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Entries for May 2025
Every TV News Report On the Economy
From Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, here’s how every single news report on the economy plays out:
Dennis and Pamela People are affected by numbers, and since they have a child, you’ll empathize with what they say while I nod in their direction.
“Well, it’s been hard because of the numbers.”
“Yeah, it has been hard, mainly because of the numbers.”
Brooker, you may remember, is the creator of Black Mirror.
Some advice from Old Man Kottke: if you need readers, get some with good lenses. I had some cheapo ones that gave me eye strain, so I ordered these from Caddis and they’re like 100 times better.
“When does a kid become an adult?” Boy oh boy, this question has manifested in so many ways in our family over the past year (my son turns 18 soon, is off to college in the fall, and is both super smart/capable *and* wildly clueless).
Chicago Sun-Times Prints AI-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don’t Exist. Just straight-up hallucinated books by the likes of Percival Everett & Andy Weir. The writer: “I’m completely embarrassed.”
Magnus Carlsen played a game of freestyle chess against 143,000 people (who voted on what moves to make) and was forced into a draw. I’m surprised at the outcome…I didn’t think the wisdom of the crowds would work in a situation like this.
Biking Is Therapy
Derek Bolz made a video about what biking does for his mental health. A partial transcript (boldface mine):
Life has been rough lately. I don’t want to air my dirty laundry on the internet, so I won’t go into detail. But for a number of reasons, I am quite stressed out, maybe more than I’ve ever been before. To put it simply: everything is not ok.
But then, suddenly, everything is ok. My hands are on the bars, my feet are on the pedals, the wind is in my face, my mind is clear. All I have to do is clear that jump, rip around that corner, clear that other jump, land that trick, hold that manual, hold that wheelie, hold on for dear life, pedal harder and harder and harder.
That is the beauty of biking. It demands so much of your attention that you have no option but to live in the present. There’s no time to worry. It’s like meditation while moving. And then you always feel a bit better after.
This is one of the reasons I’ve fallen in love with mountain biking over the past few years — riding is so all-encompassing that it forces me out of whatever past or future crisis is occupying my thoughts and into thinking no more than a second or two into the future. And moving through physical space feels like you’re making progress, which is amazing when you’re feeling stuck in the rest of your life.
Depending on the trail, if I lose concentration for a second while biking, I might get seriously injured or die. As someone who has never been into extreme sports, I have no idea why I decided being on the edge of death is fun and stress-relieving, but it is. 🤷♂️
Mountain biking isn’t for everyone — I know others get a similar sense of presence and focus from running, skiing, throwing pots, woodworking, photography, walking, surfing, writing, knitting, meditation, gardening, painting, reading, and the list goes on and on. I feel lucky to have found my thing and would love to hear if you’ve found yours. (via @mmilan)
White House officials wanted to put federal workers ‘in trauma.’ It’s working. “Federal workers describe struggling with panic attacks, depression, suicidal thoughts.” Once again, the cruelty is the point.
I Didn’t Know You Could Make Interactive YouTube Videos
Lagarto Films is a film collective based in Puerto Rico that makes interactive YouTube videos and games. This is pretty clever actually…they use keyboard shortcuts to skip to different parts of the video, Choose Your Own Adventure style. So you can play a game of Uno:
Or direct the action in a short cops & robbers film:
Play Grand Theft Auto in real life:
There are many more of their interactive videos in this playlist. (thx, ollie)
What the Comfort Class Doesn’t Get. “Nearly every aspect of society has been designed by people unfamiliar with not only the experience of living in poverty but the experience of living paycheck to paycheck.”
Fairy Pools is an excerpt from Patricia Lockwood’s upcoming novel, Will There Ever Be Another You. “Arugula, she thought. I’m going to die alone in a Scottish castle because people have gotten too good for iceberg lettuce.”
NYC Restaurant Interior or Black & White Drawing?
Whoa, look at the interior of this new Japanese restaurant in NYC called Shirokuro — all of the surfaces (floors, chairs, walls, counters, etc.) are painted to look like a 2-dimensional drawing. From Colossal:
“Shirokuro” translates to “white-black.” The New York Times shares that proprietor James Lim was inspired by an immersive, 2D restaurant he visited ten years ago in Korea, and he envisioned one of his own, now open in the East Village. To make the interior pop, he invited his friend, real estate agent and artist Mirim Yoo, to transform the space into an all-encompassing environment.
Here’s what it looks like with people and other non-b&w objects:
This reminds me of Alexa Meade’s work — it would be amazing to see a collab where Meade does up the servers (or guests) for a performance piece.
P.S. I want these 2-D Nikes. (via colossal)
The Unbreaking team is starting to publish “clear and rigorously cited explanations of what’s happening to our government and why it matters”. Their first three are on Medicaid, Transgender Healthcare, and Equality at Work.
Ed Smylie, Who Saved the Apollo 13 Crew With Duct Tape, Dies at 95. “He and about 60 other engineers had less than two days to invent a solution using materials already onboard the spacecraft.”
NASA engineers fixed some thrusters on Voyager 1 from 15 billion miles (almost 1 light-day) away. They’d been broken for 20+ years and the fix was tricky. “If the heaters were still off when they fired, it could trigger a small explosion…” Amazing.
Justice Sotomayor’s Message to Lawyers: Stand Up, Fight and Win. “Those on the high court often exercise caution in their choice of words. That’s why it was striking when she [delivered] a stern message to the legal profession: stand up for democracy…”
Fastest Rubik’s Cube Solve Ever
A group of three students at Purdue University have shattered the world record for the fastest Rubik’s Cube solve by robot — their bot solved the cube in just 0.103 seconds (103 milliseconds). As a comparison, the former record was 305 milliseconds and “a human blink takes about 200 to 300 milliseconds”. As one of the students said, “So, before you even realize it’s moving, we’ve solved it.”
The world record for a human solve is 3.13 seconds by Max Park in 2023 (not anymore, see comments. (via we’re here
“The bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema — and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong.” (I was slack-jawed by the end of this.)
Yes, the Media’s Biden Coverage Was Flawed. But Its Reporting on Trump Was Far Worse. “Despite wishful thinking, there’s no such thing as ‘just the facts’ or complete neutrality, because editorial decisions and reporting choices always matter.”
Colin Jost & Michael Che give each other jokes to tell on SNL’s Weekend Update. Humans don’t have gaskets but I nearly popped something gasket-like while watching this I was laughing so hard. (Seriously, there was actual chest pain.)
