Well, I really don’t know what happened here. One minute it was the second week of January 2024 and the next minute we’re a scant 12 hours away from 2025 — a ludicrously futuristic date, a sci-fi date. And I didn’t do a media diet post all year! I have no excuse; it just…didn’t happen. Over and over and over and over again — it just kept not happening!
As penance, and for my last post of the year, here’s a giant media diet recap of (almost) everything I read, watched, listened to, and experienced in the year of our lord 2024. (I’ll try to break it up into smaller chunks next year… 🤞)
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. I am just totally in the tank for how Rooney writes about power dynamics & interpersonal interactions. I think maybe this is my second-favorite of hers after Normal People? (A)
Shōgun. My favorite show of the year by a mile — so good all around. (A+)
Developing AI Like Raising Kids. Engaging and wide-ranging podcast conversation between Alison Gopnik and Ted Chiang about what caregiving and designing AI systems might have in common. (A)
GNX. The latest album from Kendrick Lamar has been on heavy rotation in my car since it came out. (A)
Dune: Part Two. I loved this, particularly in IMAX. It’s a better film than the first part and very rewatchable (I’ve seen it ~5 times?). I hope Villeneuve does another one. (A+)
Dune. I went back and rewatched this after seeing Dune: Part Two and it all made so much more sense. I can’t remember ever seeing a sequel that improved the first film in retrospect. Empire Strikes Back maybe? (A)
XOXO 2024. It was so good to see so many old friends and meet some new ones. (A)
The 2024 total solar eclipse. Not quiiiite as mind-blowing as my first time, but it was great to bust out the telescope and share the experience with friends and eclipse newbies. (A+)
May December. Natalie Portman & Julianne Moore were both fantastic in this. (A-)
The Incredibles. A perfect movie. No flab. Hits all the right notes. (A+)
The Incredibles 2. When this came out, I preferred it to the first movie. Now having seen them back-to-back, the sequel is not quite the equal to the original. But still great. (A)
Anatomy of a Fall. A gripping legal & family drama from director Justine Triet. (A-)
The Big Dig. A nine-part, in-depth podcast on how the massive Boston highway project got done. Would recommend for governance and infrastructure nerds but also for anyone who is curious about how things get done (or not) in America. (A)
Princess Mononoke. My favorite Ghibli movie — so great to be able to see it at the theater. Just gorgeous. (A)
Mad Max: Fury Road. My umpteenth rewatch confirms: a perfect movie. (A+)
Godzilla Minus One. Not a Godzilla scholar, but this is certainly the best Godzilla movie I’ve ever seen. A real gem of a movie. (A)
Funspot. Billed as “the world’s largest arcade”, the real attraction of Funspot for me is the 250+ classic games and pinball machines (Star Wars, Frogger, Donkey Kong, Burgertime, Gorgar, Dig Dug, Mr Do!, etc.) I took my teenaged kids here last summer and they loved it. Plus, $20 in tokens kept the three of us entertained for almost two hours. (A)
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. I watched this twice — the first time I thought it was alright (was Anya Taylor-Joy the right choice for the lead?) but I loved it the second time around (Anya Taylor-Joy was the right choice for the lead). (A)
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It’s been awhile since I’ve fallen in love with a Star Trek series, but this one got me hooked right away. (The commenters in this thread were spot on with their recommendations.) I absolutely love the cast and the episodic format. I blazed through season one, am still stinge watching season two, and am delighted that the show has been renewed for two more seasons. (A)
All Fours by Miranda July. A truly weird book that I loved. Listen to the audiobook version if you can…July’s voice acting (I can’t really call it mere narration) really adds to the experience. (A)
Lawrence of Arabia. I’d never seen this before but I got a chance to see it on a big screen this summer and was blown away by it. A truly gorgeous film. (A)
The Zone of Interest. I’m not a particular fan of Jonathan Glazer, but this film was brutal and chilling and boring. The sound design was absolutely brilliant. (A-)
Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Brodesser-Akner is a hell of a writer. (A)
Capitalism. Another banger from Scene on Radio, which you may remember from their excellent podcast series on whiteness, American history, and the climate crisis. Their series on capitalism is typically thought-provoking and informative. (A)
The Great British Bake Off (2023 season). When each new season of Bake Off starts, I’m always like “who are these chuck-a-lucks?” and by about the fourth episode I’d run through a wall for any of the bakers. Such a great format & vibe to this show. (A)
Poor Things. Really enjoyed this. Emma Stone was fantastic. (A-)
The Diplomat (season two). I can’t tell if this show is actually good or if I just really, really like it. But I’ll tell you who’s actually good though: Allison Janney — she swooped in for the final two episodes and upstaged the rest of the really talented cast. (A-)
Gladiator. Rewatched in anticipation of the sequel. A neeeearly perfect movie. I can’t really even put my finger on why it isn’t quite flawless — there’s like 3-5 minutes that could be reworked or cut or something. But still, a great film that I love to watch. (A)
Things Become Other Things. I regret to inform you that the irritatingly nice & talented Craig Mod is also good at writing memoirs. The bastard. (A)
Chernobyl. I rewatched this with my son this fall and I’d forgotten just how good it is. One of the best TV things of the past decade. The courtroom scene with Legasov and his blue & red cards is one of the best & simplest explanations of the reactor’s explosion you’ll find anywhere. (A)
James by Percival Everett. It’s a close call, but I think this retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was my favorite book of 2024. The audiobook version, narrated by Dominic Hoffman, is fantastic. (A)
Dookie Demastered. Green Day “demastered” their 1994 album Dookie into 15 “obscure, obsolete, and inconvenient” formats, like wax cylinder, Fisher Price record, Teddy Ruxpin, and player piano roll. Brilliant. (A)
Shōgun by James Clavell. I’m nearly halfway through this 1300-page behemoth, but I wanted to include it here because I’m blazing through it and enjoying it so much. (A-)
How Playwright Annie Baker Made the Movie of the Summer. This podcast conversation between Sam Fragoso and Annie Baker is fascinating because of Baker’s polite but insistent refusal to adhere to the social conventions of a media interview. (A)
Conclave. I can’t decide if this film is overwrought or just the right amount of wrought. Well-acted though and compelling. (B+)
Cléo from 5 to 7. I appreciated this film more than I enjoyed it. (B)
Fallout. A promising first season; I’m glad they’re doing another. (B+)
Past Lives. Greta Lee is great in this. And that last scene, ooof. (B+)
Moonbound by Robin Sloan. Was pretty charmed by this, in part because it was fun trying to connect the narrative & themes of the book to Sloan’s preoccupations on his mailing list over the past 2-3 years. (B+)
For All Mankind (season four). My pre-season musing about this show being “a prequel/origin story for The Expanse” hold up pretty well, I think. (B+)
The Holdovers. A mostly wholesome Christmas-time Breakfast Club. (A-)
The Great (season three). This didn’t have the zing of the first season, but it was better than the second. (B+)
Reservation Dogs. I am going to get yelled at for this but I enjoyed the first season more than the subsequent two. I appreciate what they did with the second and third seasons on an intellectual level (it’s brilliant, multi-generational storytelling) but I found my attention drifting as I tried to keep up with all of the connections. (A-)
Civil War. I’d like to see this again — I’m still not sure if I liked it or if it was any good. (B)
Constellation. Was disappointed with this show. Would have been an interesting three-episode series — instead we got eight ponderous episodes. (C)
3 Body Problem. Netflix did pretty well with this adaptation and the changes made sense. Looking forward to see where they go with the next season. (B+)
The Three-Body Problem trilogy by Cixin Liu. Well, after watching the TV series, I went back to read the three-book series for the third time. Was a little let down this time for whatever reason. (B)
Alien. Saw this in the theater over the summer and didn’t like it quite as much as I have in the past. (B+)
