihood. I kept looking through my pre-covid novel drafts, desperately trying to prod my sticky, limp brain forward. But I was too tired to answer email, let alone grapple with my book.

When people asked how I was, I gave an airy answer. Inside, I was in a cold sweat. My whole future was dropping away. Looking at old photos, I was overwhelmed with grief and bitterness. I didn't recognize myself. On my best days, I was 30 percent of that person.

I turned to the internet and discovered others with similar experiences. In fact, my symptoms were textbook — a textbook being written in real time by "first wavers" like me, comparing notes and giving our condition a name: long covid.

Even if Miller were physically able to get back to some semblance of "normal life", the current policies and attitudes w/r/t Covid make it next to impossible.

Despite the crystal-clear science on the damage covid-19 does to our bodies, medical settings have dropped mask requirements, so patients now gamble their health to receive care. Those of us who are high-risk or immunocompromised, or who just don't want to roll the dice on death and misery, have not only been left behind — we're being actively mocked and pathologized.

I've personally been ridiculed, heckled and coughed on for wearing my N95. Acquaintances who were understanding in the beginning are now irritated, even offended. One demanded: How long are you going to do this? As if trying to avoid covid was an attack on her, rather than an attempt to keep myself from sliding further into an abyss that threatens to swallow my family.

I cannot remember where I read this (it was likely more than a year ago), but it would be more accurate/helpful if we thought of the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus as a chronic vascular disease (aka Long Covid) that often comes with short-term symptoms and acute, life-threatening effects instead of the other way around.

• Covid-19
• Madeline Miller
• medicine
• science

A short TED-Ed video on the flow state of creativity and how you might enter it more easily.

Flow is more than just concentrating or paying attention; it's a unique mental state of effortless engagement. And those who more frequently experience flow report higher levels of positive emotions, creativity, and feelings of accomplishment. But what exactly is flow? And how can we find it in our daily lives? Explore steps you can take to increase your chances of finding flow.

While I am not feeling particularly in the groove today, over the past several weeks I've been in the flow state a lot, working on a couple of projects for the site. It's been a long time since I've had that feeling for more than a couple of hours every few months and booooooy does it feel good. There is almost nothing that fills me with as much joy as the "effortless engagement" of being in the flow state. I'm very glad it's back in my life — I'd been afraid it was gone forever. (via open culture)

• how to
• video

Oh wow, I love these spaceship paintings from Karla Knight. They're from a series called 33 Spaceships for Another Planet but she's been doing these diagrammatic/picographic paintings and drawings for some time now. It's fun to back through Knight's older work and see how her ancient yet futuristic style evolved. Here's my best stab at a succinct description of her aesthetic: imagine Hilma af Klint as the production designer for Wes Anderson's Stargate.

• art
• Karla Knight

This short, relaxing, mesmerizing video of an Martian impact crater called Aram Chaos was taken by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The images were run through an enhanced color red-green-blue filter, which tends to highlight the structure and geology rather than the true color. For example, the blue in the video often represents basalt, an igneous rock of volcanic origin.

• astronomy
• Mars
• mesmerizing
• NASA
• science
• space
• video

You know me; I love a good book cover. The AIGA's annual roundup of the best designed books and covers is usually aces and the results of the 2022 competition (announced at the beginning of July 2023) is no exception. Here are a few I picked out that I didn't feature in The Best Book Covers of 2022 back in December.

Uh, I guess I'm really into orange today? Anyway, these covers are from:

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke.
Sound Within Sound: Radical Composers of the Twentieth Century by Kate Molleson.
Sabit Fikir by Paul Valéry.
No hay nadie en casa by Isabel Díaz Alanís.

• best of
• best of 2022
• book covers
• books
• design
• lists

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, says that the most likely way people will be impacted by the climate crisis won't be with some big disaster but with a bunch of small changes that add up to something unmanageable.

Let me give you an example of a tiny impact that I just heard about. My wife told me about a new group of members at her gym: active 70-ish-year-olds who used to go on walks around their neighborhood. Due to the unbearable heat in Texas, though, they joined a gym and now walk indoors on treadmills. This story embodies several aspects of climate impacts that everyone should understand.

First, this is an example of non-linear climate impacts. Although temperatures have been rising gradually over the last century, it was only recently that they crossed a critical threshold that made outdoor walks literally unbearable for these people.

Second, this is what adaptation to climate change looks like. Contrary to how it is typically portrayed by climate dismissives, adaptation is not free. These people are paying $50 per month for the gym membership that is an inferior replacement for something they used to get for free: an environment cool enough to walk in.

So these people are worse off financially and not getting as good of an experience as they used to. And they're the lucky ones — they have the opportunity and resources to do this.