Netflix has picked up Sesame Street after HBO/Max/HBO Max/LOL Max cancelled their financial support of the show.
Congratulations to Amazon on Its Partnership With the Saudi Prince Who Murdered Jeff Bezos’ Employee and Hacked His Phone. A profile in rapacity & cowardice.
Some Recent Tweaks (and Post Faving!)
Hey folks. I’ve been plugging away behind the scenes on some new features and while some of them aren’t ready to go yet, others are. I don’t know if Sunday evening is the best time to do this, but here’s what’s new on the site:
1. Faving posts. For the past several months, KDO members have been able to fave comments in threads and it’s been working well. The feature allows people to applaud/reward good comments, keep track of comments that they particularly like, and, in aggregate, participate in showing the community as a whole which comments are especially popular or meaningful.
Now I’ve extended that capability to posts; members will find a fave button attached to every post on the site. The number of faves a post has will appear next to the fave button. I went around and around on whether to display fave counts or to figure out some alternative way to indicate the popularity of a post, but I settled on just displaying them because it’s easy and everyone understands that if number is big, post is more popular/beloved. (I also went back and forth a jillion times about whether to do faves with stars, faves with hearts, or likes with hearts. Faves with stars felt right because it’s old school. You can tell me I’m wrong in the comments.)
Like I said when I launched the comment faves, there isn’t a limit to the number of posts 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 posts.
Still to do: I’m working on making it so you can see a list of posts you’ve faved and a list of the most-faved posts on the site. And there are other things that can be done with the faves…it’ll take some time to figure out what those are.
Again, this feature is only for members. A few people have been testing this with me for a few months and I’m excited to open it up to members.
2. The main content area is now wider on non-mobile browsers. When I launched the most recent design in March 2024, I said I wanted the site to feel like a contemporary version of an old school blog, which meant a more compact design. For many posts, this works well but the more visual posts — with embedded art, photos, illustrations, and videos — didn’t look as good as they could have. Hopefully the wider content area gives them more room to breathe.
3. Along with that, I made some tweaks to the sidebar: decreased the menu font sizes, decreased the width, and tweaked the design of the logged-in user view (which I’m still not entirely happy with, but we’re gonna go with it and see).
4. For non-mobile browsers, clicking play on embedded videos in posts will now open up the video in a lightboxed player the width of the browser window. If that doesn’t make sense, just give it a try with one of the internet’s favorite videos, Tom Holland lip-syncing to Umbrella:
I’ve had this feature enabled for myself for a few months and I love it — it’s a much better viewing experience than in KDO’s narrow column or on YouTube or Vimeo. And if you do want to click through and watch it on the original site, it’s only one extra click. I’ve also been making sure I put a link to the video in the text of the post so that it’s easy to get to that way. (I suspect some of you are going to hate this feature because it overrides the expected behavior of the video click. But I genuinely believe it’s better for watching videos! Like, this isn’t some weird tactic to keep people on the site — please, go to YouTube if you want, delete your KDO bookmark, shut your computer down, throw your phone in the ocean, walk into the forest, you’re the internet now, you’re free! In other words, give the lightboxed videos a chance?)
(Reminder: clicking on images in non-Quick Link posts will open them in a lightbox as well. I love this feature too.)
Ok, I think that’s all for now. As always, let me know in the comments below (or via email) if you have any questions, feedback, or concerns.
The Internet Phone Book is “an annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web, featuring essays, musings and a directory with the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators.”
I Like Good Art and I Cannot Lie
I was reminded the other day of what a curated treasure trove of art 20x200 is. So I took a spin through their archive and pulled out some favorites. First up are these Always Choose Happy prints from Amos Kennedy (I also like his Book Lovers Never Go to Bed Alone prints):
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this solar eclipse photo from Carleton Watkins before. Wow:
Taken on July 29, 1878, Solar Eclipse by canonized landscape photographer Carleton Watkins powerfully, elegantly captures the exact moment the moon completely blocked the sun and cast a surreal shadow over the Earth. Watkins, known for his pioneering work depicting the American West, used this rare event as an opportunity to simultaneously experiment with photographic techniques and record a celestial occurrence. The piece’s resulting artistic and technical achievement is as sublime and awe-inspiring as the eclipse itself. It’s stunning that then, as now, eclipses humble us all by reminding us of our smallness in a vast and fascinatingly ordered universe.
Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii was a pioneer in color photography; he documented his native Russia in color from 1904 to 1915. Here’s his photograph of some flowers (lilacs? hydrangeas?):
We all might need some Rest right now:
I love the photographic work of Gordon Parks; this one is called Camp Fern Rock (archer):
If you’ve lived in NYC for any length of time, you can’t help but be a little bit curious and charmed by the now-abandoned City Hall subway station:
They also have a bunch of stuff from Jason Polan, this amazing eye test chart, prints of several works by Hilma af Klint, and the The Marvelous Mississippi River Meander Maps.
A series of videos by Toby Hendy where she explains the PhD theses of Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, and others.
The Good Luck Fish
The Public Domain Review has published some lovely illustrations of goldfish from a 1780 monograph called Histoire naturelle des dorades de la Chine.
Histoire naturelle des dorades de la Chine (1780) — the dorades in the title refers not to sea bream but the fish’s gilded appearance — was the first monograph on goldfish published in Europe, from a time when the fish were still bound up with Eastern exoticism in the Western imagination.
You can peruse the entire document at the Internet Archive.
George Orwell’s 11 rules for a nice cup of tea. “I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes.”
Photos of the Inside of a Particle Accelerator
I’ve posted before about Charles Brooks’ fantastic series of photographs of the insides of musical instruments. Recently, Brooks had the opportunity to apply his technique to capture the innards of a particle accelerator.
Despite being a scientific instrument, it behaves a lot like a musical instrument. Electrons pulse through this tunnel in tight, synchronized waves. The powerful magnets above and below make them undulate — just like the vibrating string of a fine cello — creating an intense X-ray beam used to probe hidden structures of our world.
As part of the project, accelerator physicist Eugene Tan converted the pulsing of the electrons in the chamber into sound, “letting us hear the movement of electrons at nearly the speed of light”.
Petapixel has a lot more on how this image was captured.
“This was an instant yes for me,” Brooks tells PetaPixel. “It ticked so many boxes: I’m always drawn to photographing hidden or complex spaces, and this was one of the most intricate objects I could possibly shoot.”