The Gilded Age. A gorgeously filmed and costumed guilty pleasure. Who is going to keep making this kind of series after Julian Fellowes retires? (A-)
Rebel Moon. Aka Zach Snyder’s Star Wars. Couldn’t finish this it was so bad. What a hack. (D)
Leave the World Behind. I watched this way back in January and had to paste the title into Google to see what it even was. I remember it being pretty uneven. But it also introduced me to Myha’la. (B-)
The Marvels. I honestly don’t remember much of this, just that it didn’t have the, uh, goodness of the first one. (B)
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Saw this on the big screen this summer, which was worth it for the pod race and the “duel of the fates” lightsaber battle at the end. (B-)
Petite Maman. A film of quiet impact by Céline Sciamma. I didn’t know anything about this going in and was delighted by where it went. (A-)
Frankenstein.Hot Frank Summer! I really tried to get into this but just couldn’t…I got bored and gave up a third of the way in. (C+)
Devs. Rewatched this with my son and didn’t like as much as I did the first time. I found it a little too self-serious. (B+)
Star Wars: The Acolyte. Uneven but with some good moments. Glad I watched it, even though the show got cancelled. (B)
Avatar: The Last Airbender. I thought they did a good job casting the characters for this live-action series. But there’s a magic to the animated series that they didn’t capture. (B)
Fall Guy. Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt were charming and the rest of it was fine. I enjoyed the dragging of Tom Cruise. (B)
Deadpool & Wolverine. Rotten Tomatoes has this at 78% and that seems right…I liked it about 78%. (B+ (I grade on a scale apparently))
Ponyo. Another Ghibli movie I got to enjoy on the big screen. (B+)
North Woods by Daniel Mason. I would have liked this more without the magical realism. Some great parts though. (B+)
Rebel Ridge. I really enjoyed this one. This movie felt like a throwback of sorts: a solid thriller with no bells and whistles. Reminded me a bit of The Fugitive. (A-)
A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon. I enjoy the Shaun shorts more than the films, but this one had an impressive number of sci-fi references in it…the kids got annoyed at me pointing them out. (B+)
The Wild Robot. Hilarious at times, but a bit too pat when it came to the main plot/emotional core. (B)
The Good Place. Third time through on this one…a comedy classic that stuck the landing. (A)
Gladiator II. I wanted this to be better. Denzel Washington was fantastic, as was his sleeve-work. Love that the co-emperors were basically crypto YouTube bros. (B)
Alien: Romulus. Very good Alien installment. I was on the edge of my seat for the last third of the movie as the heroes raced against the inevitability of gravity — one of the best action/thriller sequences of the year, I’d reckon. (B+)
Moana 2. Watched this with an audience filled with little kids and when Maui appeared on the screen for the first time, a little boy said “Maui” in a quietly awed voice, instantly charming the entire theater. (B)
Mr Salary by Sally Rooney. I had no idea this short story existed until a few months ago. It was written before she published her debut novel. (B+)
Elf. It was nice to see Bob Newhart — I’d forgotten he was in this. (B)
Inside Out 2. Pixar is still the best studio for making kids’ movies that appeal to all ages. My kids were like, yep, pretty much what it’s like being a teenager. And I identified both with Riley and her parents. (A)
Radical Optimism. Underwhelming compared to Future Nostalgia, but I do like Houdini a lot. (B)
Curator James Payne’s Great Art Explained channel is one of YouTube’s gems. For his latest video, he takes a look at Leonardo da Vinci’s mural The Last Supper and explains what makes it such an unusual, impressive, and revolutionary work of art. Here’s how the main part of the video begins:
Milan, 1494: Leonardo da Vinci was an exceptional man, and everyone who met him described him as a genius. And yet, he was now 42 years old — a middle-aged man in an era when life expectancy was 40 — And he still hadn’t produced anything that would be considered a masterpiece by his contemporaries. Many of his works were unfinished or in private collections, there were no great public works that people could see, no architectural marvels and no distinguished altarpieces for cathedrals. Nothing that could be considered worthy of his potential.
Then, he was asked to paint a wall.
I found the discussion of how Leonardo’s knowledge of theatre — he was charged with “creating lavish plays and pageants for the Duke of Milan” — informed his work on The Last Supper particularly interesting. You’ll never see this painting the same way again after watching this video.
52 things Kent Hendricks learned in 2024, incl. “walking speed on the streets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia has increased 15% since 1979” and “after fluoride is introduced into a city’s drinking water, the number of dentist offices drops 9%”.
5. Your body carries literal pieces of your mom — and maybe your grandmother, siblings, aunts, and uncles.
15. The weight of giant pumpkins increased 20-fold in half a century.
19. In the Middle Ages, people took their pet squirrels for walks and decked them out in flashy accessories.
31. One breadfruit tree can feed a family of four for at least 50 years.
38. Classical composers used dice to randomly compose songs.
52. Dogs may be entering a new wave of domestication.
71. The 10,000-steps-a-day goal doesn’t originate from clinical science. Instead, it comes from a 1965 marketing campaign by a Japanese company that was selling pedometers.
The Walmart Effect. According to new research, “Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all. Sometimes consumer prices are an incomplete, even misleading, signal of economic well-being.”
These biological systems are comprised of eight mussels with sensors hot-glued to their shells. They work together with a network of computers and have been given control over the city’s water supply. If the waters are clean, these mussels stay open and happy. But when water quality drops too low, they close off and shut the water supply of millions of people with them.
According to The Economist (archive), more than 50 such systems are now deployed in Poland and Russia to help protect water supplies:
The system is nifty. When the molluscs encounter heavy metals, pesticides or other pollutants, they close their shells, explains Piotr Domek of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, who has worked on the project for three decades. To create a natural early-warning system, Mr Domek and his colleagues collect the clams from rivers or reservoirs, and attach a coil and a magnet to their shells. Computers register whether their shells are open or closed by detecting changes in the magnetic field.
“In the case of a terrorist attack, an ecological disaster or another contamination of the water supply, the clams will close,” says Mr Domek. This, in turn, will automatically cut off the water supply. The clams, he thinks, are life-savers. “If contaminated water goes straight to our taps, we will get poisoned,” he says in “Fat Kathy”, a short film that celebrates the invaluable bivalves.
Each worker mussel spends three months on duty — after that, they become too accustomed to their new surroundings and are no longer sensitive enough to properly monitor the water. For retirement, they are gently tossed back where they came from.
I’ve shared animator Nick Murray Willis’ videos before — he takes snippets of sound & dialogue from sports commentary & movies and creates context-shifted animations from them. For instance, in the two videos above with football (soccer) commentary, a commentator’s chant of “Messi, Messi, Messi” becomes a French street performer thanking the crowd (“merci, merci, merci”).
(Ok, I’ve caught myself attempting to explain humor, so I’m gonna wrap this up by urging you to watch the videos if you want.)
The 7 Coolest Mathematical Discoveries of 2024, including “the biggest prime number yet, a new formula for pi, mysterious patterns in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and even a whole new kind of shape”.
“Architecton is an epic, intimate, and poetic meditation on architecture and how the design and construction of buildings from the ancient past reveal our destruction — and offer hope for survival and a way forward.”
You can use this game to narrow down 30 monospaced typefaces to find your favorite font for coding. I somehow ended up with Courier Prime (🤔) and promptly sent myself to my room for the rest of the day. (I use Menlo in VSCode.)
