Dan Sinker writes about the transformative experience of seeing a work by Jenny Holzer when he was 14. “Truisms was a revelation. Art could be just words. Art could be just at home slapped on a POST NO BILLS wall as it could in a gallery.”
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“How did medieval French handwriting become ‘the Nazi font?’ And why did Hitler make it illegal?” TIL that Hitler gave a speech to the Reichstag about how much he disliked blackletter fonts.
Do you remember Oddpost? It was an early email web app that used dynamic HTML to mimic the design and functionality of a desktop mail app, 2 years before Gmail launched.
kdo rolodex · a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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Things Magazinehttps://www.thingsmagazine.net -
Clayton Cubitthttps://bsky.app/profile/claytoncubitt.bsky.social -
Heather Armstrong (RIP)https://dooce.com -
Brilliant Crankhttps://brilliantcrank.com -
The Independent Variablehttps://tiv.today
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Tinder Hasn’t Worked, So I’m Putting Myself on Zillow. “I realize that my late-’80s construction might not land me in the “trending” section right away…”
I’ve always said more popstars should duet with puppets, so Sabrina Carpenter and Kermit the Frog singing Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton’s ‘Island in a Stream’ as part of The Muppet Show’s latest special is perfect (to me).
The Triumph of Europe’s Social Democracy
Economist Thomas Piketty, writing for Le Monde (archive) on the success of Europe’s social democratic model and countering “the narrative of a ‘declining’ continent”:
If someone had told the European elites and liberal economists of 1914 that wealth redistribution would one day account for half of national income, they would have unanimously condemned the idea as collectivist madness and predicted the continent’s ruin. In reality, European countries have achieved unprecedented levels of prosperity and social well-being, largely due to collective investments in health, education and public infrastructure.
To win the cultural and intellectual battle, Europe must now assert its values and defend its model of development, fundamentally opposed to the nationalist-extractivist model championed by Donald Trump’s supporters in the United States and by Vladimir Putin’s allies in Russia. A crucial issue in this fight is the choice of indicators used to measure human progress.
For these indicators, Piketty mentions some of the same factors that economist Gabriel Zucman detailed in his Le Monde piece I posted in December:
More leisure time, better health outcomes, greater equality and lower carbon emissions, all with broadly comparable productivity: Europeans can be proud of their model, argues Gabriel Zucman, director of the EU Tax Observatory.
Professor Walt Hunter on the merits of challenging students: Stop Meeting Students Where They Are. “Whole novels aren’t possible to teach, we are told, because students won’t (or can’t) read them. So why assign them?”
The Mountain That Weighed the Earth. How scientists in 1774 used a Scottish mountain to estimate the mass of the Earth to within 20% of the modern number by measuring the mountain’s gravitational effect on a precision plumb line.
Keep the Meter Running With Mouhamadou Aliy & Zohran Mamdani
In addition to his great series Subway Takes, Kareem Rahma does another series called Keep the Meter Running where he hops into NYC cabs, interviews the drivers, and asks them to take him to their favorite places.
In the run-up to the NYC mayoral election last year, Rahma jumped into a cab driven by Mouhamadou Aliy, who wanted to pick up his friend along the way to his favorite spot. That friend was now-mayor Zohran Mamdani, who tells the story of how the two of them protested & went on a hunger strike together. It’s a great conversation and video…I watched a snippet of it on Instagram (I missed it last year) and had to track down the whole thing:
I’m sorry, how can you not vote for this guy? The real deal, indeed — and voters could tell. There are so many politicians, particularly on the left, who talk a good game, push all the right buttons, and then they sputter or freeze or about-face when the rubber meets the road. It feels hollow; no wonder voters and activists find it hard to get behind the calculation of politicians who they know, deep down, are just saying certain things to get a vote. At least with Republicans, they tell you they’re going to run the country into the ground and then they go out and try to do it.