(via colossal)
International students studying in the US were asked about the chilling effects of the Trump regime’s actions on their freedom of speech and movement. “Others said they now avoid speaking in public about divisive issues or participating in protests…”
High-School Runner Rips GOP State Rep. for Anti-Trans Comments
Trans athlete Soren Stark-Chessa finished first in the 1600-meter race at a recent track meet in Maine. Republican state representative Laurel Libby complained about Stark-Chessa’s win on a Fox News appearance, saying that trans athletes are “pushing many, many of our young women out of the way in their ascent to the podium”.
Freshman Anelise Feldman finished second to Stark-Chessa in that race and wrote a letter to the newspaper (archive) calling Libby a bully and asserting that she didn’t feel pushed out of first place. Here’s her letter:
Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, recently used my second-place finish in the 1,600-meter run, and that of my teammate in the 800-meter run, to malign Soren Stark-Chessa, the trans-identified athlete who finished first.
One of the reasons I chose to run cross-country and track is the community: Teammates cheering each other on, athletes from different schools coming together, and the fact that personal improvement is valued as much as, if not more than, the place we finish.
Last Friday, I ran the fastest 1,600-meter race I have ever run in middle school or high school track and earned varsity status by my school’s standards. I am extremely proud of the effort I put into the race and the time that I achieved. The fact that someone else finished in front of me didn’t diminish the happiness I felt after finishing that race. I don’t feel like first place was taken from me. Instead, I feel like a happy day was turned ugly by a bully who is using children to make political points.
We are all just kids trying to make our way through high school. Participating in sports is the highlight of high school for some kids. No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies, like Rep. Libby, who want to take sports away from some kids just because of who they are.
Anelise Feldman
Freshman, Yarmouth High School
Yarmouth
Octavia Butler’s Advice on Writing. “Write, every day, whether you like it or not. Screw inspiration.”
A Roundup of Things Wearing Other Things
We all recall the revelation last year that the ocean’s rebellious teenagers, orcas, have started wearing salmon on their heads. Again. (The official state animal of Connecticut is the sperm whale, which is wholly unrelated to this post, except insofar as whales were just mentioned in the previous sentence. It’s only I just learned this fact 5 weeks ago and can’t stop shoehorning it into every conversation.) And then the recent discovery of the carnivorous caterpillars crawling around spider webs wearing the desiccated carcasses of other bugs either as a defense or disguise, or because they think it looks really cool and who are you to say otherwise.
More recently, scientists announced a new discovery about the parasite Entamoeba histolytica which kills 50K-100K people a year by going through their colon to attack their liver before moving on to their brains and lungs. This parasite wears pieces of dead human cells to evade the body’s immune system, making it difficult for us to fight an invasion.
In 2022, Ralston discovered a major reason behind the parasite’s tenacity: the amoeba develops an ability to evade a crucial part of the human immune system known as complement proteins. These proteins are vital to identifying and eradicating foreign cells. To escape them, E. histolytica ingests specific proteins from human cell outer membranes, then places those proteins on its own outer surface. Two of those molecules block those important compliment proteins from attaching themselves and fighting back. Essentially, E. histolytica wears chunks of human cells as a disguise against its host’s immune system.
Further, gorillas and orangutans have inconclusively been seen wearing leaves in the rain, pom pom crabs carry sea anemone everywhere, dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia carry sea sponges around in their mouths, and, well, decorator crabs.
What It’s Like to Be a Professional Card Counter. “Suddenly, I get a tap on the shoulder from security telling me that they don’t want my business anymore.”
Typically interesting thoughts about AI from Neal Stephenson. “I see parallels between these and the hydrogen bomb tests that were conducted in your back yard during the 1950s.”
Future Ruins is a one-day music festival featuring film and TV composers like Ben Salisbury, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Isobel Waller-Bridge, and Mark Mothersbaugh. Nov 8 in LA.
Color Photography of Paris From 1914
Albert Kahn sent photographers all over the world in the early 1900s and amassed over 72,000 color photos in the process. Here are a few shots of his from Paris on the eve of World War I.
That photo is of the entrance to the Passage du Caire at the corner of Rue d’Alexandrie and Rue Sainte-Foy in the 2nd arrondissement. Here’s what it looks like today:
U.S. Military Bans Men With Girl Names From Combat. “Suppose your special forces team is parachuting into hostile territory. Can you really order someone named Ashley to jump out of a plane? It defies common sense.”
The true story of how a deep-cover KGB spy living in the US recruited his son. “I am not who you think I am. I am not a German, and I’m not called Rudi. I am a Czech man named Dalibor Valoušek, and I work for the Soviet Union, for the KGB.”
Power Houses, a photographic look “inside the living rooms of notable New Yorkers”. Incl. Spike Lee, Colson Whitehead, Ella Emhoff, Huma Abedin, Martin Scorsese, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Maya Lin.
A Longevity Expert’s 5 Tips for Aging Well, e.g. strength training, better sleep, pay attention to mental health. (Having money helps w/ all this.) And 100%: “If they’re hawking a supplement. I would kick them off the list of being credible.”
“British researchers have discovered that a ‘copy’ of Magna Carta owned by Harvard Law School is in fact an extraordinarily rare original from 1300.” Harvard bought it for $27.50 — it’s likely worth $10s of millions.
Astronaut Don Pettit’s Marvelous Photos From Space
The NY Times has a nice feature on NASA astronaut Don Pettit’s photography from his latest stay in space, a 220-day mission aboard the ISS.
Now, you know I like a good astronomical image (like the one above of an ISS sunrise), but the thing that really caught my eye was the video of Pettit’s experiment involving charged water droplets and a teflon needle:
I could watch that allllll day long.
More Pettit: Swirling Green Aurora Captured From the ISS.
10,000 Drum Machines is a growing collection of web-based drum machines. I like the Extremely Long-Term Drum Machine (“20 bass drums a millennium”).
Nine Rules for Evaluating New Technology
In 1987, Wendell Berry wrote an essay called Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer. In it, he outlined his standards for adopting new technology in his work.
- The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
- It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
- It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
- It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
- If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
- It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
- It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
- It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
- It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.
The whole essay is worth a read, especially now as contemporary society is struggling to evaluate and find the proper balance for technologies like social media, smartphones, and LLMs. (via the honest broker)
The End of Rule of Law in America. “After these first three tyrannical, lawless months of this presidency, surely Americans can understand now that Donald Trump is going to continue to decimate America for the next three-plus years.”