The most popular Wikipedia articles of 2024 (thru Nov 22), including Deaths in 2024, Project 2025, Griselda Blanco, UEFA Euro 2024, ChatGPT, Taylor Swift, and Kamala Harris.
A group of Costco shareholders, emboldened by the Supreme Court’s continued assault on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, called on the company’s board to “conduct an evaluation and publish a report” on the risks involved in maintaining their DEI program, which these shareholders called “illegal discrimination” against employees who are “white, Asian, male or straight”. The board responded with a recommendation to vote against this proposal:
Our Board has considered this proposal and believes that our commitment to an enterprise rooted in respect and inclusion is appropriate and necessary. The report requested by this proposal would not provide meaningful additional information to our shareholders, and the Board thus unanimously recommends a vote AGAINST this proposal.
Our success at Costco Wholesale has been built on service to our critical stakeholders: employees, members, and suppliers. Our efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion follow our code of ethics:
For our employees, these efforts are built around inclusion – having all of our employees feel valued and respected. Our efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion remind and reinforce with everyone at our Company the importance of creating opportunities for all. We believe that these efforts enhance our capacity to attract and retain employees who will help our business succeed. This capacity is critical because we owe our success to our now over 300,000 employees around the globe.
But the board then went further, blaming these shareholders for wasting their time and resources:
The proponent professes concern about legal and financial risks to the Company and its shareholders associated with the diversity initiatives. The supporting statement demonstrates that it is the proponent and others that are responsible for inflicting burdens on companies with their challenges to longstanding diversity programs. The proponent’s broader agenda is not reducing risk for the Company but abolition of diversity initiatives.
The unbearable slowness of being: “Streaming a high-def video takes about 25M bits/sec. The download rate in a typical American home is about 262 million bps. Now researchers have estimated the speed of information flow in the human brain: just 10 bps.”
Sleepy Skunk’s end-of-the-year movie trailer mashups are always worth a look. This year’s installment got me wondering how many of these movies I’ve actually seen — not that many, I don’t think. (via @rands)
Food historian Max Miller stumbled upon the original recipe for 1980s/90s school cafeteria pizza (you know, with the iconic rectangular slices) and decided to whip up a batch (with “pourable dough”).
Tastes just like it. You can like — all of those herbs are exactly the same as they were. I think maybe it tastes a little fresher than I remember, like the flavors are a little heightened…but that’s that’s them. This is the pizza…
California’s raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers and contrary to some bad press & much industry outcry, it’s been a success. “California’s fast-food sector gained jobs in all but one month since September 2023.”
Whooping cough cases reach highest level in a decade. “The U.S. has recorded over 32,000 whooping cough cases this year, compared with around 5,100 as of mid-December last year. Infants are most vulnerable…” (Guess why?)
While poking around for Christmas music, I found this little-known recording of Louis Armstrong reading ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas, recorded shortly before he died.
The poem, first published in 1823, would be Armstrong’s final commercial recording. Armstrong taped it on February 26, 1971, on a reel-to-reel recorder at his home in Queens, New York, during his last spell of good health.
The film will be a “mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new IMAX technology” distributed by Universal Pictures.
The Odyssey will open in theaters on July 17, 2026.
The cast is said to include Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, and Robert Pattinson.
Given the recent interest in retelling these tales in a more contemporary way from the perspective of women (Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey, Madeline Miller’s Circe, A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes), it’ll be interesting to see if Nolan is sourcing from any of these texts and where he lands on who is the focus of the story. (Nolan has historically not been great with female characters.)
How on earth is this movie going to be under 4-5 hours long? Will this be a Part I?
It would be cool for TSG Entertainment to have a hand in producing this…their logo features Odysseus shooting an arrow through several axe heads.
A roundup of the words of the year for 2024, including brat, manifest, kakistocracy, polarization, brain rot, enshittification, sanewashing, girl mossing, vibe, and broligarchy.
Pricing calculator for creator economy platforms. For instance, if you have a newsletter with 1000 subscribers that pay $5/mo, Substack will cost you $500/mo, Patreon $400/mo, Ghost $19/mo, Beehiiv $39/mo, Ko-fi $6/mo, Buttondown $29/mo.
Well this is something special, a holiday treat for the end of 2024: a group of archivists (including Chris Person) has uploaded an HBO magic special by Ricky Jay that has been largely unavailable since it aired in 1996.
This is an RF rip of Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, to date the greatest card magic special ever produced, directed by David Mamet of all people. This special was produced by HBO and to date has never had a home release, although poor home recordings of this special exist online.
Before getting into preservation generally, it’s worth considering how we got here. Why is so much media lost or badly preserved? A recurring reason is that the people in charge are sometimes, but not always, asleep at the wheel. Media is forgotten or stored improperly, and humidity and heat have destroyed more of our history than we will ever know. Sometimes companies handle the material sloppily (I’ve blogged about the use of AI before, but there are countless examples in audio too).
Having shared all that, I feel like the quality of this YouTube video of the special is not perceptibly worse than the one uploaded to archive.org? What am I missing?
The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher affirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened:
Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher’s named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card.
“Three of clubs,” Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card.
He turned over the three of clubs.
Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, “Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card.”
After an interval of silence, Jay said, “That’s interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time.”
Mosher persisted: “Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card.”
Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, “This is a distinct change of procedure.” A longer pause. “All right — what was the card?”
“Two of spades.”
Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card.
Rickey Henderson has died aged 65. “There may not have been any player in history who was better at more things than Rickey Henderson was.” He was so fun to watch.
Last minute gift idea for the art fan in your life: Amy Sherald: American Sublime. Saw this in the bookstore this morning and it’s such a beautiful book.
My mouth is watering reading this retrospective by Cup of Jo’s retiring food writer, Jenny Rosenstrach. Lots of good recipes, like Smashed Pea Toasts with Ricotta? Yum.
Balkonkraftwerk: a German word meaning “balcony power plant”, aka the low-cost solar panels people are hanging from their balconies to generate extra household energy.
I posted this picture of my jade plant flowering on BS and a lot of people expressed surprise that jade plants flower, and I was wondering: did you know jade plants flower? Growing up, my mom always had lots of jade plants, and I was in my twenties the first time I saw flowers on jade plants in Northern California. It blew my flipping mind is what it did.
The flowers are little pink stars with tiny antennae that make the flowers look like they’re sparkling. I think they’re so dainty and gorgeous and I love them. Look at those tiny pink idiots. Look at those itsy bitty show offs sharing their joy with anyone lucky enough to gaze upon their perfect visage.
I live near Boston and my jade plants didn’t start flowering until I moved somewhere I could put them outside most of the year, and by that time they were at least 22 years old and probably 25. The three oldest are the only ones to flower, which makes sense since the other ones aren’t as old. There’s a lot of information here about how to make your indoor jades flower, but it boils down to tricking them to make them think they’re in South Africa. They need to be cold at night and in sun during the day and you gotta stop watering them a little bit.
“I could really feel the heaviness of the song, and I wanted to inject a little touch of hope and light into it. There’s always a presence of light that can break through those times of darkness.”
Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott writes about the $2 billion in donations her foundation gave in 2024 and also some alternate and forgotten definitions of the word “invest”: “To devote resources for a useful purpose. To endow with rights. To clothe.”
Vanity Fair has done a video interview Billie Eilish every year since she was a relatively unknown 15-year-old singer/songwriter. They skipped releasing last year’s interview but they are back with year eight.
I still marvel that Vanity Fair embarked on this project with this particular person. They could have chosen any number of up-and-coming 2017 pop singer/songwriters and they got lucky with the one who went supernova and won multiple Grammys.