Times New Resistance
This is awesome and clever. Minneapolis designer Abby Haddican has made a typeface called Times New Resistance. The letters are identical to Times New Roman (and it even appears as such in font menus, except there’s “an extra space between the words Times and New”) but when you type with it, it autocorrects a list of words: “For example, the word ICE autocorrects to the Goon Squad and the word Trump autocorrects to Donald Trump is a felon.” Here’s a partial list:
The idea is that you install it on your MAGA relative’s computer and then sit back and watch the fun. It even works when you copy/paste text or on pre-existing text. Free to download on Haddican’s website. (via @kylevanhorn)
10 Movies to Stream for Black History Month, from The Flying Ace (1926) to Killer of Sheep (1978) to Moonlight (2016).
Hour-long YouTube training session on how to observe & record ICE/CBP. “This call will give you the tools to exercise your rights in a moment when federal agents are terrorizing our communities and using excessive force.”
The Strangers’ Case
I don’t normally say this, but if you watch one thing on kottke.org today, this week, this month, make it this speech written by Shakespeare and performed by Sir Ian McKellen on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The segment starts at ~20:00; McKellen sets it up:
It’s all happening 400 years ago. In London, there’s a riot happening. There’s a mob out in the streets and they’re complaining about the the presence of strangers in London, by which they mean the recent immigrants who’ve arrived there. And they’re shouting the odds and complaining and saying that the immigrants should be sent back home wherever they came from. And the authorities send out this young lawyer, Thomas Moore, to put down the riot, which he does in two ways. One by saying that you can’t riot like this. It’s against the law. So, shut up, be quiet. And also, being by Shakespeare, with an appeal to their humanity.
The riot took place on May 1, 1517 and is referred to as Evil May Day:
According to the chronicler Edward Hall (c. 1498–1547), a fortnight before the riot an inflammatory xenophobic speech was made on Easter Tuesday by a preacher known as “Dr Bell” at St. Paul’s Cross at the instigation of John Lincoln, a broker. Bell accused immigrants of stealing jobs from English workers and of “eat[ing] the bread from poor fatherless children”.
The same as it ever was. The text of the play, Sir Thomas More, is available at Project Gutenberg; here are the bits that McKellan performed, after the crowd calls for the removal of the strangers (some translation help, if you need it):
Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to th’ ports and costs for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.
You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in line,
To slip him like a hound. Say now the king
(As he is clement, if th’ offender mourn)
Should so much come to short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whether would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,—
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? this is the strangers case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.
And of course, McKellen performs this wonderfully — he originated the role and has been performing it since the 1960s. Again…I urge you to watch it.
The CIA has deleted the CIA World Factbook (a popular almanac about the countries of the world) from the web. Fuck this. All these assholes do is pillage & destroy.
Measles Is Causing Brain Swelling in Children in South Carolina. 876 measles cases in the state so far, and some children have developed encephalitis. “Among children who get measles encephalitis, 10 to 15 percent die.”
Michelangelo’s First Painting, Made at Age 12
The Torment of Saint Anthony is the earliest surviving work attributed to Michelangelo, painted by him in 1487 or 1488 when he was 12 or 13 years old. This is an intense painting, the kind of thing that would have resulted in Michelangelo’s parents visiting the principal’s office had the young man painted this in a contemporary 7th grade art class.
Until 2009, it was believed the painting was a copy of a documented Michelangelo original, but a restoration and x-ray & infrared scans of the work showed evidence that the painting was done by the future master.
Michelangelo’s work was based on Martin Schongauer’s engraving Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons. This video provides a great overview of the history of the painting:
(via colossal)
The Tour Down Under’s winner won despite being blasted off his bike by kangaroos. “Two of them blasted through the peloton when we were doing probably 50 kph and…went left, right, left right, left right and I ended up hitting its backside.”
“Virginia Oliver, a feisty, salty-tongued lobster boat skipper who fished off the New England coast wearing earrings, hot-pink lipstick and an occasional scowl for more than 80 years, until she was 103, died on Jan. 21 in Rockport, Maine. She was 105.”
Shared Claude is a website anyone can change via LLM chat. “Text the number below to shape this website in real-time.” (Does anyone remember Metababy?)
How Do They…?