Three Fascism Experts on Why They’re Leaving the US
At the end of March, I posted some news about three prominent scholars of fascism and authoritarianism who were leaving the United States to live and work in Canada. In this video for the NY Times, We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S., Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley explain their reasons for going. Here’s some of what they had to say:
I’m leaving to the University of Toronto because I want to do my work without the fear that I will be punished for my words.
The lesson of 1933 is you get out sooner rather than later.
My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, “We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.” And I thought my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship. Our ship can’t sink. And what you know is a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.
I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency.
Toni Morrison warned us: “The descent into a final solution is not a jump. It’s one step. And then another. And then another.” We are seeing those steps accelerated right now.
When the world is going to shit, people need music; they need to dance. Especially those whose communities are under attack and who feel unsafe. See also Sinners. (That scene! You know the one…)
How to Sniff Out ‘Copaganda’: When the Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. “The selective curation of anecdote is an essential mechanism of copaganda.”
Lololol: Max is changing its name back to HBO Max. It’s a real golden age of rich people revealing how not that smart they are. And now some more laughing: hahahaha.
It’s Interesting How the Past Can Make You Think About the Present. Hamilton Nolan reads a book about the beginning of WWII and “found over and over again that certain entries would vividly remind me of things happening today”.
Alchemists rejoice! Scientists have turned lead into gold using the Large Hadron Collider. “The ALICE scientists calculate that, while they are colliding beams of lead nuclei, they produce about 89,000 gold nuclei per second.”
New Report Finds Vacationing Sources Habla Un Poquito De Español. “We discovered that the sample population was eager to approach locals and strike up conversations about la comida, la playa, y las chicas bonitas.”
What I Learned at My First Tree-Climbing Workshop. “For many, climbing also rekindled a connection to the natural world. ‘It reconnected me with nature in a way that I haven’t really felt since I was a kid.’”
Forget Psychedelics. Everyone’s Microdosing Ozempic Now. (In Hollywood, at least.) “They are doing it not primarily for weight loss…but for the surprising and widely touted side benefits, particularly its anti-inflammatory properties.”
“ICE has become Trump’s private militia. It must be abolished.” Reminder: ICE was formed in 2003 by the Homeland Security Act, which was criticized at the time for enabling exactly these kinds of abuses.
Eminem’s Lose Yourself, Sung by 331 Movies
This video feels like a throwback to a simpler time on YouTube: 331 film clips edited together to recreate Eminem’s Lose Yourself. A particularly well-done example of a time-worn genre. I lol’d at “let it go!!”
A Young Readers Edition of Ed Yong’s award-winning An Immense World is out today. “Did you know that there are turtles who can track the Earth’s magnetic fields? That some fish use electricity to talk to each other?”
I somehow missed this: after a federal judge in VT ordered her freed from a Louisiana detention center, Tufts PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk was released later that day. 🙏
Scientist Kseniia Petrova came to US to study aging. In Feb, she was detained for a minor offense, had her visa revoked, and has spent 3 months in a detention center in Louisiana. She just wants to get back to her work.
How Trump’s Anti-Trans Policies Mirror the WWII Persecution of Japanese Americans. “Of the 120,000 people of Japanese descent whom our government sent to American concentration camps, approximately two-thirds were fellow citizens.”
“Boredom: the great engine of creativity. I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom — without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells.”
In Poland, We Know All About Fighting Illiberal Regimes. Here Are Our Lessons for the Trump Age. “Diversity matters most. Not just in communication tools, but in the social makeup of the protest movement.”
I am cautiously optimistic about F1. (The Brad Pitt movie — there’s a full trailer out today.)
The Three Types of Specialists Needed for Any Revolution
From a passage of Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard, the three types of specialists needed for the success of any revolution.
Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be.
The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.
The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius — a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. “A genius working alone,” he says, “is invariably ignored as a lunatic.”
The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. “A person like this working alone,” says Slazinger, “can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be.”
The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. “He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting,” says Slazinger. “Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.”
Slazinger, high as a kite, says that every successful revolution, including Abstract Expressionism, the one I took part in, had that cast of characters at the top — Pollock being the genius in our case, Lenin being the one in Russia’s, Christ being the one in Christianity’s.
He says that if you can’t get a cast like that together, you can forget changing anything in a great big way.
(via @moleitau)
In Shanghai, “a new crowd-sourced transit platform allows riders to propose, vote on, and activate new bus lines in as little as three days”.
The Trumpist assault on the federal government is a “civil war by other means”, says Rebecca Solnit. “It is a war against the government of the United States and the land and people of this country.”
“The Trump administration’s policy ideas to incentivize women to have more kids resemble those pushed by authoritarian regimes throughout history.”
On Male Social Isolation
I thought this whole Tumblr post by @skaldish was fascinating. The author is a trans man1 who has experienced social situations presenting as both a woman and a man.
There’s a huge sense of social isolation that comes with being perceived as male, because now people are subconsciously treating me as a potential predator. All strangers, no matter their gender, keep their guard up around me.
It made me realize that there is no inherent camaraderie in male socialization as there is in female socialization — unless, of course, it’s in very specific environments. And the fact I don’t ambiently experience this mutual kinship in basic exchanges anymore is an insanely lonely feeling.
You know how badly this would have fucked my mind up if I had grown up with this?
And then later:
When I’m out in public and interact with women, all of them come off as incredibly aloof, cold, and mirthless. I have never experienced this before even though I know exactly what this composure is — the armor that keeps away creepy-ass men.
As someone who used to wear it myself, I know this armor is 100% impersonal. Nobody likes wearing it, and I can say with absolute certainty that women would dump the armor in favor of unconditional companionship with men if doing this didn’t run the risk of actual assault. (Trust me when I say women aren’t just being needlessly guarded.)
But I only have a complete understanding of this context because I’ve experienced female socialization. If I hadn’t, I would’ve thought this coldness was a conspiracy against me devised by roughly half of the human population. Even now, with all that I know about navigating the world as a woman, I’m failing to convince my monkey-brain that this armor isn’t social rejection.
I found this via @danximenes.bsky.social (via someone else I don’t remember, sorry!) and the conversation in the thread is interesting as well.
- From the context (“the culture shock I’m going through”, etc.), it sounds like he was newly out as trans when he wrote this.↩
OMG! The universe is going to decay into nothingness 10^1022 times sooner than previously expected. Carpe diem, everyone!
Enjoying the Lane 8 Spring 2025 Mixtape this afternoon.
This is a little bit genius: an analysis of OpenAI based on a close reading of a 22-second video of CEO Sam Altman cooking pasta. “His kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste.”
