Raccoons Are Showing Early Signs of Domestication. “City-dwelling raccoons seem to be evolving a shorter snout — a telltale feature of our pets and other domesticated animals.”
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Entries for November 2025
Magnetikpunk: Playing Vintage Reel-to-Reel Tapes as Musical Instruments
A Japanese experimental music group called Open Reel Ensemble plays reel-to-reel tape recorders from the 70s & 80s as musical instruments (give it a sec to get going):
Brilliant! A YouTube commenter notes: “Very cool, looks like you’re fishing for sound waves.” Here’s another video of them playing…this one’s like a reel-to-reel version of DJing with turntables:
I went looking for information about how they’re producing these sounds and found this profile of the group from 2018.
Over the years, the group has developed new techniques. As Motherboard explains, each member can now “program” sounds directly on to the recorders, creating a strange blend of digital and analog technology. With multi-track recorders, Open Reel Ensemble is able to switch individual tracks on and off, too. Sometimes they’ll record blocks of sustained noise, at various pitches, to be triggered and disabled like notes on a guitar. These allow the band to play intricate chords and melodies on stage. “We’re finding new techniques every day,” Wada said, “exploring rotation and movements, and the relationship between magnetics and sound.”
I bet they are amazing to see live.
The winners of the LIT Lighting Design Awards, encompassing the best work in lighting architecture, product design (lamps, etc.), concerts, healthcare, streets, and many more categories.
A Beloved Clothing Store Closed. A Customer Bought All 4,500 Items. “Ms. Szuflita said she had nearly broken even purely on the numbers. There’s also value in the still unfolding adventure.”
Fantastic and useful little design touch on this website that sells lighting (toggle the switch in the upper right corner).
Football Stadium Turned Community Garden
As part of a city-wide urban greening program, Taipei turned an abandoned football stadium into a community garden. Here’s an overview of the terraced garden that’s taken over Zhongshan Soccer Stadium from James Stewart on Instagram. A couple of screenshots from the video:
So cool! (thx, alaina)
How Mira Nair Built the World That Made Zohran Mamdani. “Zohran has been marinated in love, not just from us, his parents, but from intergenerational family life. He’s so secure in knowing who he is.”
Stress Is an Ancient Superpower That Is Slowly Killing You
Stress in pre-modern times was a “biological superpower” that helped humans hunt for food and survive in harsh environments and situations. But our bodies can’t easily tell the difference between the stress of encountering a lion in the jungle and a worrying email from your boss.
Our world has changed so quickly and profoundly that our biology couldn’t keep up. Stress is still the same it was fifty thousand years ago: Sense a stressor. React immediately and with full force. Prioritize present moment survival, make sacrifices if necessary.
That works well when you have to jump out of the way of a car. But most stressors we encounter nowadays are abstract, acute and more numerous, often intangible, persist for much longer and usually don’t even require physical action. The tigers of the past are now angry emails, deadlines, online dating, rush hour traffic or doom scrolling the news and social media.
Note: Watching this video might actually stress you out, at least until you get to the solutions part of it.
Caveat: In places with a lot of economic insecurity & few social safety nets, like the US, the solutions presented by this video may not be super helpful. Slowing down, disconnecting, and taking time for mindfulness can be difficult under the best of conditions and nearly impossible if you’re working two jobs as a single mother to just make ends meet.
How to Photograph an Active Volcano Without Getting Vaporized. “It’s dangerous and completely mesmerizing. Everyone edges closer even though your brain’s screaming don’t. It’s pure moth-to-flame energy.”
Climate Change in America: Is It Too Late to Wake Up?
From Vann R. Newkirk II, a editor & journalist who hosts the Floodlines podcast (about Hurricane Katrina), a long piece about the climate chaos that’s taking hold in the US: What Climate Change Will Do to America by Mid-Century.
Over the next 30 years or so, the changes to American life might be short of apocalyptic. But miles of heartbreak lie between here and the apocalypse, and the future toward which we are heading will mean heartbreak for millions. Many people will go in search of new homes in cooler, more predictable places. Those travelers will leave behind growing portions of America where services and comforts will be in short supply — let’s call them “dead zones.” Should the demolition of America’s rule of law continue, authoritarianism and climate change will reinforce each other, a vicious spiral from which it will be difficult to exit.
Newkirk details how the increasing effects of the climate crisis might play out in “a landscape of inequality” like the United States.
Even if climate change does not trigger a full-fledged economic panic, whole regions will be thinned out and impoverished. Residential areas are the centerpiece of local economies, yet without insurance, people cannot get mortgages, and so most cannot buy houses. The mere prospect of that makes business investment riskier. Jesse Keenan, a professor at Tulane University who studies climate change and real estate, told me that some places are already becoming economic “no-go” zones.
I remember reading about the coming climate-driven crisis in insurance back in the early 2000s — e.g. Michael Lewis’s post-Katrina piece in the NY Times Magazine — and hoping it wouldn’t come to that but knowing that it would as years went by without significant action on climate. And now here we are.