There's also the non-monetary costs of adaptation. When it's too hot to go outside during the day, you are a prisoner of air conditioning instead of going outside and getting fresh air and exercise. We've lost something valuable but difficult to quantify.

Some great points here. Reading it made me think of the gun problem here in the US. The focus is often on the immediate damage that guns do (mass shootings, suicides) but there are hundreds of other ways, large and small, in which guns make Americans' lives worse. For many people, the number of guns in this country and the hard-line views held by those who own them add up to a general vibe of feeling unsafe and under threat. For me, it definitely seems like "we've lost something valuable but difficult to quantify" by allowing so many guns to exist in our communities.

• Andrew Dessler
• climate crisis
• guns
• USA

I really enjoyed taking a spin around Felicia Chiao's Instagram (previously) — it's chock full of vibrant, expressive and dreamy work. Oh and take a look at her sketchbook tours — and you can buy a reproduction of her 6th sketchbook here (here too).

• art
• Felicia Chiao
• illustration

David Zipper, who researches and writes about mobility and transportation, recently did a big thread on Mastodon (and Bluesky) about car bloat: the way in which cars and trucks have gotten much bigger and heavier in the US over the past few decades and how it's bad for society. The whole thread is worth a read...here are a couple of Zipper's points:

Tall vehicles have bigger blind spots and are more likely to strike a person's torso or head. Heavier vehicles exert more force crashing into a person, bicycle, or smaller car. They also have longer braking distances.

Heavier cars exert more pressure on tires, eroding them faster. Tire particles are absorbed into water, where they damage ecosystems. They also float through the air, harming human health when ingested.

For further reading, Zipper links to a number of pieces he's written in recent months: The Blatant Greenwashing of SUVs, EVs Are Sending Toxic Tire Particles Into the Water, Soil, and Air, Carry That Weight, and The Car Safety Feature That Kills the Other Guy. Zipper's solution to these problems is government action: for example, taxing vehicles by weight, testing vehicles for pedestrian and cyclist safety, or requiring drivers have commercial driver's licenses for larger vehicles.

The image above is from Carsized and compares a 2018 Dodge Ram to a 2005 VW Jetta.

• cars
• David Zipper
• USA

Scrabble is one of those games where pro/expert gameplay differs so much from amateur/novice gameplay that it might as well be a totally different game. In this entertaining recap of the finals of the 2023 Scrabble World Championships, former US champ Will Anderson explains how finalists David Eldar and Harshan Lamabadusuriya think and strategize throughout the best-of-seven series.

Gameplay aside, the thing that stood out for me is how many of the words played I'd just never heard of before. Like, at least 60% of them. Like I said, it's just a completely different game at the expert level, with a shit-ton of memorization required. I don't play Scrabble for this reason — because if you don't have a bunch of two-letter words and Q,Z, & X words memorized and you're playing against someone who does, it's not fun. But it is fun to see two heavyweights of the game go at it on equal terms. (via peterme)

• games
• language
• Scrabble
• video

It is astounding to me the number of YouTube channels that I have never heard of with subscriber bases larger than that of many countries. (This goes double and triple for Instagram and TikTok.) Alan Becker has over 23 million subscribers and makes videos pitting animated characters against various other entities. His latest video is Animation vs. Math and it is super nerdy and engaging. You might have to be a bit of a math nerd to enjoy this fully, but even if you only get the gist of what's going on (like I did for at least half of the video), it's still pretty entertaining. You can check the comments for an explanation of the math or this illustrated explainer.

• animation
• mathematics
• video

In a June piece for The Guardian and the video above from just a few days ago, Robert Reich outlines five crises — including wokeness, the trans panic, and critical race theory — that Republicans have manufactured in order to deflect from their true agenda.

Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin's "day one" executive order banned the teaching of critical race theory. DeSantis and Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, have also banned it from schools.

Here again, though, there's no evidence of a public threat. CRT simply teaches America's history of racism, which students need to understand to be informed citizens.

Banning it is a scare tactic to appeal to a largely white, culturally conservative voter base.

However, I would argue that Reich needed to go a bit further. While the crises are inventions, their consequences go beyond mere distraction and into the territory of active harm, particularly of queer and trans people, Black people, and people of color. That's why I modified the title from his original.

• LGBTQ
• politics
• racism
• Robert Reich
• USA
• video

In the 1994 Caribbean Cup qualifying group stage match between Barbados and Grenada, the 90 minutes of normal time ended with an intentional own goal by Barbados and then with Grenada trying to score either a goal or an own goal and Barbados defending both nets. Say what?! How did this happen?