Here Is Everything That Has Changed Since Congestion Pricing Started in New York. Uniformly positive results clear from the data after just a few months. And millions raised for public transit. A scandal this didn’t happen sooner.
Jimmy Carter for The Onion: You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got To Be President. “Maybe I’m just a sucker. Apparently, all I needed to do was hand off control of the farm to my family.”
4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere. “Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government.”
A streaming music translator: I Don’t Have Spotify. Paste a share link from Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer or SoundCloud and get links to that music on the other platforms.
A Real Life Version of Wallace & Gromit’s Breakfast Machine
I love me some Wallace & Gromit and so I was delighted to see that this guy made a real life version of Wallace & Gromit’s breakfast machine, complete with a spoonful of jam flying through the air perfectly meeting a piece of toast popping out of a toaster.
It starts with this crazy part here, where he falls out of bed into a pair of trousers, landing in a chair, and then his sleeves go on, and the vest. And then, probably the hardest part of all, is throwing jam — through the air — and hitting toast — in the air — perfectly. Some of these stunts are going to be the most challenging things I’ve ever attempted.
Cracking toast, Gromit! (via the kid should see this)
The help desk at Auburn University is still answering questions from the public via telephone. “The rules are these: Be as polite as possible, end the call if the question is offensive, don’t answer anything that sounds like a homework question…”
I’d never seen this before: a thief does some stretches in the parking lot before robbing a Dunkin Donuts. Warming up is important for peak performance!
A Visual Celebration of Miyazaki’s Weird Little Guys
A few weeks ago, I posted about the hundreds of stills from their animated movies that Studio Ghibli has made available for free download. Since I’m a big fan of the weird little guys director Hayao Miyazaki loves to put in his films (e.g. the kodama in Princess Mononoke1 and Spirited Away’s soot sprites), I thought it would be cool to pull some images from the Ghibli archive featuring these lovable little freaks.
And an honorable mention to this frame from Porco Rosso:
The weird little guys category generally doesn’t apply to humans, but this image of little kids crawling all over a pig man’s airplane certainly classifies as an unusual swarm.
- I bought a shirt with a kodama on it after seeing Princess Mononoke in 1999. At some point, I got rid of the shirt — why the hell did I do that?! It was very close to this shirt on Etsy selling for $288…the collar/sleeve color was a dark blue or black on mine.↩
Bess Kalb: Hooray for Pills. “I hope you shut out the simplistic, reductive, anti-science voices like RFK’s who tell us that pills are bad, and suffering is good.” Co-sign!
How to Be a Grown Up: The 14 Essential Skills You Didn’t Know You Needed. I saw this in a bookstore recently and wondered if going-off-to-college teens actually read books like these or if they’re just bait for well-meaning adults. Recs welcome!
16-bit Intel 8088 Chip by Charles Bukowski
Today I learned that Charles Bukowski, “laureate of American lowlife”, wrote about the incompatibilities of early computing platforms in a poem called 16-bit Intel 8088 Chip:
16-bit Intel 8088 chip
with an Apple Macintosh
you can’t run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can’t read each other’s
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can’t use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.
Lovely. And accurate. And somehow even maybe profound? (via sing, memory)
I saw Sinners last night (fantastic!) and loved reading Karen Attiah’s piece, ‘Sinners’ is a Black Challenge to White Christianity. Eagerly accepting recommendations for what else to watch/read/listen to about this film.
Is This Autocracy? “Without a distinction between truth and falsehood, we have no basis for a distinction between good and evil. And at present there is barely even an attempt to conceal the absence of such a basis.”
Bertrand Russell on How Fascism Starts
From a 1940 collection of essays called Freedom: Its Meaning, here’s Bertrand Russell on how fascism begins:
The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.
This technique is as old as the hills; it was practiced in almost every Greek city, and the moderns have only enlarged its scale.
From Kyla Scanlon, a “brief comprehensive guide” about tariffs. “We call a tariff a protective measure. It does protect; it protects the consumer very well against one thing. It protects the consumer against low prices. —Milton Friedman”
Ye Olde Funny Headlines
The Instagram account History Cool Kids has been featuring some funny olde timey headlines recently and I thought these three were worth sharing with you.
A review of the last 25 years of food & dining in NYC. Cool to see lots of my old faves on here: Ssam Bar, Bourdain, WD-50, Death & Co (which turned me onto cocktails), Xi’an Famous Foods, Daisy Mays, Torrisi, Ivan Ramen, etc.
The Catholic Church has selected Robert Prevost as their new leader, Pope Leo XIV. “The cardinals clearly wanted someone committed to Pope Francis’ reform agenda and someone with a demonstrated record for effective management.”
A new Lord of the Rings movie will premiere in theaters on Dec 17, 2027. It’s the first of two films that will focus on Gandalf, Aragorn, and Sauron searching for Gollum.
That Coveted Window Spot
Craig Mod is currently on a book tour for his new walking memoir, Things Become Other Things. While in NYC, he stopped by one of his favorite bookstores in the world, Three Lives & Company, located on the corner of W 10th and Waverly Place in the West Village, to sign some copies of his book. He wrote about Three Lives and what it means to see his book in the window of the shop:
I know of no other store (book or otherwise) with nicer, more knowledgable people working there. It’s uncanny, the amount of unharried, chill, giving-a-shitness you feel as soon as you walk in. The space is small, sure, but every millimeter is covered in arguably one of the best curated selections of books in the world. I dare you to visit and not buy something (I bought Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test today). The taste is unparalleled. I’ve been to enough bookstores in the world now to say this with some confidence. No, they don’t have every book. But we don’t want every book. We want great books chosen by people whose adoration of books stems from a life committed to books.
Like Craig, I’ve been visiting Three Lives for probably 20 years, first as my neighborhood bookstore and now as one of the NYC touchstones I visit every time I’m in town (even when they moved several blocks west a few years ago during the renovation of their building). It’s my favorite bookstore and the place against which I mentally compare every other bookstore I’ve ever been to — my personal mètre étalon for booksellers.
If I ever write a book, the only place I really care about seeing it is in the window or on the front table at Three Lives. When I visit, I always daydream a little about that, my book in that window. Like Craig said: “It’s not about seeing it in every window, just the windows of places I respect the most.”
How Cory Arcangel Recovered a Late Artist’s Digital Legacy. “This was his computer exactly as he had left it, down to his customized Photoshop shortcuts and the positions of the windows.” I love Cory, this is awesome.