Clint Smith recently talked to students around the country about the “complexities and contradictions” of US history (including slavery) and found they were receptive to it. “Doesn’t seem that hard. Just say both things.”
Kevin Kelly shares some essential apps & services for independent travel in China. “A good rule of thumb is to download your apps outside of China before you leave, because most are behind their great firewall.”
All the Cats, Explained
From MinuteEarth, a quick tour of all the different kinds of cats in the world, extinct, wild, and domesticated, and how they are related to each other. Some interesting facts I learned:
- The saber-toothed tiger was the largest cat to ever live and researchers now believe it had a short tail rather than a long one.
- There was an American cheetah. It was bigger than the cheetah we know today and “almost as fast”. It went extinct around the time humans showed up in North America.
- Leopards and snow leopards aren’t actually that closely related.
- Domestic cats are mostly descended from wildcats (not to be confused with cats who are wild — wildcat refers to two specific species, the European wildcat (Felis silvestris) and the African wildcat (Felis lybica)).
See also All the Dogs, Explained: “Standing on his hind legs, [the tallest ever Great Dane] was taller than Shaq.”
The Sagrada Família has become the tallest church in the world, after workers placed the first part of a cross at the top of its central tower. The Barcelona church will top 564 feet when the rest of the cross is placed in the next few months.
A digital atlas of the Roman Empire’s entire road network (180,000+ miles). “The data creation is a collaborative ongoing project edited by a scholarly community.”
Skydiving the Sun
Skydiver & musician Gabriel Brown and astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy teamed up to capture these incredible photos of Brown transiting the Sun while skydiving. You can see a video of the jump and some behind the scenes calculations on Instagram.
We had to find the right location, time, aircraft, and distance for the clearest shot; while factoring in the aircraft’s power-off glideslope for the optimal sun angle and safe exit altitude. Then we had to align the shot using the opposition effect from the aircraft (shout out to the pilot @jimhamberlin) and coordinate the exact moment of the jump on 3-way coms!
As if that wasn’t hard enough, we had a myriad of malfunctions that almost led to the shot not being captured… But as you can see, against all odds, we got it on the sixth try!
That sounds….complicated. But the results speak for themselves. More coverage of this on Petapixel and Colossal.
As Petapixel notes, the photos are composite shots:
After he captured the shot of Brown, he then made the image “super high-res” by shooting the Sun on another telescope and “assembled a mosaic of the entire Sun”, which he later matched with the features in Brown’s photo.
(thx, alex)
“A Personal Business is run by people who are truly into what they are doing, and invested enough to offer products, services, and/or experiences that are both high-quality and idiosyncratic.”
This Black Fungus Might Be Healing Chernobyl By Drinking Radiation. The fungi contain melanin, which “absorbs radiation, which is then converted into usable energy, allowing it to grow in areas with intense radioactive exposure.”
The Farmers’ Almanac, citing a “chaotic media environment”, will cease publication after their 2026 edition. The almanac dates back to 1818. (The Old Farmer’s Almanac, started in 1792, is still going.)
This seems promising: researchers have demonstrated that a “nanoparticle-based vaccine can effectively prevent melanoma, pancreatic and triple-negative breast cancer in mice”.
After 230 years, the US Mint has ended production of new pennies. One of the very few things that incompetent stopped clock in the White House has gotten accidentally right.
The Northern Lights Put on a Show. “A powerful geomagnetic storm brought spectacular light displays to night skies across the Northern Hemisphere, with sightings of pink, red, and green lights as far south as Florida and Oklahoma.”
Put wings on your car. “We call it a private jet for tax reasons really. Private jets don’t pay duty on fuel, so by adding wings to the vehicle, we should qualify for the same exemption.”
Recently discovered 55-million-year-old crocodile eggshells perhaps belong to “drop crocs”, a species that “perhaps [hunted] like leopards — dropping out of trees on any unsuspecting thing they fancied for dinner”. Drop crocs!
More women are riding the streets of Tehran on motorbikes, in violation of the law & social restrictions. “There is not any political manifesto or social agenda here. It’s just that since my workplace is downtown and I had to commute every day…”
Anton Kusters’ Photos of the Yakuza
For his Yakuza project, photographer Anton Kusters spent two years documenting some members of the Japanese mafia.
A limited edition of a book containing the photos is available. Steward Mag recently did an interview with Kusters:
The values were almost comparable to general Japanese workplace values, actually. Most yakuza gangs actually have neighborhood offices, and the plaques they have on the door state core values like “respect your superiors,” “keep the office clean,” and so on.
One thing I noticed early on with gang life was how subtle everything was. Everything was unspoken, and will was expressed through group pressure. A pressure was constantly there. There was this innate understanding of form — if someone did something wrong, no one would say anything; he would simply be expected to apologize. And the fact everyone would be so silent about it made the pressure really intense.
(thx, david)
A group of archaeologists has proposed “applying a model of how humans expanded to the different islands across the Pacific Ocean during their early migration to glean insights into how humanity should manage our colonization of space”.
