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Prior to the men’s UEFA European Championship (aka the 2024 Euros), Belgium announced new kits for their national teams and the away kit is an homage to Tintin and his creator, Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Fantastic! (thx, matt)
Things the guys who stole my phone have texted me to try to get me to unlock it. “As the texts escalated in complexity and rage, I sympathized with their plight. I mean, not enough to unlock my phone.”
The Best Podcasts of 2024 So Far, including 99% Invisible’s series on The Power Broker, Normal Gossip, and WikiHole.
What cars would the Founding Fathers have driven? “thomas jefferson would have preordered a cybertruck. ben franklin would have made fun of him for it, but would himself own a rapidly depreciating model 3.”
Bradley Hart creates pointillist paintings by painstakingly injecting acrylic paint into the individual bubbles in bubble wrap. The paint leaks out of the bubbles and onto a canvas backing, which also becomes part of the creative output (which he calls the “impression”). Here’s Hart’s version of Picasso’s Le Rêve, bubble wrap and impression:
And here’s Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte:
And the impression:
From Hart’s artist’s statement:
The bare bubbles in the bubble wrap reference dots or pixels, echoing various movements in art history and other media, including pointillism, screen-printing, TVs and LCD monitors. In today’s world people do not print their pictures for an album. Their albums are on Facebook, Flickr and Instagram, all exotic rote, yet combinations of 1’s and 0’s. The process of injecting paint into bubble wrap directly references pixilation (and those 1’s and 0’s) and at the same time harkens back to the time of family portrait painting, when a family’s personal “photo” album consisted of paintings hanging on its walls.
It’s such a genius idea to use the backing canvas as a separate artwork — I love that. (via clive thompson)
It’s interesting (but unsurprising) to see the no-kneeling-during-the-nation-anthem, anti-flag-burning “patriots” flying Confederate flags, defacing US flags w/ blue lines, and flying them upside-down. It’s all just self-interested bigotry.
TIL that the theme song for PBS’s The Star Hustler (starring Jack Horkheimer) is a reworked version of Claude Debussy’s Arabesque No. 1 by legendary Japanese composer Isao Tomita.
Should Employees Be Paid? Why People Think It’s Time. “Others feel the concept of ‘getting compensated for your labor’ is a dangerous gateway right that could lead to workers wanting other things like ‘paid time off’…”
Hamilton Nolan, Everyone Into The Grinder:
Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.
See also Ranjan Roy’s The Sweetgreen-ification of Society and Tom Junod’s The Water-Park Scandal and Two Americas in the Raw: Are We a Nation of Line-Cutters, or Are We the Line? about the introduction of a cut-the-line pass at a waterpark:
It wouldn’t be so bad, if the line still moved. But it doesn’t. It stops, every time a group of people with Flash Passes cut to the front. You used to be able to go on, say, three or four rides an hour, even on the most crowded days. Now you go on one or two. After four hours at Whitewater the other day, my daughter and I had gone on five. And so it’s not just that some people can afford to pay for an enhanced experience. It’s that your experience - what you’ve paid full price for - has been devalued. The experience of the line becomes an infernal humiliation; and the experience of avoiding the line becomes the only way to enjoy the water park.
And this quote from the former mayor of Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa:
An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.
“It’s not your imagination: a disproportionate number of women really do play bass guitar in rock bands.” Research shows there are a few reasons for this, one of which is that bass players are typically in short supply.
One of the great modern mysteries, finally solved: How many cans of ABC SpaghettiOs would it take to write the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy?
There’s now a Bechdel Test for climate change in movies. “The Climate Reality Check asks whether, in a given story: 1. Climate change exists, and 2. A character knows it.”
Announcing the Tiny Awards 2024, a competition to find and celebrate the “small, personal, whimsical, weird and poetic things people are making on what is left of the web”. I’m a judge this year! Pls submit your projects!
I was a little too young (and culturally sheltered — like I’d never heard of New York magazine) in 1985 to really understand what the heck the Brat Pack was (not to mention what the name was referencing), but as a child of the 80s, I obviously grew up watching movies and TV shows that featured these actors. According to Wikipedia (which is a good read if you’re unfamiliar with the whole thing), here are some of the actors that were in the Brat Pack (or Brat Pack-adjacent): Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Tom Cruise, Charlie Sheen, James Spader, Robert Downey Jr., John Cusack, and Matthew Broderick.
The Brat Pack moniker was coined in a 1985 New York magazine article and it stuck. And according to some of the members, it ruined lives, careers, and friendships. Now one of the group members, Andrew McCarthy, has directed a documentary about the group: Brats. From Deadline:
Brats looks at the iconic films of the 1980s that shaped a generation and the narrative that took hold when their young stars were branded the “Brat Pack.” McCarthy reunites with his fellow Brat Packers — friends, colleagues and former foes, including Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez, Jon Cryer, Lea Thompson and Timothy Hutton, many of whom he had not seen for over 30 years — to answer the question: What did it mean to be part of the Brat Pack? The actor-filmmaker also sits down for a first-time conversation with writer David Blum, who fatefully coined the term Brat Pack in a 1985 New York Magazine cover story.
That trailer definitely hooked me in. Brats will be available on Hulu on June 13.
A list of the highest known prices paid for paintings. Some private sales aren’t on here and there are dozens (hundreds?) of paintings held by museums that are basically priceless (the Mona Lisa, etc).
Amazing: thousands of patients in England are being given personalized cancer vaccines that are intended “to hunt and kill any cancer cells and prevent the disease from coming back”.
The Hydrant Directory is a collection of colorful fire hydrants where “each hydrant has been processed into color palettes for free use by artists and designers”. I love stuff like this. (via @presentandcorrect)
A first in the nation, Vermont’s Climate Superfund Act “directs the state to charge major fossil fuel companies potentially billions of dollars to pay for climate impacts to which their emissions have contributed”.
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