Well, it was the confluence of a few things:

1. The match would go into overtime in case of a tie.
2. The "golden goal" rule was in effect for overtime...the first goal wins and the match is immediately over. Oh, and the goal is worth 2 goals, not just one.
3. To qualify for the next round, Barbados not only needed to win the match, they needed to win it by two goals...a one-goal difference would not be enough.

I found out about the match by reading this SBNation article but Wikipedia does a better job in clearly explaining why that combination of factors resulted in chaos:

The match started off routinely and Barbados scored the first two goals, establishing the two-goal winning margin they required: in the 83rd minute, the game changed when Grenada scored a goal, which would take Grenada through to the finals unless Barbados could score again.

Barbados attempted to score for the next few minutes, but as time ran out they switched to a different strategy: tying the game so they could attempt to achieve the two-goal margin with the golden goal in extra-time. In the 87th minute, they stopped attacking, with Barbados defender Terry Sealey and goalkeeper Horace Stoute passing the ball between each other before Sealey intentionally scored an own goal to tie the game at 2-2.

With just three minutes of normal time left, the Grenadian players caught on to the Barbadians' plan, and realised that they would advance in the tournament by scoring a goal in either net, since they would still qualify for the finals with a 1-goal loss. This saw normal time finish in a highly unusual manner, with Grenada trying to score a goal in (and Barbados trying to defend) both nets. For the next three minutes, Barbadian players successfully defended both sides.

As 90 minutes had expired with the score at 2-2, the game went on to extra time, where the winning "golden goal" would count double — thus, Barbados only had to score once to qualify for the 1994 Caribbean Cup. Trevor Thorne scored the winning goal for Barbados to advance to the next round with a score of 4-2.

• soccer
• sports
• video

From Adam Kovacs' YouTube channel Adam Something comes this brisk 10-minute video essay on why European malls are doing better than their American progenitors. I thought his third point, about poor urban planning, was particularly interesting: malls tend to fail in America because they are not integrated into the fabric of towns and cities (because very little is integrated into the fabric of cities and towns in many places these days).

Malls, hell, all commerce has to be an organic part of towns and cities. People should be able to get to them by means other than a car, and conveniently. Such integrated commercial spaces are far more resilient. If your commercial spaces aren't resilient — if you just plop a big box outside the town — don't be surprised when it goes bust in a few years. And then it's bulldozed for the next thing to be put up for it to go bust the same way and then get bulldozed and then the next thing and the next and the next so on and so forth.

• Adam Kovacs
• cities
• economics
• Europe
• USA
• video

Starting with Jaws, his first big blockbuster movie that defined the genre, Steven Spielberg has filled the audiences of his films with a sense of wonder, that alchemical mix of fear and astonishment of the unknown. No other director does it better and this video essay explores how he does it.

• film school
• movies
• Steven Spielberg
• video

The music for Sinéad O'Connor's 1990 smash hit Nothing Compares 2 U is already pretty stripped down to emphasize the vocals, but in this video, the vocals are almost fully isolated so you can really hear the clarity and emotion in that wonderful voice of hers.

The song was apparently recorded in one take:

"I actually think the intensity of Sinéad's performance came from the breakup of her latest relationship," opines Chris Birkett, who co-produced and engineered the track as well as the accompanying, Grammy Award-winning album, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, which topped the Billboard 200 for six weeks and sold seven million copies worldwide. "She had been dating her manager, Fachtna O'Ceallaigh, who's a really good guy and had been instrumental in getting her deal with Ensign Records. However, their relationship had gone pear-shaped and they were in the process of breaking up when we recorded 'Nothing Compares 2 U', so that's probably why she did such a good vocal. She came into the studio, did it in one take, double-tracked it straight away and it was perfect because she was totally into the song. It mirrored her situation."

(via openculture)

• music
• Sinéad O'Connor
• video

A NYC DJ named Dwells released this mashup of Radiohead's Everything In Its Right Place and Kendrick Lamar's N95 back in March and I love it:

You can also find it on Soundcloud and Bandcamp. I ran across it when Radiohead shared a snippet of it on TikTok.

FWIW, Dwells seems to be the same DJ Dwells that won the NYC regional of the prestigious DMC DJ competition when he was just 13 years old. (via @jessicabrillhart)

• Dwells
• Kendrick Lamar
• music
• Radiohead
• remix
• video

Yesterday, a Washington DC grand jury indicted Donald Trump for "for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding", aka trying to steal the 2020 presidential election. Heather Cox Richardson lays it out in plain English:

The Trump team used lies about the election to justify organizing fraudulent slates of electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Allegedly with the help of Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, they attempted to have the legitimate electors that accurately reflected the voters' choice of Biden replaced with fraudulent ones that claimed Trump had won in their states, first by convincing state legislators they had the power to make the switch, and then by convincing Vice President Mike Pence he could choose the Trump electors.