A Deep Dive on Daft Punk’s Vocal Effects
Daft Punk are famously secret about, well, most everything they do. Marc Edwards recently took a detailed look at some of the devices that the duo probably used for the vocal effects on their albums.
Talk boxes are relatively simple devices — they’re a speaker in a sealed box with a small opening. One end of a hose is fitted to the opening, and the other end is placed into the performer’s mouth, blasting noise towards their throat. The performer can pretend to speak, shaping and filtering the sound coming out of the tube with their vocal tract. A microphone is then needed to record the resulting sound. A keyboard or guitar is typically connected to the talk box unit as the sound source for the speaker. This lets the keyboard or guitar sound like it’s singing. If you’ve heard Chromeo, 2Pac’s California Love, Peter Frampton’s Do You Feel Like We Do, or Bon Jovi’s Livin’ On A Prayer before, you’ve heard a talk box.
I can confirm firing loud sounds into your mouth while holding a tube with your teeth is a bit uncomfortable. In terms of vocal effects used by Daft Punk, I think talk box might be the least used and least interesting, in terms of hunting down the exact hardware used. Talk boxes are simple devices and typically all sound similar. The sound source and performance play a bigger role in the result than the hardware itself.
The two videos above are worth watching for their comparisons of the effects of the different devices. They don’t include any direct Daft Punk samples (rights issues?), but if you’re familiar enough with their oeuvre, it’s easy enough to compare w/o samples.
“When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the gov’t because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy. By that measure, America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.”
Personal Raincloud is a trope in TV & comics where a character gets followed around by their own personal rainstorm. “If the cloud has a mind of its own it may be a Cumulonemesis.” I love TV Tropes.
4th Grader to RFK Jr: “I Have Autism and I’m Not Broken”
At a recent Princeton Public Schools’ Board of Education meeting, Teddy, a fourth-grader from one of the district’s schools, got up and delivered a speech about the many reasons that PPS should teach about autism and other disabilities, including “so we don’t have people like RFK Jr in the future”. Here are Teddy’s full remarks:
Recently, the U.S. Secretary of Health, RFK Jr, made false comments about autism like people with autism are broken, that autism is caused by vaccines, and that people with autism will never have jobs or families. But that’s not true. I have autism and I’m not broken, and I hope that nobody in Princeton Public Schools believes RFK Jr’s lies.
Autism and all disabilities should be taught in the Princeton Public Schools curriculum at all grade levels because it will raise awareness, increase acceptance, and improve the quality of life for kids with disabilities.
But first, here is a quote from a Changing Perspectives article called Disability Inclusion in Education: “A truly inclusive environment does not value one marginalized group over another; instead, it recognizes the unique backgrounds of all members of the community, including but not limited to cultural heritage, religion, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, gender, disability, or any other differences.”
Princeton Public Schools already recognizes Autism Awareness Month, but not much. There are posters in the cafeteria that say to be kind and inclusive. Students wear blue on April 2nd. But we are never taught about the spectrum of autism. Kids need to be taught more about the different kinds of autism, that autism is a natural variation in the genes that you are born with, not caused by vaccines, and about successful people with autism. The lessons should also be extended to other disabilities like ADHD, cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, dyslexia, apraxia, and more.
This is important because it will teach kids how to accept people with disabilities. Accepting someone means really understanding someone for who they are and not minding their differences. I want everyone to know that people with autism and other disabilities are not tragedies, but just different, like all people. If everyone understood more about autistic people, and about people with other disabilities, they would know more about how to treat them, what their lives are like, and that they don’t need to be fixed or cured. This will help kids with disabilities have a better life.
When people are aware of disabilities and are accepting them, they will have friends and less bullying. Also, the teachers might be more aware because they learned about the disabilities also. Kids and teachers should know more about disabilities so they do not believe RFK Jr is right about autism, and they choose to treat them in a nice way that is good for the kid. By knowing more about it, kids and teachers will be nicer to the kids with disabilities.
This is important to me and Princeton Public Schools because I have a disability, and I noticed that disabilities are not being taught, only a few people mentioning autism. When teaching about culture, we teach many different cultures to accept them better — because that’s what disabilities are like, a culture, a culture of differences. Princeton Public Schools must add this to the curriculum of all grades and students, so we don’t have people like RFK Jr in the future.
I want to end with the district mission statement: “Our mission is to prepare all of our students to lead lives of joy and purpose as knowledgeable, creative, and compassionate citizens of a global society.” Adding disabilities to kids’ education will make them knowledgeable and compassionate, and help kids with disabilities to lead lives of joy and purpose.
Come on, challenging the district to uphold their own mission statement? That’s an S-tier move right there.
Defector’s Sabrina Imbler is interviewing civil servants who have been fired/purged from their jobs at EPA, US Forest Service, USAID, NOAA, USDA, CDC, etc.
WWII Vet Crushes a Tesla With a Sherman Tank
In this video, 98-year-old British WWII veteran Ken Turner demolishes a Tesla with a Sherman tank. Here’s what Turner had to say before getting down to business:
I’m old enough to have seen fascism the first time around; now it’s coming back. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is using his immense power to support the far-right in Europe, and his money comes from Tesla cars. Well, I’ve got this message for Mr Musk. We’ve crushed fascism before and we’ll crush it again.
A Popeless Situation: The election of Gregory X in 1271 took 1006 days to decide, during which the cardinals were eventually locked in a palace and fed only bread & water. The deliberations lasted so long that three cardinals died during the conclave!
Gears and Other Mechanical Things
This is a 1930 short film from avant-garde filmmaker Ralph Steiner that shows dozens of gears and other machinery at work.
(thx, matthew)
Some of the cardinals tasked with choosing a replacement for Pope Francis have watched the Hollywood movie Conclave in preparation for the real-life process. “So many of the conclave participants have little experience of Vatican politics and protocol.”
McMansion Hell on Trump’s gaudy “dictator chic”. “This ruling class nostalgia for times of absolute domination over the populace and its use as a conservative signifier is a defining characteristic of Rococo Revivalism…”
Graphic Novel Biography of Eadweard Muybridge
The life and work of photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge is the subject of a new graphic novel called Muybridge by Guy Delisle.
Sacramento, California, 1870. Pioneer photographer Eadweard Muybridge becomes entangled in railroad robber baron Leland Stanford’s delusions of grandeur. Tasked with proving Stanford’s belief that a horse’s hooves do not touch the ground while galloping at full speed, Muybridge gets to work with his camera. In doing so, he inadvertently creates one of the single most important technological advancements of our age—the invention of time-lapse photography and the mechanical ability to capture motion.