Her selection over a multitude of other talented, rising stars is truly one of the great talent scouting successes ever.
Hmm. I don’t know. I haven’t liked Superman in a movie since the early 80s. What do you think? Does Superman even make sense as a contemporary superhero?
The only Christmas music I want to hear this year is The Muppets doing Carol of the Bells. Beaker, Animal, and the Swedish Chef makes a great trio, don’t you think?
I didn’t know that the whereabouts of one of Vincent van Gogh’s most important works, a 1890 painting called “Portrait of Dr. Gachet”, is unknown and that the painting had not been seen publicly since the 1990s. This investigation into the potential location of the painting is an engrossing read as well as a good opportunity to appreciate van Gogh’s piece.
Many experts encountered along the way had no clue what had happened to the painting. Four art world insiders said they suspect the painting is held by a private, very rich European family. All parties had an opinion on the core question that drives such a quest: Do collecting families have any responsibility to share iconic works of art with the broader public?
The question has grown more relevant as it becomes clearer that most museums can no longer outbid billionaire collectors for the greatest works of art. Few paintings make that point plainer than Dr. Gachet’s portrait, a piece long on public display that has now vanished into someone’s private home or a climate-controlled warehouse.
For many in the art world, such a work is not just a creative expression, but part of a trade that survives because of the interest and deep pockets of collectors who may, or may not, choose to share their work.
“People are allowed to own things privately,” said Michael Findlay, who was involved as a specialist for Christie’s in the 1990 auction sale of the Gachet. “Does it belong to everybody? No, it does not.”
See also a new short documentary on the missing painting:
Marisa Kabas correctly asserts that Substack’s latest announcement reaffirms their status as a publication (and not a platform) and as a place that will publish disinformation and hate under the guise of “free speech”.
As we wrote in the Substackers Against Nazis letter, “there’s a difference between a hands-off approach and putting your thumb on the scale.” And by championing Bari Weiss and her worldview, Substack is once again putting its thumb on the scale.
But this is the bit that really caught my eye (italics mine…and imagine me pumping my fist as well):
Substack has managed to convince some that there is no life for a newsletter beyond them. This is simply untrue.
Since I left Substack for beehiiv in January, I went from making a little bit of money to actually making a living as an independent journalist with my own publication. I didn’t need Substack’s Twitter-esque Notes feature or its recommendation network to grow; I used social networks — mostly Bluesky — to successfully promote my work. That personal engagement created, I believe, deeper relationships with my readers than passive subscriptions via an algorithm. Most importantly, I’ve remained committed to producing work that I’m proud of, and publishing it via a platform that doesn’t force me to compromise my values.
Leaving aside all of the arguments about publication vs platform and whether Substack is a Nazi bar or not, the unfortunate truth for publications on Substack is that in order to amass the money necessary to recoup the investment pumped into the company by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz (Trump supporting billionaire oligarch wannabes who would ruin anything and everything to make one more dollar), they will continue to wedge themselves in between publications and their readers. And at some point, what you thought of as your publication turns out to merely be a tiny fraction of theirs. As Kabas says:
There is no such thing as a perfect place on the internet. But it’s possible to avoid the ones that aren’t even pretending to try to be better. The best time to leave Substack was a long time ago. The second best time is now.
I am almost positive that I have posted this before but I don’t care: rotating sandwiches. (There seem to be a couple spinning clockwise but maybe that’s just an opticalillusion?)
“These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.
And from an excerpt of the book describing how the road to fascism is like being a frog in a gradually heated pot of water:
“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ‘43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ‘33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
So if you’re waiting for the grand moment when the scales tip and we are no longer a functioning democracy, you needn’t bother. It’ll be much more subtle than that. It’ll be more of the president ignoring laws passed by congress. It’ll be more demonizing of the press.
🔔 Laaaast call for The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide. If you still have holiday shopping to do, it’s probably coming down to the last day or two for ordering in time for Dec 25 (Xmas and also the first night of Hanukkah).
36 Things That Stuck With Us in 2024, including Chappell Roan, Missy Elliott, Kendrick Lamar, The Substance, Twisters in 4DX (🤔), and Nobody Wants This. (I think there’s maybe a better version of this list out there…)
A group of scientists warns against creating mirror cells. This sentence is somehow not sci-fi: “Drug developers might be able to create mirror antibiotics, but the treatments might not be ready to use until a mirror pandemic was out of control.”
In thinking about the books I’ve read that made a significant impact on how I see and understand the world, I’d have to go with:
Various Richard Scarry books (like Cars and Trucks and Things That Go) when I was little, although Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood & Sesame Street probably had a bigger and more lasting impact on who I am as a person.
Where the Red Fern Grows was my favorite book as a child — I read it so many times. And there were these biography series for kids at my local library and I read a bunch of them. The two that I distinctly remember were the books on Thomas Edison and Harriet Tubman. From the Edison book I learned that a clever lad from the Midwest could make and invent wonderful things using your mind and your hands. And Harriet Tubman: she was straight-up a superhero and her story taught me all I needed to know about the truth of American slavery.
I first read Orwell’s 1984 in 1984, when I was 10 or 11. Probably affected my view of the world more than any other book.
How about you? What are your personal foundational texts? Note that, as I understand it, these are not simply your favorite books, but the books that mean a lot to you and have been instrumental to your development as a human.
Then Comes The Body is a great short documentary from Jacob Krupnick about a Nigerian man who taught himself how to dance ballet from watching YouTube tutorials, the ballet school he started in Lagos, and the students who are branching out into the rest of the world.
There’s no ballet here in Nigeria. There’s no one to look up to. There are no theaters. There are no productions. There are no ballet schools at all. The only thing you have is yourself and the internet.
The founder of Leap of Dance Academy, Daniel Ajala, was inspired to learn ballet after watching the 2001 American film Save the Last Dance. As there weren’t any ballet schools in Nigeria, he taught himself by watching YouTube videos. Determined to provide his community with opportunities he hadn’t had, Ajala established the Academy in 2017 and offers classes for free, explaining that he doesn’t want anyone “to have an excuse for not following your passion.”
Speaking of speaking of Tiny Desk Concerts here are two recent good ones. (Eep, wait, they’re all really good. What if any performance by a very talented performer in an intimate setting is always going to be special?)
Waxahatchee was solo in her 2013 performance, but here she is with an excellent five piece band, including Jeff Tweedy’s son on drums.
And here’s Doechii with a NINE piece. Gosh, this is so good and so fun to watch.
This is also worth a watch about how the NPR engineers make the concerts sound so good.
A teaser trailer for the third season of The White Lotus is out and the release date has been revealed: February 16, 2025. Parker Posey? Walton Goggins? Yes, please. But I’ve got a love/hate relationship with this show (I couldn’t get through the first season but thought the second season was great), so I’m feeling cautiously optimistic.
During the pandemic, Billie Eilish did a Tiny Desk Concert at home amidst a very faithful recreation of the NPR office. Last week, Eilish played a proper set at the actual office. From the video’s description:
Saudade is a Portuguese word that can be roughly defined as a feeling of melancholy, nostalgia or yearning for something that is beloved but not present. There’s no perfect translation, but one of the closest English expressions of the word I’ve ever seen is Billie Eilish’s Tiny Desk performance.
You’d think the Los Angeles-born singer invented the term. Every breath is so full of indulgent melancholy, hopeful regret, at 22 years old she’s become a captivating fixture of what it means, or rather what it feels, to love and lose simultaneously.
Accompanied by a small band and her brother Finneas, Eilish played The Greatest, L’Amour de Ma Vie, i love you, and Birds of a Feather. Lovely.
