Plato’s Cave Regrets to Inform You It Will Be Raising Its Rent. “As the costs of maintaining a cave meant to trap you in your ignorance increases year after year, we want you to know, from the bottom of our hearts, that we, too, are suffering.”
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Entries for September 2023
The Trailer for The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki’s Final Film
It is with the appropriate feelings of melancholy and excitement that I share with you the teaser trailer for The Boy and the Heron, the legendary Hayao Miyazaki’s final animated feature film for Studio Ghibli.
A young boy named Mahito, yearning for his mother, ventures into a world shared by the living and the dead.
There, death comes to an end, and life finds a new beginning.
A semi-autobiographical fantasy about life, death, and creation, in tribute to friendship, from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki.
Miyazaki had previously retired after 2013’s The Wind Rises but according to Studio Ghibli co-founder Toshio Suzuki, he had good reason to come back for one more film:
Miyazaki is making the new film for his grandson. It’s his way of saying, ‘Grandpa is moving on to the next world, but he’s leaving behind this film.’
The Boy and the Heron opens on December 8 in the US. (via waxy)
The SAF Aranet4 CO2 monitor I’ve seen many people using to estimate ventilation levels in indoor spaces (for Covid safety) is 20% off the regular price at Amazon today.
This is a small study but semaglutide treatment eliminated the need for insulin in 70% of newly diagnosed Type 1 diabetes patients. “It could possibly be the most dramatic change in treating Type 1 diabetes since the discovery of insulin in 1921.”
Eric Meyer has a lovely remembrance of Molly Holzschlag. “She was a groundbreaker, expanding and explaining the Web at its infancy.”
RIP to web pioneer Molly Holzschlag. May her name continue to ring out as a true champion of the open web, someone who made the internet a better place for all of us.
368 Broadway: the NYC Building That Nurtured the Film Careers of Greta Gerwig, Lena Dunham, the Safdie Brothers, and More
Somehow I’d never heard of this before watching this video (nor it seems, had much of anyone else outside of the participants), but the building located at 368 Broadway in Manhattan was, in the years after 9/11, the creative home for a surprising number of filmmakers: Greta Gerwig, Lena Dunham, the Safdie brothers (Josh & Benny), the Neistat brothers (Casey & Van), the Schulman brothers (Ariel & Nev), and Henry Joost.
Here’s a clip of Van Neistat talking about those days (starting at 19:50):
Brian Eno had a word for places like 368 Broadway and the people who gather together to create: scenius. Austin Kleon elaborated on scenius in his book Show Your Work:
There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals — artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers — who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals: it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.
All of the 8,291 License Plates in America
Have you noticed there are a lot of different license plates you can choose for your car these days? So did Jon Keegan; he scraped the DMV websites of all 50 states and DC and came up with over 8,200 different plate combinations you might see out on the road.
By my count, there are currently 8,291 different vehicle license plates offered by the 50 states and the District of Columbia. States now offer a vast menu of personalized plate options for a dizzying array of organizations, professions, sports teams, causes and other groups.
My count was conducted over June and July 2023, so this should be considered a snapshot, as I’m sure some plates have changed already.
Fun fact: finishers of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race are eligible to get a special “Iditarod Finisher” plate for their car.
Less fun fact, per Keegan:
Yes, license plates are still made by cheap prison labor in most states. 80% of all license plates issued in the U.S. today were made by state prisoners, with only 12 states opting out of the practice. According to a 2022 ACLU report on prison labor in the U.S., many states offer no pay at all to prisoners, while the average hourly wage across the country was between 13 and 52 cents per hour.
Here in Vermont, the use of prison labor for manufacturing things like license plates resulted in the image of a pig hidden in a cow’s spots appearing on an official crest emblazoned on state police cars back in 2012.
From Self magazine, a package on trans kids & sports. “We believe that children deserve the right to experience the wide-reaching benefits of organized sports in a fun, safe, and nurturing environment, without having to compromise who they are.” 💯
Who Gets to Enter the Arena and Who Gets to Leave
Ryan Broderick on this year’s Burning Man shitshow as a metaphor for the climate crisis, America’s fraying social fabric, or our crumbling national infrastructure (pick two all three):
If you want to see what the next 25 years are going to be like, Burning Man is it. Millionaires and managers ignoring huge structural problems until it starts to impact their libertarian freak fests and then escaping to somewhere safe when they get the chance. Well, until there aren’t any safe places to escape to, I guess…
Wow, NYC has all but banned Airbnb, restricting short-term rentals to registered hosts who are present at the time of the stay (and a limit of two guests).
Huh, a good-tasting non-alcoholic beer. “The Athletic tasted good. Undeniably good. Bitter and complex and full. Deliriously, pleasurably cold. The exact right amount of foamy. It tasted real.”
The Tenderness of Marshawn Lynch
For the role of a teacher/coach in her new film Bottoms (about a pair of queer girls who start a fight club in their high school in order to get laid), director Emma Seligman made the unorthodox decision to cast former NFL player Marshawn Lynch. It turned out to be an inspired choice — according to an interview with Seligman, he was a natural.
