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.
It has been a week. It’s not going to fix anything, but maybe watching George Clooney chilling at the end of a movie will help you in some small way.
He has perfected the art of just chillin’ out silently for an extended period of time during the last shot of a movie while the credits roll…
(via laura olin)
Matthew Ingram takes a look at the moral panic over social media and teen depression. “Despite all of the studies, there is still an almost complete lack of any evidence that social media use causes anxiety or depression in young adults.”
Sports Celebrate Physical Variation — Until It Challenges Social Norms. “A powerful triple axel on the ice is perfectly feminine when done in a skirt. But a powerful punch? A cheetah-fast sprint? Variation is suddenly of deep concern.”
You’ve heard about the Earth’s new mini-moon, yes? “It will be temporarily trapped by our planet’s gravity and orbit the globe - but only for about two months.”
Ran across this book in the bookstore recently and it looked great: The Art of Aardman. “This collection features original character sketches and never-before-seen concept art, offering a unique look inside the studio that created…Wallace & Gromit.”
Music By John Williams is a documentary film about the legendary composer who did the scores for Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Close Encounters, Superman, E.T., Home Alone, Schindler’s List — seriously, one person composed all these?! — Saving Private Ryan, Harry Potter, Lincoln, etc. etc. etc. Oh, and the Olympic Fanfare and Theme that NBC uses for the Olympics.
Anyway, the documentary premieres on Nov 1 on Disney+.
I got a lot out of this interview with The Message author Ta-Nehisi Coates by Jon Stewart for The Daily Show.
Best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates sits down with Jon Stewart to talk about his latest book, “The Message,” and reconciling past and present vestiges of oppression. They discuss his visits to Senegal, South Carolina, and The West Bank, how past atrocities like slavery and the holocaust can create a zero-sum game of control, the need for safety and statehood despite morally problematic systems, his exposure to Palestinian stories that have been hidden in American media, understanding the physical traumas of the Black community, and the purpose in writing to shape the world around us.
See also his interview with Chris Hayes on MSNBC:
And with Terry Gross on Fresh Air.
Ross Anderson and I share a favorite web page, Wikipedia’s Timeline of the Far Future, which he wrote about for the Atlantic: For How Much Longer Can Life Continue on This Troubled Planet?
Like the best sci-fi world building, the Timeline of the Far Future can give you a key bump of the sublime. It reminds you that even the sturdiest-seeming features of our world are ephemeral, that in 1,100 years, Earth’s axis will point to a new North Star. In 250,000 years, an undersea volcano will pop up in the Pacific, adding an extra island to Hawaii. In the 1 million years that the Great Pyramid will take to erode, the sun will travel only about 1/200th of its orbit around the Milky Way, but in doing so, it will move into a new field of stars. Our current constellations will go all wobbly in the sky and then vanish.
Some aspects of the timeline are more certain than others. We know that most animals will look different 10 million years from now. We know that the continents will slowly drift together to form a new Pangaea. Africa will slam into Eurasia, sealing off the Mediterranean basin and raising a new Himalaya-like range across France, Italy, and Spain. In 400 million years, Saturn will have lost its rings. Earth will have replenished its fossil fuels. Our planet will also likely have sustained at least one mass-extinction-triggering impact, unless its inhabitants have learned to divert asteroids.
I wrote about the timeline back in 2012 (and again in 2017 & 2019).
The timeline of the far future article is far from the longest page on Wikipedia, but it might take you several hours to get through because it contains so many enticing detours. What’s Pangaea Ultima? Oooh, Roche limit! The Degenerate Era, Poincar’e recurrence time, the Big Rip scenario, the cosmic light horizon, the list goes on and on.
This AI-generated video is a) completely bonkers (seriously, watch all the way to the end) and b) illustrative of how visual LLMs work: it so obviously doesn’t know anything…it’s just mindlessly following image similarity.
If you play Spelling Bee, the Times has a Spelling Bee Buddy that offers statistics and personalized hints that update as you play. (There’s also a Connections Bot.)
The NY Times has been doing these challenges every Friday where you sit and look at one piece of art for 10 minutes. Last week featured a woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige called Great Bridge: Sudden Rain at Atake, a piece that Vincent van Gogh had in his personal collection and painted a version of himself.