Isle of Tune: a web-based game where you build streetscapes that play music when a car is driven on them — trees, house, and light poles all make different sounds. Big Star Guitar vibes.
Hello, everyone. I just launched a few new features related to the comments here on kottke.org:
1. The ability to fave comments. This feature has been in test mode for the past few months, and I’m happy it’s finally getting a wider release. Only kottke.org members can fave for now (but I may open it up for everyone depending on how things go). For now, only you will be able to see what you’ve faved. The number of faves on each comment will be displayed next to the fave button (again, I’m going to see how this works…precise fave counts definitely have their minuses). Non-members will not see fave buttons or fave counts. You can’t fave your own comments — no getting high on your own supply.
There aren’t any limits to the number of comments you can fave, but in the spirit of kottke.org’s community guidelines, try to be thoughtful and community-minded about faves…at their best, faves are a useful communal signal for others looking for the most interesting and useful comments.
2. If you’re a member, you can see your own comments and those you’ve faved on your new profile page, which you can find in the menu in the upper right of every page — just click on your name and then “Profile”. (If you’re on mobile, click on the menu, then your name, then “Profile”.) I don’t know if this is the right place for profiles to live, but it’ll do for now. As I add more features to the site, I may have to shift things around a little.
No one else can see your profile page right now, but that might change in the future. At the moment, you won’t be able to see all of your comments and faves, only about ~30 of the most recent — I need to add some pagination here soon.
3. For longer comment threads, I’ve added a sorting option. The default is the threaded view but you can also sort by the most recently posted comments and most popular (i.e. by number of faves). Anyone can use this — it’s going to be super useful for keeping up with new comments on popular threads (like What’s The One Thing Only You Noticed?) and for surfacing the best comments.
Ok, that’s all! I’m pretty excited about finally getting this launched — there’s lots of interesting stuff being shared in the comments these days and helping people find it is a good thing! Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions, feedback, or concerns. And as always, thank you to kottke.org’s members for their support in enabling new features like this. ✌️
Once again, The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide. If you’re shopping online, especially from smaller retailers, getting your order in this weekend is probably a good idea for delivery before Xmas or the first day of Hanukkah.
Adam Sharp has curated the most flamboyant ways to tell someone to pound sand in other languages, and it’s delightful. There’s “go ski into a spruce” from Finland, in Brazil you tell someone to “go pick little coconuts,” while in Poland you say “go to the park and paint the ceiling.”
The most devastating in the entire thread, though, is the French saying, “go back home, your mother made you waffles.” If someone said this to me, they would need a dustpan to sweep up the dust of me. If someone said this to me, they’d have to put in the newspaper I wasn’t mad. If someone said this to me, I’d think about the time my 5th grade teacher goaded the entire class to laugh at me because she was wrong about Berlin being on the border between East and West Germany, but I was right! If someone said this to me, all the liquid in my body would heat to one thousand degrees and my skin would melt. If someone said this to me, I’d move away and change my name and miss my family. If someone said this to me, the yellowjackets inside my chest would chew their way out and then sting ME for making them chew through bones. If someone said this to me, all of the songs I’ve heard plus all of the songs I haven’t would play at once inside my brain resulting in a symphony of anguish. If someone said this to me, I would go into debt buying a yacht hoping a gang of orcas wearing dead salmon on their heads would sink it.
Seven benign words on their own collocated into a soul-destroying eviscerator punctuated by a normally pleasant breakfast item. I told the very tall Chris Piasick about this saying and he drew it.
I’m sure there are science or moral reasons I shouldn’t use Jason’s “World’s Best Pancake Recipe” in my waffle maker, but I don’t care, I’ve been doing it for years and the resulting waffles are fabulous.
Watch a stone pine grow from a seed harvested from a pinecone into a small tree, a 2-year growth period compressed into just 110 seconds through the ✨magic✨ of time lapse photography. Don’t you snicker…it is magic! Its invention in the 1870s made it possible to observe, study, and appreciate objects and events in entirely new ways — it’s literal time travel.
Look at feisty confectionary upstart Skittles trying to get in on the NERDS Gummy Cluster candy innovation money bazooka. Freeze-dried Skittles? They sound terrible. I must try them.
This is a really interesting video about something called the gang-nail plate, a construction innovation that enabled larger roofs to be built on houses, removed the need for internal load-bearing walls, and made the process of construction cheaper & more efficient.
While it helped streamline building processes and cut costs, it also encouraged rapid housing expansion and larger, more resource-intensive homes. The result was an architectural shift that contributed to suburban sprawl, increased energy demands, and homes increasingly treated as commodities rather than unique, handcrafted spaces. These changes reverberated through building codes, real estate markets, and even family life, influencing how we interact with our homes and one another.
The story of gang-nail plate illustrates an inescapable reality of capitalist economics: companies tend not to pass cost savings from efficiency gains onto consumers…they just sell people more of it. And people mostly go along with it because who doesn’t want a bigger house for the same price as a smaller one 10 years ago or a 75” TV for far less than a 36” TV would have cost 8 years ago or a 1/4-lb burger for the same price as a regular burger a decade ago? (via @mariosundar.bsky.social)
I really like this: “If you think about it, the very best books are really just extremely long spells that turn you into a different person for the rest of your life.” —Jonathan Edward Durham
Watching these expert restorers mend & refresh a pair of vintage Star Wars posters (neither of which features the logo we’re familiar with today and one of which is signed by the designer) is both fascinating and relaxing. It’s like the posters are having a spa day: bit of a soak, a gentle scrub, some light bodywork, and voila, you’re brand new. (via meanwhile)
The largest nuclear weapon ever tested was Tsar Bomba, a 50-megaton device detonated by the Soviet Union in 1961. That made it “3,300 times as powerful” as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — an almost unimaginable level of potential destructive power. But Tsar Bomba wasn’t even close to being the biggest nuclear weapon ever conceived. Meet Project Sundial, courtesy of Edward Teller, one of the inventors of the hydrogen bomb, and his colleagues at Los Alamos:
Only a few months later, in July 1954, Teller made it clear he thought 15 megatons was child’s play. At a secret meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, Teller broached, as he put it, “the possibility of much bigger bangs.” At his Livermore laboratory, he reported, they were working on two new weapon designs, dubbed Gnomon and Sundial. Gnomon would be 1,000 megatons and would be used like a “primary” to set off Sundial, which would be 10,000 megatons.
10,000 megatons. In the video above, Kurzgesagt speculates that exploding a bomb of that size would result in a fireball “up to 50 kilometers in diameter, larger than the visible horizon”, a magnitude 9 earthquake, a noise that can be heard around the entire Earth, a 400 km in which everything is “instantly set on fire – every tree, house, person”, and, eventually, the deaths of most of the Earth’s population.
Sundial would bring about an apocalyptic nuclear winter, where global temperatures suddenly drop by 10°C, most water sources would be contaminated and crops would fail everywhere. Most people in the world would die.
Fun fact: Edward Teller was one of Stanley Kubrick’s inspirations for the bomb-giddy character of Dr. Strangelove in the 1964 film of the same name.
A list of medieval English dog names, including Fyndewell, Sturdy, Plodder, Harmeles, Mercurye, Paris, Achilles, Jeester, Beste-of-all, Pretiboy, and Havegoodday.
This is interesting and somewhat counterintuitive: “Fare-free transit is not an environmental policy. The reason is simple: It doesn’t reduce driving.” People shift trips from walking and biking but drivers keep driving.
In striking aerial images, he captures the massive scale of 21st-century agriculture that has sculpted 40 percent of the Earth’s surface.