I was poking around on YouTube for “how to” videos (one of my favorite video genres) the other day when I hit a small jackpot: a bunch of How Do They…? videos from the National Film Board of Canada. A favorite shows how chain link fences are made:
You can view all the videos at the NFB site as well. NFB produced one of my favorite “how to” videos ever: how to build an igloo.
An almost 2-hour mashup mix by dk darkly of music from France’s two most well-known electronic duos, Daft Punk and Justice. Also available on Bandcamp.
A Lovely 3500-Year-Old Drawing of a Sparrow
From the collection of the Met, an Egyptian artist’s sketch of a sparrow circa 1479–1458 BCE. Much of the art that filters down to us from ancient civilizations was used for official purposes (state, religion, commerce); it’s nice to see something simpler like this drawing. Archaeologist Alison Fisk:
This may have been a practice drawing of the sparrow hieroglyph which was used for words meaning ‘small’, ‘poor’, or ‘bad’
The Egyptian artisans who decorated tombs and temples, drew sketches and jotted down notes on the plentiful limestone flakes which were by-products of temple and rock-cut tomb construction. Egyptologists refer to them as ‘ostraca’ (singular: ostracon). More info: ancientegyptonline.co.uk/ostracon/
From that link about ostracon:
The word “ostracon” is derived from the Greek “ostrakon” (meaning a piece of pottery used as a voting ballot). When a vote was held on whether to banish a person from society these shards were used to cast votes. This is the origin of the word “ostracism” (literally meaning “to be voted out”).
The Evolutionary Brilliance of the Baby Giggle. “Laughter and humor are fundamental to how babies learn about and participate in the world.” *Highly recommend* watching the laughing baby videos to brighten up your day.
Only 7 gasoline cars were sold in Norway last month. Seven! 98 diesel cars & 29 hybrids were also sold, but the rest were EVs. And this comes after Norway cut EV incentives.
Roxane Gay: “Humanity is, always, enough. We have a right to protest, legally carry a firearm, drive while Black, walk in a neighborhood at night, play in a park, sleep in a bed or do anything else whether we are wonderful people, and beloved or not.”
Good god, this story: Mother Says Asking 13-Year-Old Son to Swim Four Hours to Save Family ‘One of the Hardest Decisions’. “I knew he was the strongest and he could do it.” Australia: a nation of athletes.
Minimalistic City Map Posters
This Github project from Ankur Gupta allows you to “generate beautiful, minimalist map posters for any city in the world”. There are a variety of different themes you can choose from and the resulting images are big enough to print out actual posters (20-inch height maximum).
You can install the Python scripts on your computer or use this website (which seems quite slow). Also, I wonder if the height/width minimums can be changed to output bigger posters?
The full trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2. The pitch perfection of Miranda completely forgetting Andy gives me hope that this will be a worthy sequel.
Been thinking a lot about this Ted Chiang quote recently: “I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too.”
Vibe-coding gone wild. “Stories of family groceries delivered to data centers, and “world burnt bacon day” became memes — and resulted in class-action lawsuits against kitchen appliance manufacturers like Breville, Viking, and Cusinart.”
A collection of thousands of photographs of NYC restaurants (2002-2008) taken by Noah Kalina. Quite an archive of interior design from that era.
Claude’s Constitution
A couple of weeks ago, AI company Anthropic published the constitution that they use to train their Claude LLM (“under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Deed, meaning it can be freely used by anyone for any purpose without asking for permission”). From the company’s news release:
We’re publishing a new constitution for our AI model, Claude. It’s a detailed description of Anthropic’s vision for Claude’s values and behavior; a holistic document that explains the context in which Claude operates and the kind of entity we would like Claude to be.
The constitution is a crucial part of our model training process, and its content directly shapes Claude’s behavior. Training models is a difficult task, and Claude’s outputs might not always adhere to the constitution’s ideals. But we think that the way the new constitution is written — with a thorough explanation of our intentions and the reasons behind them — makes it more likely to cultivate good values during training.
The full document is 80+ pages, but the news release does a decent job in summarizing what’s in it.