When Pence would not fraudulently alter the election results, Trump whipped up the crowd he had gathered in Washington, D.C., against Pence and then, according to the indictment, "attempted to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol" to overturn the election results. "As violence ensued," the indictment reads, Trump and his co-conspirators "explained the disruption by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince Members of Congress to further delay the certification based on those claims." On the evening of January 6, 2021, the indictment alleges, Trump and Co-Conspirator 1 called seven senators and one representative and asked them to delay the certification of Biden's election.

Here also is the full 45-page indictment, annotated by the NY Times (gift link). The gist of the indictment is, yes, the attempts that we all saw Trump making in broad daylight to stay in power despite his clear election loss were real, serious, and harmful.

One important aspect of the indictment that neither of them picked up on was pointed out by Adam Serwer on Bluesky:

The indictment makes clear that Donald Trump and his accomplices planned to seize power by force and then maintain that power through the mass murder of American citizens by their own military.

That sounds pretty serious — here's what the indictment says:

On the afternoon of January 3, Co-Conspirator 4 spoke with a Deputy White House Counsel. The previous month, the Deputy White House Counsel had informed the Defendant that "there is no world, there is no option in which you do not leave the White House [o]n January 20th." Now, the same Deputy White House Counsel tried to dissuade Co-Conspirator 4 from assuming the role of Acting Attorney General. The Deputy White House Counsel reiterated to Co-Conspirator 4 that there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that if the Defendant remained in office nonetheless, there would be "riots in every major city in the United States." Co-Conspirator 4 responded, "Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that's why there's an Insurrection Act."

And this:

Also on January 4, when Co-Conspirator 2 acknowledged to the Defendant's Senior Advisor that no court would support his proposal, the Senior Advisor told Co-Conspirator 2, "[Y]ou're going to cause riots in the streets." Co-Conspirator 2 responded that there had previously been points in the nation's history where violence was necessary to protect the republic. After that conversation, the Senior Advisor notified the Defendant that Co-Conspirator 2 had conceded that his plan was not going to work.

HuffPost explains who Co-Conspirator 4 is (top Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark) and what the Insurrection Act is all about. Co-Conspirator 2 is John Eastman, one of Trump's lawyers.

Trump and his team were going to unlawfully (and immorally, I would argue) seize power and quell protests with military force by claiming there was a rebellion against the government or that public safety was at stake. Whether the military would have gone along with it (if Pence had chosen to play his part) is unknown, but it's pretty incredible how close we came to the United States very quickly devolving into a dictatorship. This fucking traitor must be held accountable for his crimes and must not ever be allowed anywhere near any public office in the United States ever again.

Update: Updated the post to add a second passage from the indictment about the use of state violence to quell protest.

• Adam Serwer
• crime
• Donald Trump
• Heather Cox Richardson
• politics
• USA

Cruise ships are a relatively new human invention that look quite different from other ships. Oh, and they are absolutely massive. How did they get that way?

The predecessor of today's cruise ships was the ocean liner: big, beautiful ships that sailed across the Atlantic. But ocean liners had a totally different purpose from cruise ships: They were for transportation. Everything about them was designed to facilitate an ocean voyage from one continent to another.

But air travel changed that. Planes eliminated the main reason to take a ship somewhere, and ocean liner business plummeted. So the industry pivoted and began selling a ship as the destination itself. The cruise ship was born. But the ocean liners, built for a voyage, weren't ideal for the purposes of a cruise, and over the next few decades, the cruise ship began its evolution. And it has culminated in the behemoths we see today.

Cruise ships always make me think of David Foster Wallace's classic piece, Shipping Out (which you might know as A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again).

• travel
• video

[Note: If you're reading/watching this, I assume you've watched season two or don't care about spoilers; they abound.] The Bear is an intense show about a group of intense people doing an intense job. It can be tough to watch sometimes because people often communicate by screaming and yelling at each other. As Evan Puschak observes in this perceptive video essay, the second season delves into where some of those behaviors came from (surprise: childhood trauma) and offers a counterbalancing force: tenderness, listening, and paying attention.

• Evan Puschak
• The Bear
• TV
• video

I have said previously that "even on my busiest day, I will drop everything to watch a video of pencils being made". Still true! This video from Process X of a Tokyo pencil factory really hits the spot. My favorite part of watching pencils get made is always the sharpening of the finished pencils by belt sander.

See also How Pencils Are Made, A Visit to an American Factory That's Been Producing Pencils Since 1889, and A History of Pencil Lead and How Pencils Are Made. (via the kid should see this)

• how to
• pencils
• video