He explores the farming of staples like wheat and rice, the cultivation of vegetables and fruits, fishing and aquaculture, and meat production. He surveys traditional farming in diverse cultures, and he penetrates vast agribusinesses that fuel international trade. From Kansas wheat fields to a shrimp cocktail’s origins in India to cattle stations in Australia larger than some countries, Steinmetz tracks the foods we eat back to land and sea, field and factory. He takes us places that most of us never see, although our very lives depend on them.
Tressie McMillan Cottom: “Whether you call it crony capitalism or just an unfair economy, the market sets the rules for which lives matter. We have set up a system of interlocking ninth circles of hell for all of our basic needs.”
I just updated the 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide, including some gifts for people you hate (ugly decanters, Baby Yoda s&p shakers). Years ago, a work colleague received a *turtle* as a wedding gift. What’s the worst gift you’ve ever given or received?
The only catch for pedantic mayonnaise lovers is that the label clarifies that Nomu mayo is a “mayonnaise-style drink” and “not mayonnaise”. Currently in a “test sale period”, it still remains to be seen if Nomu mayo actually appeals to Japanese customers, who are used to the thicker and richer taste of Japanese mayo, as opposed to more Western varieties.
Unrelated, the best idea I ever had for a reality television program was “Uh Oh, It’s Mayo!” The premise being kind of like Cake or Not Cake (though this idea is from 2008) where the host goes around offering people the opportunity to taste different food products with some of them being 100% mayonnaise. It even had a theme song, the tune of which you’ll have to imagine unless you want to text me so I can send you a voice memo of it, but the lyrics are, “What’s in the pie, I don’t know. Uh oh it’s mayo!” Call me, Bravo.
Holiday Terms & Conditions (A Christmas Album). Lyrics include: “It’s beginning to look a lot like lawsuits, everywhere you scroll…” and “I don’t want a lot for Christmas, just my intellectual property rights…”
At an event last month marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, actor Bryan Cranston read a passage from the book (it’s about 13 minutes long):
After some loving jabs at the devotion this book inspires and its notorious length (“There are only 50 chapters…”), Cranston reads from Power Broker’s opening pages. The performance is fun, and Cranston gets an ad-libbed laugh by archly reading “Shea Stadium,” a part of Moses’ legacy that was demolished and replaced in 2009. Cranston’s also reads some of the famous list sections that Caro rattles off in The Power Broker’s opening chapters. The drumbeat of names is Caro’s attempt to contextualize the scale of Moses’ impact, a technique cribbed from The Aeneid.
Racing’s Deadliest Day. After the 1955 Le Mans disaster, “it would be another 40 years before Mercedes got back into racing”. (In the meantime, they pioneered “anti-lock brakes, anti-collision radar systems, and other consumer safety technologies”.)
In the wake of the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, a book published in 2010 by Rutgers Law professor Jay Feinman has hit the bestseller charts: Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It. The book’s title is a reference to an insurance industry strategy of denying legitimate claims to boost profits. Bullet casings at the scene of the shooting referenced the same strategy: they were labelled “deny”, “defend”, and “depose”.
Delay, deny, defend violates the rules for handling claims that are recognized by every company, taught to adjusters, and embodied in law. Within the vast bureaucracy of insurance companies, actuaries assess risks, underwriters price policies and evaluate prospective policyholders, and agents market policies. The claims department’s only job is to pay what is owed, no more but no less. A classic text used to train adjusters, James Markham’s The Claims Environment, states the principle: “The essential function of a claim department is to fulfill the insurance company’s promise, as set forth in the insurance policy… The claim function should ensure the prompt, fair, and efficient delivery of this promise.”
Beginning in the 1990s, many major insurance companies reconsidered this understanding of the claims process. The insight was simple. An insurance company’s greatest expense is what it pays out in claims. If it pays out less in claims, it keeps more in profits. Therefore, the claims department became a profit center rather than the place that kept the company’s promise.
A major step in this shift occurred when Allstate and other companies hired the megaconsulting firm McKinsey & Company to develop new strategies for handling claims. McKinsey saw claims as a “zero-sum game,” with the policyholder and the company competing for the same dollars. No longer would each claim be treated on its merits. Instead, computer systems would be put in place to set the amounts policyholders would be offered, claimants would be deterred from hiring lawyers to help with their claims, and settlements would be offered on a take-it-or-litigate basis. If Allstate moved from “Good Hands” to “Boxing Gloves,” as McKinsey described it, policyholders would either take a lowball offer from the good hands people or face the boxing gloves of extended litigation.
I don’t know about you, but the violence implied by the “Boxing Gloves” metaphor is particularly galling — but also germane to the national conversation we’re currently having about violence, culpability, and who is and isn’t sanctioned by the state to decide who suffers or dies.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has released a pair of visualizations of the phases the Moon will go through in 2025, one for the northern hemisphere above and one for the southern hemisphere below:
Look at that sucker wobble! Each frame of the 4K video represents one hour and there are lots of locations labeled on the map, including the landing sites of the Apollo missions.
But also: How have I never noticed that the Moon is upside-down in the southern hemisphere?! I mean, it makes total sense but I’ve just never noticed or thought it through. 🤯 (via the kid should see this)
If you haven’t had the pleasure, you should double back and read the comments on this post from readers who have noticed things everyone else hasn’t. Not surprised to have gathered a community of extreme noticers.
Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?
Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.
You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the “Gay Minority Female” setting? Hardcore.
The New Rules of Media. “Everything is a personality cult, and maybe just a cult. You have to cultivate your own, no matter how small.” (No thank you.)
Willem Dafoe interviewed by Matt Zoller Seitz. “If you make it about you, you’re limited. You have to make it about other people and go toward that.” Great stuff in here about the ‘why’ of craft.
“ProPublica’s Claim File Helper lets you customize a letter requesting the notes and documents your insurer used when deciding to deny you coverage.” Greatest nation in the world, etc.
As you know, I am passionate about sweet things. All different kinds. So imagine my dismay back in 2017 when I discovered the recipe for Heath Bar Klondike had been changed to remove any trace of Heath Bar bits from the Klondike. It wasn’t just one box of Heathless wonders neither, it was box after box, which I kept buying like some kind of fool. This post has a point past petty dessert-themed grievances, I stg, bear with me. But first, look at this nonsense. (If you want the point, just skip to the last paragraph.)
2017 was a time when Google still worked so I searched to see if anyone else had noticed this change and didn’t find anything. I am not a narcissist, but I can spin a yarn, so the narrative I told myself was I was the only person in the world with the following traits: 1) cares a lot about desserts 2) likes Heath Bar Klondike Bars 3) is stubborn enough to buy a product multiple times after being so wronged and 4) is perceptive enough to notice the lack of Heath Bar bits on the Heath Bar Klondikes.
I did what was customary at the time and complained to Klondike on Twitter. Klondike put me in touch with customer service who insisted my lying eyes hadn’t seen what they saw, and the recipe hadn’t been changed at all. It clearly had because sometime in late 2018, I tried another box and the Heath Bar bits were back. Still not as prevalent as they had been, but back nonetheless.
All this to say at some point, my friend Mike, on the other side of the country, also noticed the lack of bits on his bars and mentioned something about it, which thus made me feel less crazy for noticing it. I was no longer alone.
My most recent example of this phenomenon, is Irish Spring changing the formula in 2022, which many people have mentioned online because the scent changed. I don’t care about any of that, but what does bug me is you used to be able to marry an old bar with a new bar. That is, if you put the sliver of your old bar on to the new bar, it would melt into the new bar. After the formula change this doesn’t happen anymore. You stick the old bar on the new bar and never the twain shall meet. IT DRIVES ME CRAZY.