I didn’t expect to last the entire 10 minutes — a slow start to the day (dentist, errands) had me feeling rushed and a computer with an infinite number of apps & websites just a tab or click away is not the ideal medium for this exercise — but once I got going (or, rather, once I slowed down), it was pretty easy. (via laura olin)
Profile of Aisha Nyandoro (founder of a guaranteed-income project) for the Time Next 100 list. “Money — the type that can be spent on anything — has been out of favor as a method of helping impoverished Americans.”
Some of the most prized public spaces in Europe were once used for parking lots (and some still are). “Why are we so comfortable filling our most iconic public spaces with a bunch of metal boxes?”
I was surprised to learn, via Youngna Park’s excellent newsletter, that Sally Rooney wrote a short story in 2016 that features Marianne & Connell after the events of Normal People (which was published in 2018, technically making it a prequel?)
On the way to the dental clinic they talk about going home for Christmas. It’s November and Marianne is having a wisdom tooth removed. Connell is driving her to the clinic because he’s her only friend with a car, and also the only person in whom she confides about distasteful medical conditions like impacted teeth. He sometimes drives her to the doctor’s office when she needs antibiotics for urinary tract infections, which is often. They are twenty-three.
And that Rooney also published a novella called Mr Salary in 2019.
Opinion: We Need More Consequences for Reckless Driving. “‘Punishment’ and ‘consequences’ aren’t synonyms — and when we confuse the two, we lose lives on our roads.”
A site called Chromeography collects chrome logos and typography from vintage cars & electric appliances. As I was looking through these, I wondered: “What the hell is chrome anyway?” So I looked it up:
Chrome plating (less commonly chromium plating) is a technique of electroplating a thin layer of chromium onto a metal object. A chrome plated part is called chrome, or is said to have been chromed. The chromium layer can be decorative, provide corrosion resistance, facilitate cleaning, and increase surface hardness. Sometimes, a less expensive substitute for chrome, such as nickel may be used for aesthetic purposes.
(via @presentandcorrect)
When I tell folks (like during my XOXO talk) that I’m leaving a lot of money on the table by not paywalling my stuff on Substack, this is what I’m talking about: “You probably can’t make more than $1 million a year on Substack. But Matthew Yglesias does.”
Two college students paired Meta’s Ray Ban smart glasses with facial recognition tech and were able to pull up info on strangers (name, home address, phone number, and family members) in seconds just by looking at them.
While listening to an episode of Scene on Radio’s excellent series on Capitalism, I learned about an economic measure called the labor share of national income. From The Guardian:
This week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest estimate for the share labor receives of national income for the first quarter of 2024. The statistics shows the income workers receive compared with the productivity their labor generates.
According to BLS, this income share has declined for non-farm workers from about two-thirds, 64.1% in the first quarter of 2001, to 55.8% in the first quarter of 2024.
Roughly speaking, in the first quarter of 2024, workers received ~56% of the income generated by their labor and 44% went to capital (ownership & shareholders).
Here’s a graph that shows the labor share of national income from 1947 to 2016 so you can get some idea of the decline that’s happened:
Scene on Radio hosts John Biewen and Ellen McGirt described labor share of national income like so:
Ellen McGirt: The labor share of national income. So, of all the income that businesses bring in, from sales of their goods and services, how much of that goes to workers. As opposed to, how much winds up as profits in the pockets of stockholders.
John Biewen: That number, according to the Federal Reserve, also went up significantly during the “thirty glorious years” in the United States. In the before times, in 1930, workers took home about 57% of the money that was generated by their labor. 57%. That labor share went up in the 1940s, to about 65% — almost two-thirds of corporate income was going to workers. It stayed over 60% for the next few decades, well into the 1970s.
Ellen McGirt: That doesn’t sound like a huge increase — from fifty-some percent to sixty-some percent. But the result, over those decades, was trillions of dollars in the pockets of people in the bottom 90-percent of the income scale — that’s money that would have gone to the wealthiest folks without those more progressive policies that reduced inequality. And then, guess what, starting in about 1975, the labor share of national income went down, and down. Until now, things are more like they were back in the days of Herbert Hoover.
This observation by McGirt is important but kind of hard to follow in text so I’ll restate it: when you’re talking about something as massive as the US economy, even a difference of a few percentage points in the labor share of national income over several years is trillions and trillions of dollars. And increasingly, those trillions are going to the wealthiest and not to the bottom 90%.
According to a groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP — enough to more than double median income — enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year.