He was one of the best improvisers I’ve ever worked with. I’m not overstating that. He improvised most of his stuff in the movie that ended up in the final cut! We couldn’t ever write something that would be as funny as what he gave us. He’d spew out the most brilliant jokes ever. I kept on encouraging him to do more improv. He’d be like, “Ugh, that stuff’s easy! I wanna get your words right!” I told him that it was so much better than anything we could have written and he was like, “I don’t care about this. I want to honor your work.” I’m so glad I got to talk about him this much.
Here’s a short clip of Lynch doing his thing as Mr. G, “an air-headed high school teacher”:
Lynch also used the film as an opportunity to make some amends for how he reacted when his sister came out as queer:
This was a good opportunity for me because when I was in high school, my sister had came out as being a lesbian or gay — I did not handle it right. You feel me, as a 16-year-old boy, I didn’t handle it the way that I feel like I probably should have. So I told [Seligman] it was giving me an opportunity to correct my wrongs, to rewrite one of my mistakes.
From that interview with Seligman again:
In our first conversation, he told me that his sister is queer and when they were in high school, he didn’t necessarily handle it super well. He felt like this movie coming into his hands was the universe giving him a chance to right his wrongs. That’s what he said. He walked her down the aisle. He felt like they were all good, you know? But his sister thought it’d be really cool if he did this.
If you have never seen this old interview with Lynch about the value of persistence, buckle up because you’re in for a treat:
Somehow, the illustrator who created the cover image for a 1976 paperback edition of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time was unknown…until the Endless Thread podcast sleuthed out his identity.
Notes On Losing. “Nearly every time I play tennis, I melt down spectacularly. Why do I keep coming back for more?”
Harvard Graduate Raises Over $300 Million From Angel Investors With Drawing Of Flying Dog. “I’m not even sure if there is a company or if it has a name, but we forked over $50 million right away.”
Save the Bees! But Which Bees?
When most people think of bees, they picture the honeybee. But the honeybee is a domesticated animal — essentially livestock — and are well taken care of. The thousands of species of wild bee are paid less attention and are no less important to maintaining healthy ecosystems (and yes, helping out with pollination).
As a group, wild bees are considered incredibly important pollinators, especially for home gardens and crops that honey bees can’t pollinate. Tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers, for example, require “buzz pollination;” bees have to vibrate their bodies to shake the pollen free — a behavior that honey bees can’t do (bumblebees and some other native species can).
Yet these free services native bees provide are dwindling. While wild bees are, as a group, understudied, existing research suggests that many species are threatened with extinction, including more than a quarter of North American bumblebees.
The Real Crime Isn’t Shoplifting — It’s Wage Theft. “A 2017 study from the Economic Policy Institute estimated that low-wage workers lose more than $50 billion annually to wage theft.”
The Trailer for Michael Mann’s Ferrari
Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari — a little too on the nose? Michael Mann hasn’t made a film since 2015’s Blackhat and hasn’t made an award-winning film since 2004’s Collateral, so it’s nice to see him back in the director’s chair. The film is based on Brock Yates’ 1991 book Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine.
Next to the Pope, Ferrari was the most revered man in Italy. But was he the benign padrone portrayed by an adoring world press at the time, or was he a ruthless despot, who drove his staff to the edge of madness, and his racing drivers even further?
Brock Yates’s definitive biography penetrated Ferrari’s elaborately constructed veneer and uncovered the truth behind Ferrari’s bizarre relationships, his work with Mussolini’s fascists, and his fanatical obsession with speed.
Ferrari just premiered at the Venice Film Festival and early reviews are mostly positive but not overwhelmingly so. The film opens on Dec 25 in the US.
New iOS game from Iconfactory (makers of Twitterrific, RIP): Ollie’s Arcade. It consists of 3 retro-style mini-games: Ollie Soars (a Flappy Bird-like scroller), Tranquility Touchdown (lunar lander), and Snake (er, Snake).
Two people detained for digging shortcut through Great Wall of China. “The suspects admitted under questioning that they had used a digger to create a shortcut in the wall in an attempt to reduce local travel time.”
Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland
Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland is a 5-part documentary series from director James Bluemel on the Troubles in Northern Ireland that is available to watch on PBS and BBC. A short1 trailer is above.
“Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland” weaves together the personal stories of ordinary men, women and children who were drawn — both willingly and unwillingly — into a conflict that spanned over thirty years. The series mixes extraordinary archive footage and emotionally compelling first-person testimonies to create an intimate, multi-generational portrait of Northern Ireland’s past, present and future with an emphasis on understanding and empathy for all points of view.
I’ve heard really good things about this series and, after recently reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent Say Nothing, I’m looking forward to watching this. Bluemel even interviewed Michael McConville, whose mother’s disappearance forms the backbone of Keefe’s book:
Michael McConville remembering the day his mother, Jean, was taken away and murdered by the IRA felt like an important historical story to include in the series. The IRA denied murdering her for over 30 years and they only revealed the whereabouts of her body in 2006. The trauma of this event on Michael is evident, not just in the way he talks but also the way he holds himself, his body displays the pain he feels. The trauma of those years can be consuming and was present in nearly everyone I interviewed.
Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland is available to stream on PBS and BBC sites and apps. (via @overholt)
I embedded the BBC trailer rather than the PBS one because it was a little longer. I wish PBS made longer trailers for their series…how do you even begin to tease something like a five-hour documentary on the Troubles or a six-hour series on the Holocaust with 30- and 60-second trailers? If you give people more of an idea of what the series is like, you might convince more people to watch.↩
WOW: “If Earth were an exoplanet, JWST would know there’s an intelligent civilization here.” The telescope is capable of detecting molecules of life & industrialization — which means we should be able to detect those on other exoplanets.
“The fastest we ever travelled was in 1969.” A barn-burner of a thread about the slow collapse of the US after the revolt of the rich in the early 70s against the excess freedom/wealth of the middle/working classes.
This Labor Day is for Laborers. “There is an energy in the air. It’s in our unions and our workplaces and all over the news and it has the power to transform our economy and our country.”
Great piece from The Marshall Project about a group of men on death row in Texas who play Dungeons & Dragons. “Playing Dungeons & Dragons is more difficult in prison than almost anywhere else.”
Aww, I am bummed that Hulu has cancelled The Great after three seasons. This show was hilarious…Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult were fantastic as Catherine and Peter.
I may or may not have gotten irrationally excited about finding this NY Times recipe for Homemade Hamburger Helper, which “melds the indelible comfort of macaroni and cheese with the complexity of a good Bolognese”. My fam is skeptical!
What if beavers were reintroduced into NYC? “I’m here to tell you that restoring a population of urban beavers could help bring New York City into a more prosperous, ecological future.”
An Amazing 19th-Century Autograph Quilt
In 1856, a 17-year-old girl named Adeline Harris started making a unique quilt. Over the next two decades, she sent pieces of silk to famous people from around the world and they signed them and sent them back to her. She assembled them into a quilt with a tumbling blocks pattern (aka, the Q*bert pattern).
The signatures that Harris was able to acquire are astounding: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Samuel Morse, Alexandre Dumas, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alexander von Humboldt, Washington Irving, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Oh, and eight US Presidents: Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant.
The aesthetics of this thing are just marvelous, with all the different colors and patterns arranged into a strict grid.
Oh and I couldn’t resist checking The Great Span of the quilt. The earliest-born signatory I could find is Alexander von Humboldt, who was born in 1769, and the last person to die was Mary Virginia Hawes Terhune, who died in 1922. That’s a span of 154 years, all in one incredible quilt.
I found this via the Public Domain Review, who is offering prints of the quilt.
I feel like I have posted this before but it’s worth a second look: a huge collection of animations of how to tie different knots.
“For more than 150 years, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were sent to boarding schools across the country. In many cases, they were forcibly removed from their homes.”
25 Perfect TV Episodes From the Last 25 Years, include those from Arrested Development, Mad Men, The Wire, Black Mirror, Fleabag, The Americans, and, of course, the finale of Six Feet Under.
How the Race Was Won
What an amazing, info-dense composite photograph taken by Casey Sims of the semi-finals of the men’s 110-meter hurdles at the 2023 World Athletics Championships in Budapest from last month. You can see and analyze the entire race, just from this one image. Eventual finals winner Grant Holloway is in lane 5 and led from start to finish.
From the NY Times, a calendar of noteworthy events in astronomy or spaceflight. “Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that’s out of this world.”
Human ancestors nearly went extinct 900,000 years ago. “A new technique analysing modern genetic data suggests that pre-humans survived in a group of only 1,280 individuals.” !!!
Trailer for Errol Morris’s The Pigeon Tunnel
Oh yay, I had been wondering just the other day what Errol Morris has been up to and it turns out to be a project with Apple TV+ called The Pigeon Tunnel, which is billed as the final interview with espionage novelist John le Carré (born David Cornwell).
It’s terribly difficult to recruit for a secret service. You’re looking for somebody who’s a bit bad, but at the same time, loyal. There’s a type. And I fit it perfectly.
The movie has the same title and covers some of the same ground as le Carré’s 2016 memoir, probably with more of an emphasis on Morris’s general obsession with what constitutes truth. More info on the film from the Toronto International Film Festival, where the movie is premiering on Sept 11:
Cornwell once worked for the British spy agencies MI5 and MI6. He sparingly gave interviews, but accepted Morris’ invitation because he saw it “as something definitive.” He had already begun a process of opening up in his memoir The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life.
Crucial to the narrative is the author’s relationship to his father Ronnie, an inveterate gambler and con artist. Cornwell’s mother disappeared when he was five, so his main frame of reference was the world of his father, who was endlessly on the run from the mob or the police. The title The Pigeon Tunnel comes from Cornwell’s experience as a child going to Monte Carlo with Ronnie. Imprinted on his memory was a shooting range on the top of a cliff. Beneath the grass was a tunnel from which trapped pigeons were ejected over the sea as targets.
The Pigeon Tunnel will be out on Apple TV+ on Oct 20, 2023.
Socials & More