Anyway, I was wondering if any of y’all have any bugaboos like this where you feel like you’re the only one who knows this is happening. Put it in the comments and feel less alone.
For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website. “It will only become more painfully clear how important sovereign websites are to protecting information and free expression.”
Sanborn maps were designed to help insurance companies assess the fire risk of individual properties. They were highly detailed, showing the size, shape, and construction of buildings, as well as the materials used in their construction. This information was used by insurance companies to calculate the premium that a property owner would have to pay for fire insurance.
They audition all-comers: an uproarious business in which weird randoms show up with a tendency to destroy others by using a flame-thrower or rocket-launcher for no reason at all while the production is being explained to them.
They end up performing the play all over the city, “this is Shakespeare on a billion dollar budget,” not sticking to the amphitheater. The trailer looks great.
Your 2024 Therapy Wrapped. “2024 was a BUMPY ride…and your therapist was right there with you for every maternal microaggression and election-induced tummy ache. Let’s see how your neuroses stacked up…”
This Beautiful Day: Daily Wisdom from Mister Rogers (Bookshop) is exactly what it says on the tin: a book of daily reflections from the writings, stories, and shows of Fred Rogers. I would be chuffed to find this under the tree on Xmas morning.
Just updated the 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide with suggestions from Kottke readers, a surprisingly popular Japanese nail clipper, a bonkers Criterion Collection box set, and a very unique timepiece.
I wonder if, when Bobby Internet invented the internet, he imagined it would be used for videos like this. There’s something so fun about watching people crack up at work. See also SNL actors breaking. They also have fun accents, which I maybe shouldn’t say because kottke.org is worldwide and if you live in Australia, you probably just think the videos are funny without any special notice of the accent.
Anyway, I was watching this and my eight year old saw it over my shoulder and said excitedly, “I’ve seen that!” I thought he was watching mostly Bluey so I asked him what he searched to find this and he said, “Balloon popping videos,” matter of factly, so I guess we’re kind of the same and that’s a perfectly understandable thing for an 8-year-old to be searching for on YouTube. Then we watched a video of these guys throwing things off a Swiss dam.
Coldplay tapped Spike Jonze & Mary Wigmore to direct the music video for a song called All My Love from their latest album and the pair decided to turn it into an early 99th birthday celebration of Dick Van Dyke. Van Dyke danced a bit, sung a bit, was swarmed by his family, and ruminated on nearing the end of his life:
I’m acutely aware that I could go any day now, but I don’t know why it doesn’t concern me. I’m not afraid of it. I have the feeling — totally against anything intellectual I have — that I’m gonna be alright.
The video is really quite moving — what a splendid human. Watch until the end, when Chris Martin composes a song on the spot for an absolutely delighted Van Dyke. (via @danielgray.com)
The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age. “We’ve been cored like apples, a dependency created, hooked on the public internet to tell us the worth. Every notification ping holds the possibility we have merit.”
Oh, this is so good: NASA has an 8-hour cozy fireplace video in 4K that’s actually a rocket engine (in a fireplace).
This glowing mood-setter is brought to you by the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket that launched Artemis I on its mission around the Moon and back on Nov. 16, 2022. 8.8 million pounds of total thrust – and a couple glasses of eggnog – might just be enough to make your holidays merry.
This Instagram account posts the backgrounds of Looney Tunes cartoons with the Looney Tunes characters removed. As @presentcorrect.bsky.social remarks, these images are also a great resource for color palettes.
An unidentified disease (“Disease X”) in the Democratic Republic of Congo has infected 376 people, killed 79 people (mostly children), and “appears to be airborne”. They hope to have an ID by the weekend. This seems bad?
Also, it’s weird/interesting that CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray, LaserDisc, cassettes, MiniDisc, and 8-tracks are all played on devices named for the media (e.g. CD player) but VHS tapes are played on VCRs. We could have easily started calling them “VCR tapes” or “VHS players” en masse, but we mostly collectively stuck to the “correct” terminology. (thx, david)
32 Rules for Flying Now. Like: “This should go without saying, but there’s no reason, ever, to take off your socks on a plane.” And: “Triple-check that your cat didn’t get into your carry-on bag.”
I posted the first pass of the 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide yesterday and just added some new items to it this morning (this link will take you right to the new stuff). I’m gonna be updating it every day or two with new gift guides and things I run across, but I wanted to ask you folks if there’s anything you would recommend for the list. Please leave a comment below! And don’t forget to include links — you can just paste a URL into the comment box and it will autolink it for you. (And comments are editable for 10 minutes, so if you screw it up or forget the link, you have time to fix it.)
If you run an online store or sell products that would be appropriate for holiday gifts, feel free to share your own stuff. (But be reasonable and personable — if you paste a press release into my website, I’m gonna yeet that comment right into the Sun.)
Comments are members-only, but I will also be taking suggestions via email — send them along and I will make sure they are included below. Thanks!
A playlist of the 100 most streamed songs on Spotify. The current #1 is The Weeknd’s Blinding Lights (4.59 billion streams) followed by Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You (4.12B) and Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Love (3.7B). Never even heard of Capaldi!
A 15th century polymath of soaring imagination and profound intellect, Leonardo da Vinci created some of the most revered works of art of all time, but his artistic endeavors often seemed peripheral to his pursuits in science and engineering. Through his paintings and thousands of pages of drawings and writings, Leonardo da Vinci explores one of humankind’s most curious and innovative minds.
The trailer for the series is above and there are several extended clips available on the website and on YouTube.
Jesus, this story about an IVF clinic mix-up… “Two couples in California discovered they were raising each other’s genetic children. Should they switch their girls?”
Since 2013, I’ve done a holiday gift guide that’s basically a curated roundup of stuff from the best gift guides I can find. I always do it a little bit differently from year to year, and this year I’m going with a simple list. It’s gonna be dense…let’s go!
3. You can give the gift of Kottke! *cringe* There’s The Kottke Hypertext Tee and The Process Tee in light & dark colors. There are kottke.org gift memberships as well starting at $30/yr; check the FAQ on the membership page for more options and details.
5.Twelve South AirFly Duo is a Bluetooth transmitter that you can plug into the jack on your seatback TV on the airplane and then use your Bluetooth headphones to listen to your movie. I have one of these; it works great. Apple AirTags are essential travel infrastructure these days. Oooh, there’s a new addition to the Sushi Go! family of games: Spin Some for Dim Sum. I reget to admit I am a tiny bit curious about Meta’s Ray-Ban Smart Glasses. [via The Verge’s 2024 holiday gift guide]
6. You know her, you love her: Edith Zimmerman. Her Etsy shop is chock full of prints, cards, and even original watercolor paintings. Go get ‘em.
10. Uniqlo’s HEATTECH Ultra Warm T-Shirt is one of the warmest and comfiest shirts I’ve ever owned. I picked one up when I was in NYC a couple of months ago and I loved it so much I just ordered two more the other day. On sale right now for $20! Men’s. Women’s.
14.{I asked Edith for a gift suggestion and here’s what she sent me. Thanks, Edith! -j} I’d like to recommend these cute, fleece-lined “Antura” baby booties from Reima. I felt a little silly getting them for my first daughter (surely there’s a hand-me-down option?), but they’re still going strong on baby no. 2, they stay put, we get compliments wherever we go, and they work well, warmth-wise. They don’t seem to be available in the “Cinnamon” color I ordered in 2022, but Red Violet and Navy are great, too.