You can find Muybridge at Drawn & Quarterly, Amazon, or Bookshop.
Phew, for a Minute There, I Thought the Arts Were Going to Get Too Much Funding. “I mean, what were we thinking…handing out grants to novelists with weird names like Marisol or Devin? Some of them were using metaphors. OPENLY.”
A guide to staying safe during civil unrest. “Know who you can call on for help. Even if the threat isn’t right on your doorstep, it can be a relief to just let someone else watch the news for a while so you can put your phone down and get some rest.”
Altair at 50: Remembering the First Personal Computer. “The Altair didn’t survive for very long, but essentially being responsible for the creation of Microsoft is a pretty Big Deal. It also inspired Steve Wozniak to create the first Apple computer…”
48 Things Women Hear In A Lifetime (That Men Just Don’t)
HuffPost gathered a diverse group of girls and women for this video on the sexist things that they hear throughout their lives that men don’t.
Don’t be so bossy. Why are you getting so emotional? You’d be much prettier if you smiled. I was just trying to give you a compliment.
See also 48 Things Men Hear In A Lifetime (That Are Bad For Everyone):
The invention of the transformer (and LLMs) has upended the field of natural language processing. John Pavlus interviewed NLP researchers about the breakthrough. “Look how absurd this is, but look how well it works.”
Subtly Geometric Birds
There’s something a little bit mesmerizing about Aled Thompson’s illustrations of birds. They are at once highly detailed and also slightly vectorish — and it shifts back and forth while I’m looking at them, like one of those young woman/old woman optical illusions.
You can find more of Thompson’s work on Instagram and Bluesky and can purchase prints here. (via @mims.bsky.social)
“When we think of love, we think of romance and happily-ever-after fairy tales. By telling this story, I want to invoke something different — the radical power of seeing, understanding, and showing up for another human.”
The Phony Physics of Star Wars Are a Blast. You can’t see laser shots and X-wings wouldn’t turn like that in space, but “it’s more fun this way”.
Things Become Other Things & A Physical Education
Fun day today: two of my online pals have books coming out. First is Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things, a memoir of a walk (and a life) in Japan and on a childhood friend who didn’t have the same opportunity.
Photographer and essayist Craig Mod is a veteran of long solo walks. But in 2021, during the pandemic shutdown of Japan’s borders, one particular walk around the Kumano Kodō routes — the ancient pilgrimage paths of Japan’s southern Kii Peninsula — took on an unexpectedly personal new significance. Mod found himself reflecting on his own childhood in a post-industrial American town, his experiences as an adoptee, his unlikely relocation to Japan at nineteen, and his relationship with one lost friend, whose life was tragically cut short after their paths diverged. For Mod, the walk became a tool to bear witness to a quiet grace visible only when “you’re bored out of your skull and the miles left are long.”
Also out today is Casey Johnston’s A Physical Education, the subtitle of which is How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting.
In A Physical Education, Casey Johnston recounts how she ventured into the brave new world of weightlifting, leaving behind years of restrictive eating and endless cardio. Woven through the trajectory of how she rebuilt her strength and confidence is a staggering exposé of the damaging doctrine spread by diet and fitness culture.
Both Casey and Craig are wonderful writers who care deeply about their craft and passing their experiences, insights, and enthusiasm along to their readers. I’m picking up my pre-ordered copy of Craig’s book from my local bookstore this afternoon and I’m hoping there’s a copy of Casey’s book on the new nonfiction table so I can grab that too.
A Physical Education is available at Amazon, Bookshop, and at other booksellers. Casey is on tour for the book right now; check out the tour dates here.
Things Become Other Things is also available at Amazon, Bookshop, and other booksellers. Craig is currently on tour too; you can find his tour dates here.
A history of music album art. “Before most people owned a TV set, Steinweiss’s album covers were affordable multi-sensory entertainment. Looking at the album cover & listening to the music created an experience that was more than the sum of its parts.”
New Language for Slavery and the Civil War
Drawing upon the work of colleagues, historian Michael Todd Landis proposes new language for talking about slavery and the Civil War. In addition to favoring “labor camps” over the more romantic “plantations”, he suggests retiring the concept of the Union vs the Confederacy.
Specifically, let us drop the word “Union” when describing the United States side of the conflagration, as in “Union troops” versus “Confederate troops.” Instead of “Union,” we should say “United States.” By employing “Union” instead of “United States,” we are indirectly supporting the Confederate view of secession wherein the nation of the United States collapsed, having been built on a “sandy foundation” (according to rebel Vice President Alexander Stephens). In reality, however, the United States never ceased to exist. The Constitution continued to operate normally; elections were held; Congress, the presidency, and the courts functioned; diplomacy was conducted; taxes were collected; crimes were punished; etc. Yes, there was a massive, murderous rebellion in at least a dozen states, but that did not mean that the United States disappeared.
Mr. Beast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money. “The work is intended to distill the content of the most popular YouTuber in the world down to one of its core motifs: the promise of the next number being even bigger.”
Early 20th Century Advertisements for the Queen City Printing Ink Company
I love the colorful illustrative style of these adverts for the Queen City Printing Ink Company done by Augustus Jansson in the first decade of the 20th century.
For decades, US companies have “cast aside the goal of addressing a legacy of discrimination for the vague idea of diversity – an idea that was always destined to fail, and an idea many corporations never truly believed in”.
How Soderbergh Elevates an Ordinary Scene in Black Bag
In this episode of Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak takes a look at a simple scene from one of my favorite recent films and shows how director Steven Soderbergh makes it sing.
Like Spielberg or Fincher, Soderbergh is a master craftsman, who can translate a scene from page to screen with the confidence of a seasoned pro. You feel that confidence when you watch his movies, and it’s both relieving and engaging.
I thought Black Bag was great (and great fun) — it’s got a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is streaming on Peacock in the US.
Tim Friede has been bitten by 200 poisonous snakes and his antibodies are being used to create a broad antivenom. “He’s willingly been bit some 200 times by all manner of venomous snakes — black mambas, taipans, cobras, kraits and many others.”
The Courts Must Stop Presuming Donald Trump is a Regular President. “Much of our law […] depends on the courts thinking that they can trust the president to comply with orders, and to be honest and truthful in court.”