Claude’s constitution is the foundational document that both expresses and shapes who Claude is. It contains detailed explanations of the values we would like Claude to embody and the reasons why. In it, we explain what we think it means for Claude to be helpful while remaining broadly safe, ethical, and compliant with our guidelines. The constitution gives Claude information about its situation and offers advice for how to deal with difficult situations and tradeoffs, like balancing honesty with compassion and the protection of sensitive information. Although it might sound surprising, the constitution is written primarily for Claude. It is intended to give Claude the knowledge and understanding it needs to act well in the world.
We treat the constitution as the final authority on how we want Claude to be and to behave — that is, any other training or instruction given to Claude should be consistent with both its letter and its underlying spirit. This makes publishing the constitution particularly important from a transparency perspective: it lets people understand which of Claude’s behaviors are intended versus unintended, to make informed choices, and to provide useful feedback. We think transparency of this kind will become ever more important as AIs start to exert more influence in society.
Casey Newton and Kevin Roose recently interviewed the primary author of the constitution, philosopher Amanda Askell, for the Hard Fork podcast (the segment starts at ~25min).
Newton says the document reads like “a letter from a parent to a child maybe who’s leaving for college”:
And it’s like, we hope that you take with you the values that you grew up with. And we know we’re not going to be there to help you through every little thing, but we trust you. And good luck.
Both the constitution and the conversation with Askell are fascinating, no matter where you lie on the AI debate continuum. You might also be interested in this video of Askell answering questions from Claude users about her work:
The Case of the Green Covers is a risograph-printed zine that documents the history of the “Green Penguins”, “a series of hundreds of crime novels published with green covers by the UK publisher Penguin in the 1960s”.
Podcast interview with two photojournalists who have been covering ICE in Minnesota. “It’s a conversation about what they’ve seen, the vital role of photojournalism at this moment, and the personal toll of doing this work.”
Haven’t watched this 90-minute video yet, but I’ve seen so many recommendations for it that I’m posting it as a to-do list item for myself: You are being misled about renewable energy technology.
A group of 50 Chileans recently spent several hours powering a human-operated chatbot. Some questions were answered quickly but “when they didn’t know the answer, they walked around the room to see if someone else did”.
Killing In The Name, The Minnesota Edition
Late last week, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello led a crowd gathered at the iconic First Avenue music venue in a spirited rendition of the band’s Killing In the Name. The band handled the music while the crowd, in the absence of Rage frontman Zack De La Rocha, sang the lyrics.
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
How many ICE/BPD/DHS officers marched in Charlottesville, assaulted Congress on Jan 6, and/or are Proud Boy/Stormfront members, I wonder? (They’re the same picture.)
Morello spoke briefly before the performance:
Brothers and sisters, thank you for welcoming us to the Battle of Minneapolis. My friends, if it looks like fascism, sounds like fascism, acts like fascism, dresses like fascism, talks like fascism, kills like fascism and lies like fascism, brothers and sisters, it’s fucking fascism. It’s here, it’s now, it’s in my city, it’s in your city and it must be resisted, protested, defended against, stood up to, exposed, ousted, overthrown and driven out. By who? By you. By me.
Minneapolis is an inspiration to the entire nation. You have heroically stood up against ICE, stood up against Trump, stood up against this terrible rising tide of state terror. You’ve stood up for your neighbors and for yourselves and for democracy and for justice. Ain’t nobody coming to save us, except us. And brothers and sisters, you are showing the way.
To that end, we would like to begin our program with an old Native American war chant. We encourage you to singalong, in this very room Prince created a revolution, now it’s our turn.
Here’s the official video for Killing In The Name:
PS. Bruce Springsteen was there as well and performed his song Streets of Minneapolis.
The Border Patrol Is the Problem. It Always Has Been. “If you are uncomfortable with what the Border Patrol is doing in Minneapolis, you are uncomfortable with the Border Patrol, full stop.”
Elon Musk and other internet racists started an internet war over Christopher Nolan’s casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, thereby immediately disproving their point.