16. My friends at Colossal recently-ish reopened their shop and I love these Cyanometer Postcards (for measuring the blueness of the sky and the orangeness of the sunset). [via The Colossal Gift Guide]
20. My daughter got me this jar of truffle butter as a gift last year and it’s so good (and it lasts forever in the fridge). Perfect for putting into white, creamy pasta sauces or as a finishing element for a grilled cheese. (Also I just learned you can buy white truffles on Amazon but I wouldn’t?)
24. I love this one: gift audiobooks from Libro.fm. “You choose the credit bundle, your gift recipient picks their own audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase!” Two credits (for two books) for $30, 3 for $45, 6 for $90, etc.
26. Pal Robin Sloan and his partner Kathryn Tomajan run a tiny olive oil producer called Fat Gold. This year they’re offering a Super Fresh Gift Set of olive oil produced just a few months ago. I can also recommend Sloan’s latest novel, Moonbound (Bookshop) — I’m eagerly awaiting the second installment. [via Robin’s 2024 gift guide]
30. Also Verbatim from last year: Let’s destigmatize the gift card: there is no shame in not knowing what to get someone for a gift, even if you know them really well. This is actually the gift of getting someone exactly what they want. There’s the obvious Amazon gift card but you can also get cards for Apple (use it for Fitness+ or Apple TV+?), Audible, Fortnite, Snapchat, Airbnb, Disney+, Spotify, Netflix, and Roblox.
34. Thing that I want: Insta360 GO 3S. It’s a teeny 4K camera that you can magnet-attach to your shirt and record yourself, say, downhilling on your mountain bike.
38. Surprisingly popular item from last year’s gift guide: this Japanese nail clipper. (This tracks because when you finally adult up and buy a quality nail clipper, the shame you feel at wasting so much time on a shitty nail clipper is real.)
This is a living document — I’ll be updating this list with more stuff over the next few days, and I’ll let you know when to check back! To be continued…
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Bloomberg Businessweek’s Jealousy List for 2024, “We’ve asked our editors & contributors to identify that one story in 2024 that filled them with the kind of indescribable resentment that theologians once thought was a dangerous gateway to other sins.”
It is difficult to categorize the kinds of videos that Posy makes — they are part science demo and part visual art. His latest video, Household Objects (But Extremely Close), uses a powerful macro lens to look at everyday objects like toothbrushes, sponges, and pencils, turning them into swirling abstract films. His music is lovely too — you can find it on Bandcamp.
How to Win Connect 4 Every Time. “Ever thought Connect 4 was a simple game of luck and chance? I will explain why Connect 4 is way harder than you think.”
In this clip from my favorite Werner Herzog film, Encounters at the End of the World, the director muses about the mental health of penguins and observes a lone penguin heading in the wrong direction. From an appreciation of this penguin scene written by Tim Cooke for Little White Lies:
Herzog proceeds to explain that the penguin will not go to the feeding grounds at the edge of the ice, nor will he return to the colony; instead he heads straight for the mountains, “some 70 kilometres away”. Catching him and bringing him back will make no difference — he’ll simply turn around and head again for the interior. “But why?” Herzog asks. We then see footage of another of these “deranged” penguins, 80 kilometres off course, sliding on its belly towards certain death. These shots of the solitary birds marching to their demise, mere black dots against the white expanse, are perfect in their portrayal of loneliness and desolation.
The scene, then, is a splendid tragicomedy, serving as a sour antidote to the fluffy charm of films like the The March of the Penguins, which arrived two years earlier. It’s a play within a play; masterfully constructed, it delivers a hefty emotional blow. It’s in this construction, and self-reflexive style, that truth and revelation can be found — Herzog’s ecstatic truth, that is. The natural world, as we learnt from the horrors of Grizzly Man, is not easily compared with ours. The structures we adopt for our stories — be they tragic, romantic or comedic — do not fit nature quite so tightly, and Herzog knows this. Any facts about the penguins’ motivations and thought processes remain unobtainable. We view the narrative as the filmmaker builds it: through an exclusively human lens.
I just spent my lunch hour watching the 22 nominated goals for the 2024 Puskas & Marta Awards, given to the most spectacular goals scored by men’s & women’s footballers last season.
On Standby is a piece of sound art “based on data collected by seven different people in Malmö, Sweden. Each of those people used a smart plug to collect data on the energy consumption of a device in their home over the course of a single night”.
Maybe you’d like to read Patricia Lockwood on the X-Files? “So then the show becomes about something else, something deep and dark as water, it is carried rapidly past all other unsolved mysteries to ask: what if a woman were irreplaceable?”
There’s an assumption that because of the relationship between metabolic rates, volume, and surface area, animals get an average of one billion heartbeats out of their bodies before they expire. Turns out there’s some truth to it.
As animals get bigger, from tiny shrew to huge blue whale, pulse rates slow down and life spans stretch out longer, conspiring so that the number of heartbeats during an average stay on Earth tends to be roughly the same, around a billion.
Mysteriously, these and a large variety of other phenomena change with body size according to a precise mathematical principle called “quarter-power scaling”.
It might seem that because a cat is a hundred times more massive than a mouse, its metabolic rate, the intensity with which it burns energy, would be a hundred times greater. After all, the cat has a hundred times more cells to feed.
But if this were so, the animal would quickly be consumed by a fit of spontaneous feline combustion, or at least a very bad fever. The reason: the surface area a creature uses to dissipate the heat of the metabolic fires does not grow as fast as its body mass.
To see this, consider a mouse as an approximation of a small sphere. As the sphere grows larger, to cat size, the surface area increases along two dimensions but the volume increases along three dimensions. The size of the biological radiator cannot possibly keep up with the size of the metabolic engine.
Humans and chickens are both outliers in this respect…they both live more than twice as long as their heart rates would indicate. Small dogs live about half as long.
Icelandic photographer Haukur Sigurdsson captured this aerial image of Nordic skiers looking like musical notes on a staff. Someone on YouTube played the tune:
My friend Youngna is a wonderful writer and observer and I loved these vignettes about “how kids understand power, social dynamics, hierarchy, control, and influence, all topics that swirl around whose voices are dominant voices in our world”.
When a Telescope Is a National-Security Risk. The Vera Rubin Observatory is a new telescope that the US built in Chile and they had to jump through some hoops to ensure it’s not going to see anything top secret (like US spy satellites).
A Japanese group called Electronicos Fantasticos! figured out that by connecting a supermarket barcode scanner to a powered speaker and rhythmically scanning barcode-like patterns with it, you can make music. This is so fun!
Madeleine Riffaud, hero of the French Resistance, has died at the age of 100. “The essential was not to give in. When you resisted, you were already a victor. You had already won.”
9. Medellin in Colombia has cut urban temperatures by 2°C in three years by planting trees. [Peter Yeung]
14. In early 1980s San Francisco, several seat-slashing gangs operated on the BART transit system, deliberately generating extra fees and overtime payments for repairs. They’d use specific cutting patterns so the repair teams would know who to pay for the favour. [Dianne de Guzman, via Russell Davies]
24. If you drop a normal hair dryer into a fish tank full of tap water, it will carry on working, gently warming up the water. (NB Please do not try this.) [JD Stillwater]
38. Between 1926 and 1934, the average life-span of a light bulb fell from 1,800 hours to 1,200 hours, because a global cartel of lightbulb manufacturers fined anyone who made a longer-lasting bulb. [Markus Krajewski]
49. To avoid radio jamming, some Russian drones in Ukraine now trail a 10km long spool of super fine fibre optic cable behind them for steering and communication. [David Hambling]
Best TV Shows of 2024. Shogun, My Brilliant Friend, The Day of the Jackal, and What We Do in the Shadows all make the list. (Shogun would be my top pick.)
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