Price and Edwards calculate that the cumulative tab for our four-decade-long experiment in radical inequality had grown to over $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. At a recent pace of about $2.5 trillion a year, that number we estimate crossed the $50 trillion mark by early 2020. That’s $50 trillion that would have gone into the paychecks of working Americans had inequality held constant — $50 trillion that would have built a far larger and more prosperous economy — $50 trillion that would have enabled the vast majority of Americans to enter this pandemic far more healthy, resilient, and financially secure.
The podcasts generated by Google’s NotebookLM service are “surprisingly effective”. (Whether this says more about the current state of podcasts or AI is an open question…)
Lighthouse Parents Have More Confident Kids. “Sometimes, the best thing a parent can do is nothing at all.” This has largely been my parenting strategy, although it’s sometimes been challenging to stick to.
It’s been awhile since I’d checked in on one of my favorite YouTube channels, Great Art Explained. In the past year, curator James Payne has done videos on Duchamp, Manet, Magritte, and that one painting by Caspar David Friedrich (you know the one). But this one, on Vincent van Gogh’s final painting, particularly caught my attention:
The mystery of what [his final painting] was and where it was painted would take over a century to solve, and that was only thanks to a worldwide epidemic. What it means is that we now have a deeper insight into what van Gogh’s final last hours were like — before his tragic death.
Over 33,000 sounds are available for free download from the BBC’s sound effects library. “Among the plethora of sounds covered are reindeer grunts, common frog calls and crowds at the 1989 FA Cup Final.”
A flock of starlings is called a murmuration, an apt word because the flocks move like a rumor pulsing through a crowded room. This is a particularly beautiful murmuration observed in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Great interview by Jia Tolentino of Dr. Warren Hern, one of the few doctors who openly perform late abortions in the US. “Abortion is a clear therapeutic treatment of the condition of pregnancy where the woman is not going to have a healthy baby.”
Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of books that need to be sorted alphabetically by author. What’s the fastest way to accomplish this task? Luckily, efficient sorting is a problem that’s been studied extensively in computer science and this TED-Ed video walks us through three possible sorts: bubble sort, insertion sort, and quicksort.
For more on sorting, check out Sorting Algorithms Visualized, sorting techniques visualized through Eastern European folk dancing, and a site where you can compare many different sorting algorithms with each other. (via the kid should see this)
The Absolute Best Butter For Every Occasion, After Taste-Testing, Cooking And Baking With 32 Kinds. Definitely need to get my hands of some Le Beurre Bordier at some point. But I’m really happy with Ploughgate’s salted butter. 🤤
“Barbaric.” A “nightmare of vulgarity.” “Monstrous.” “A violent mess.” “The work of a madman.” Those are just some of the reactions that Henri Matisse’s Dance received after its public debut in 1910. In this video, Evan Puschak shares How Matisse Revolutionized Color In Art with this painting and other Fauvist work.
The most common adjectives ending in “-y” used in the NYT Cooking section include jammy, silky, buttery, cheesy, and lemony.
Examples of a book cover design trend: multi-panel illustrations or “bento books”. Think the covers for Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.
The humble hyperlink, the backbone of the entire internet, is increasingly endangered. “If you degrade hyperlinks…you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things.”
Evidence of ‘Negative Time’ Found in Quantum Physics Experiment. “Another oddball quantum outcome: photons, wave-particles of light, can spend a negative amount of time zipping through a cloud of chilled atoms.”
Hey everyone. It’s been more than 2 weeks since my bike accident and I’m still not quite back to full speed. I’ve been slowed down by some emotional/psychological/existential stuff and my wrists haven’t fully healed yet, making typing/mousing for long periods challenging. I’m sorry the site has been slower than usual — thanks for your patience as I get back into the groove here.
But also! I had a really nice, relaxing, contemplative birthday weekend in NYC — museums, art, walking, bookstores, city vibes, friends, and food. It really filled me up. I’m about 2/3rds of the way through Intermezzo and loving it. I’ve got an audiobook going too: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (recommended by Kottke reader Mike Riley). I finished Shōgun (excellent, can’t wait to rewatch), am working my way through season two of The Rings of Power, and am rewatching Devs with my son (a first-timer). I know, I owe you a media diet post…I haven’t done one since December. 😬
If you don’t mind sharing, what have you been up to recently?
Thom Yorke is reworking Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief for a production of Hamlet. “PLEASE NOTE: RADIOHEAD WILL NOT BE PERFORMING IN HAMLET HAIL TO THE THIEF.”
Stay Connected