Early this month, a wily coyote swam across San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz. He was in such rough shape, observers thought he’d probably die, but he’s been snacking on birds and rodents and was recently observed fat as a pickle.
Seu Jorge’s Lovely Tribute to David Bowie
For his 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson enlisted Brazilian musical artist Seu Jorge to perform several of David Bowie’s songs in Portuguese. Jorge released an album of the songs about a year or so later.
A few weeks ago, to mark the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s death, Jorge released a hour-long set of him performing those songs:
Just an acoustic guitar, a microphone, and the beautiful coastline of São Paulo.
The Accidental Winners of the War on Higher Ed. “Well-resourced and prestigious small colleges are less exposed in almost every way to the crises that higher ed faces.” (My kid goes to a liberal arts school & anecdotally can confirm.)
Significant Find of Cambrian Explosion Fossils
A recent paper in Nature details what scientists found at the Huayuan biota:
Here we report the Huayuan biota — a lower Cambrian (Stage 4, approximately 512 million years ago) BST Lagerstätte from an outer shelf, deep-water setting of the Yangtze Block in Hunan, South China. The Huayuan biota yields remarkable taxonomic richness, comprising 153 animal species of 16 phylum-level clades dominated by arthropods, poriferans and cnidarians, among which 59% of species are new. The biota is comprised overwhelmingly of soft-bodied forms that include preserved cellular tissues.
They have identified more than 50,000 individual fossil specimens that existed during what’s referred to as the Cambrian explosion, “when a sudden radiation of complex life occurred and practically all major animal phyla started appearing in the fossil record”. The fossils at the site are unusually intact:
Not only is this ecosystem notably diverse, but the fossils have remained unusually intact in the ancient mudstone, allowing for the preservation of soft tissues like tentacles, guts, and a nearly-complete nervous system found in one arthropod.
I’ve been interested in this period in paleontology since reading Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History in college. The Burgess Shale was a significant discovery that shed much light on the Cambrian explosion and surprisingly, paleontologists found fossils that appeared in both places.
The Burgess Shale animals date to about 508 million years ago, further removed from the Sinsk event than the Huayuan biota. Despite the vast distance separating the two sites, fossils of several of the same animals were found in the two locations.
“It surprised us when we found the Huayuan biota shared various animals with the Burgess Shale, including the arthropods Helmetia and Surusicaris that were previously only known from the Burgess Shale,” Zeng said.
“As larval stages are common in extant marine invertebrates, the best explanation of these shared taxa shall be that the larvae of early animals were capable of spreading by ocean currents since the early days of animals in the Cambrian,” Zeng said.
For those looking for more info on this discovery and its significance, paleontologist Dr. Joe Botting’s video on the Huayuan biota, which he calls “a stunning new Burgess Shale-type fauna”, might be a good place to start.
Volleyball Player Does Sliding Dogeza Apology
During an exhibition, Japanese volleyball player Yuji Nishida hit a courtside judge in the back with an errant serve. He immediately sprinted across the court and dove prostrate in apology. The gesture was a sort of sliding dogeza:
Even in a country where a sincere apology can go a long way, Nishida’s mea culpa was an extreme example. The most extravagant form in Japanese culture is the dogeza, which can also be used to express deep respect.
When used as an apology, the person in the wrong prostrates themselves and bows so that their forehead touches the floor between their hands. While the dogeza is rarely seen in public, scandal-hit politicians have used equally theatrical gestures to communicate their remorse.
Nishida followed up his slide with several more bows.
As part of their coursework, students at UC Berkeley are contributing edits to Wikipedia about “LGBTQ+ history, with an emphasis on queer and trans people of color”. They’ve added 300,000+ edits and 3,000+ citations.
The Schoolchildren of Minneapolis. “As thousands of ICE agents arrived, kids started staying home from school. A local principal, teachers, and parent volunteers have banded together to keep the families safe.”
Autocratic backfire: when dictators construct echo chambers, overestimate their abilities, and dismiss their adversaries’ capabilities, leading to weakening or ruin. Examples: Mussolini, Putin, and now (hopefully) Trump.
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