“The reason there are no weird blogs anymore is that it’s more fruitful to drive them out of business.” Private equity is ripping media into shreds.
22 Thanksgiving Main Dishes That Are Better Than Turkey. I’ve been trying to get the fam to pivot from turkey to chicken (with all the usual sides in place), but no dice.
Just as You Feared — Life in Zohran Mamdani’s New York. “Breakfast is sugar-free pea fibre from the state-run ZohranMart. I wish that I could give my son something better — it’s his birthday. But he doesn’t mind. School has turned him very woke.”
Operation Space Station
Operation Space Station is a two-part PBS documentary series on the International Space Station. Here’s a very short teaser trailer:
A synopsis:
The size of a football field, the International Space Station hurtles around Earth at 17,000 mph, shielding its astronauts from the most hostile environment humans have ever endured. After 25 years of continuous human presence in space, astronauts and Mission Control insiders reveal the most terrifying moments aboard this remarkable orbiting laboratory, where a single mistake could prove fatal. From ammonia leaks, meteor strikes, and docking disasters, to spacewalk horrors, potentially lethal showers of space junk, and the moment the entire ISS backflipped out of control, follow life-or-death dramas unfolding 250 miles above our planet — and the human ingenuity and teamwork that save the day.
(via installer)
Meet the 2025 National Book Award Finalists. “Literary Hub caught up with the finalists to ask them a bit about their books, their reading habits, and their writing lives.” Some great stuff in here.
A History of Japan
Bill Wurtz’s History of Japan is the most entertaining history of anything I have ever seen.
The trailer for Train Dreams, a film adaptation of the novella by Denis Johnson. “In select theaters November 7 and on Netflix November 21.”
Jamelle Bouie: “I’m gonna make a case to you that no matter what you’ve heard about the filibuster, you should want the filibuster to be sent to the ash bin of history.”
Jessica Guo: “If there’s something out there that calls to you, I hope you listen. Give yourself permission to do the thing.” Guo just finished hiking both the the Continental Divide Trail and the Great Divide Trail, solo. 3500+ miles!
The Age of Audio, a Documentary on the History of Podcasting
Here’s the trailer for The Age of Audio, a feature-length documentary about the invention and popularization of podcasting, from Adam Curry to Ronald Young Jr.
I ran across this movie via a clip on Instagram that explains how the word “podcast” came to be; here’s the same clip from YouTube:
Every time there’s a new technology, it always has to be named the dumbest thing.
Whoever came up with the name podcasting, like what a dumbass name.
It’s so funny cuz the podcast community gets very heated about these issues.
Whoever invented the word podcast, I’m going to punch him in the throat.
See also blogging. 🫠
For a More Creative Brain, Travel. “New sounds, smells, language, tastes, sensations, and sights spark different synapses in the brain and may have the potential to revitalize the mind.”
“China’s carbon dioxide emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months, analysis reveals, adding evidence to the hope that the world’s biggest polluter has managed to hit its target of peak CO2 emissions well ahead of schedule.”
High Horse: The Black Cowboy
High Horse: The Black Cowboy is a three-part documentary about the culture of Black cowboys & cowgirls and their erasure from the history of the western United States.
From executive producer Jordan Peele and Monkeypaw Productions, the pop culture and historical documentary confronts and reclaims the Wild West while revealing the story of the Black cowboy — a history that has largely been untold. It rides into the forgotten corners of history, shattering myths and celebrating the Black cowboys, farmers, jockeys, musicians, and rodeo champions who built the West — and now takes back their place in the saddle, sitting high atop the horse.
High Horse: The Black Cowboy starts streaming Nov 20th on Peacock.
Going to Art Galleries Can Improve Wellbeing. “Enjoying original works of art in a gallery can relieve stress, reduce the risk of heart disease and boost your immune system, according to the first study of its kind.”
A zoomable, fully searchable archive of every single page of every single issue of BYTE magazine from 1975-1998. “I hope seeing everything in single, searchable place offers a unique perspective.”
Notes on Harold Brodkey’s 1992 essay Notes on American Fascism, which was dismissed at the time but now seems prescient.
Two Hours of Wellness
A two-hour version of the music played in the Wellness Center in Severance. “Please try to enjoy each listening session equally.” See also Severance: Music To Refine To.
✅ Added to my Underscore collection.
A Journey to Vietnam to Uncover the Origins of Phở. “If you want to find the origins, you must go to Nam Ðịnh province and a village called Vân Cù.”
17-Year-Old Biggie Smalls Freestyling
From Freestyle: The Art of the Rhyme, a short clip of a 17-year-old Christopher Wallace (aka Biggie Smalls, aka The Notorious B.I.G.) freestyle rapping on a street corner in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn in 1989.
It’s all there…the talent, the confidence, the skills. Compare with a 17-year-old LL Cool J rapping in a Maine gymnasium in 1985. (via ★interesting)
Update: Biggie was rapping on Bedford Ave between Quincy St and Lexington Ave in Bed-Stuy. Check it out on Google Maps. (thx, debbie)
Socials & More