Monty Python and the Holy Grail Turns 50. Watch It Free on YouTube.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail premiered in theaters on April 3, 1975. 50 years on, it remains one of the finest comedy movies ever (though it is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea). If you’re a fan, you can catch it for free on YouTube (with ads, not sure about region restrictions) or in select theaters in North America. You can also stream it for free on Amazon Prime Video, Pluto TV, Roku Channel, Plex, and a few other free movie services. (via open culture)
“At the heart of [Trumpist] policies is soft eugenics thinking – the idea that if you take away life-saving healthcare and services from the vulnerable, then you can let nature take its course and only the strong will survive.”
People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies. “He started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.”
Jia Tolentino: My Brain Finally Broke. “The phone eats time; it makes us live the way people do inside a casino” and with IRL current events like Trump & Gaza, “a chill sets in at some point, then a grimness, then a detachment”. Yes, all of this.
Mohsen Mahdawi: I Was Detained for My Beliefs. Who Will Be Next? “By seeking to deport me, the Trump administration is sending a clear message: There is no room for dissent, free speech be damned.”
A series of info visualizations that show how true “based on a true story” Hollywood movies actually are. Selma & The Big Short top the list with Hacksaw Ridge & The Imitation Game bringing up the rear.
Swirling Green Aurora Captured From the ISS
I don’t have a whole lot to say about this video except wow. Wow wow. It’s almost inconceivable that we live in a world of sights like this. Feels like science fiction but is actually real. Captured by NASA astronaut Don Pettit aboard the ISS.
60-year-old cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko has spent a little over three full years in space. That’s 5% of his life.
What?! 108-Gigapixel Scan of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.
Several years ago, digital microscope technology company Hirox collaborated with The Mauritshuis museum to create a 10-gigapixel scan of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. Recently, Hirox upped the game with the creation of a 108-gigapixel scan of the painting. 108 billion pixels! And each pixel is 1.3 microns in size — 1000 microns is 1 millimeter. Incredible.
You can explore the scan of the painting courtesy of Hirox. Be sure to check out the 3D view (button at the bottom of the page); here’s a topographical view of the pearl:
For a look at how they captured this image, check out this behind-the-scenes video.
Tag and release works with tardigrades now — scientists are using nanotechnology to “tattoo” the tiny creatures with “squares, dots, and lines as small as 72 nanometers wide”.
The World’s Largest Data Center Rises in Texas
Photographer Stephen Voss has been working on a project about data centers and recently travelled to Abilene, Texas to document the first data center built as part of the Stargate Project. When completed, it will be the largest data center in the world. Here’s a short drone video he took of the project:
“The place was mesmerizing and deeply unsettling,” Voss told me over email. “When finished, it’ll have the power demands of a mid-sized city and is on a piece of land that’s the size of Central Park.”
The video immediately reminded me of Edward Burtynsky’s work that documents “the impacts of human industry on the planet”.
3D-printed Starbucks? Sure, why not. “3D-printed construction is really taking off throughout the United States…”
Is This the Best Cover of Radiohead’s Creep?
Do yourself a favor and watch this: Erin Morton is a junior in the BFA Musical Theatre program at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and she absolutely blisters the paint off of the walls with her performance of Radiohead’s Creep. Wow. I actually got some goosebumps watching this.
BTW, other contenders for best Creep cover include Prince and a 1600-person pub choir.
Some rules for a private dinner party for “Fucked Up Individuals”, including “no one can say ‘I’m fine’ or ‘I’m good’” and “the first person to check their phone must reveal an embarrassing screenshot”.
A recent survey “shows a steep decline in the number of parents reading aloud to young children, with 41% of 0- to four-year-olds now being read to frequently, down from 64% in 2012.”
Theoretical Gravastars Are Even Weirder Than Black Holes
TIL I learned about gravastars (aka a gravitational vacuum star), theoretical objects related to black holes. Both are massive & dense, but instead of a singularity surrounded by an event horizon, gravastars are made up of dark energy surrounded by a extremely thin shell of exotic matter.
The shell of the gravastar is utterly dark and the coldest thing in the universe, only a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. If we look at it in deep infrared, even the cosmic microwave background glows bright in comparison. It is made from an entirely new, unique and extreme matter that is at the very limit of what is physically possible in nature and doesn’t have a name yet. Actually, the shell is so incredibly thin that atoms seem truly gigantic next to it.
Retro USAID t-shirts featuring a classic logo from the 50s. “50% of all proceeds go to support current court cases fighting to save USAID.”
Scope of Work’s Spencer Wright on imports, tariffs, and maturity. “I buy a pair of shoes, make myself a drink, take a sip of water — it all has so much meaning.”
Ooh, I like this question: “What is the best album released by a music act at least 15 years after its debut album?” Any ideas?
What Is Fascism?
Robert Paxton is one of the world’s foremost scholars of fascism and in his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism (Bookshop), he defined the term:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Paxton famously declined to label Donald Trump a fascist, warning against overuse of the term, before changing his mind after January 6th’s attack on Congress.
Jan. 6 proved to be a turning point. For an American historian of 20th-century Europe, it was hard not to see in the insurrection echoes of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, who marched on Rome in 1922 and took over the capital, or of the violent riot at the French Parliament in 1934 by veterans and far-right groups who sought to disrupt the swearing in of a new left-wing government. But the analogies were less important than what Paxton regarded as a transformation of Trumpism itself. “The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so intentional, that you had to change what you said about it,” Paxton told me. “It just seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was happening.”
When an editor at Newsweek reached out to Paxton, he decided to publicly declare a change of mind. In a column that appeared online on Jan. 11, 2021, Paxton wrote that the invasion of the Capitol “removes my objection to the fascist label.” Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line,” he went on. “The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”
See also Umberto Eco’s 14 Features of Eternal Fascism, How Fascism Works, Toni Morrison’s Ten Steps Towards Fascism, and Rick Steves’ The Story of Fascism. (via @chadloder.bsky.social)
Pirouette Abecedarium at MoMA: “Twenty-six designers, scholars, DJs, photographers, and entrepreneurs will each present on one paradigm-shifting object or idea, each corresponding to one letter of the alphabet.”
Scientists on the Trump regime’s war on science in the US. “However bad everyone on the outside thinks it is, it is a million times worse. They’re dismantling and destroying everything.”
Why Lawrence of Arabia Still Looks Like a Billion Bucks
Even after 60+ years, Lawrence of Arabia is one of the best-looking films out there; this video explores why. I got to see Lawrence of Arabia on a big screen last fall and it was stunning — the colors, the amount of detail, the cinematography in general.
“The Adventures of Tintin officially entered the public domain in 2025. We now all own the alluring aesthetics of this timeless classic.”
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