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.
A teaser trailer for the third season of The White Lotus is out and the release date has been revealed: February 16, 2025. Parker Posey? Walton Goggins? Yes, please. But I’ve got a love/hate relationship with this show (I couldn’t get through the first season but thought the second season was great), so I’m feeling cautiously optimistic.
Speaking of Tiny Desk Concerts, the most popular set of 2024 (18M views) is by “Argentine power duo” Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso. Their music is “heavily dependent on electronic sounds” but for Tiny Desk they went traditional and it sounds great.
Actual things my parents said while watching my son’s swimming lesson. “MOM: He’s so beautiful. The teacher must be beside herself. DAD: She’s barely controlling herself. She’s trying not to cry. [HE IS CRYING A BIT]”
HPV vaccines have been linked to a steep drop in cervical cancer deaths in young women. “We observed a substantial reduction in mortality — a 62% drop in cervical cancer deaths over the last decade.”
During the pandemic, Billie Eilish did a Tiny Desk Concert at home amidst a very faithful recreation of the NPR office. Last week, Eilish played a proper set at the actual office. From the video’s description:
Saudade is a Portuguese word that can be roughly defined as a feeling of melancholy, nostalgia or yearning for something that is beloved but not present. There’s no perfect translation, but one of the closest English expressions of the word I’ve ever seen is Billie Eilish’s Tiny Desk performance.
You’d think the Los Angeles-born singer invented the term. Every breath is so full of indulgent melancholy, hopeful regret, at 22 years old she’s become a captivating fixture of what it means, or rather what it feels, to love and lose simultaneously.
Accompanied by a small band and her brother Finneas, Eilish played The Greatest, L’Amour de Ma Vie, i love you, and Birds of a Feather. Lovely.
“Americans spend more years being unhealthy than people in any other country.” Among high income countries, the US has the highest rates of adults with multiple chronic conditions, shortest life expectancy at birth, highest rate of avoidable deaths, etc.
Isle of Tune: a web-based game where you build streetscapes that play music when a car is driven on them — trees, house, and light poles all make different sounds. Big Star Guitar vibes.
From an old version of the Wikipedia page for Warren G and Nate Dogg’s Regulate, an extremely dry synopsis of the song. “Warren, unaware that Nate is surreptitiously observing the scene unfold, is in disbelief that he is being robbed.”
Hello, everyone. I just launched a few new features related to the comments here on kottke.org:
1. The ability to fave comments. This feature has been in test mode for the past few months, and I’m happy it’s finally getting a wider release. Only kottke.org members can fave for now (but I may open it up for everyone depending on how things go). For now, only you will be able to see what you’ve faved. The number of faves on each comment will be displayed next to the fave button (again, I’m going to see how this works…precise fave counts definitely have their minuses). Non-members will not see fave buttons or fave counts. You can’t fave your own comments — no getting high on your own supply.
There aren’t any limits to the number of comments you can fave, but in the spirit of kottke.org’s community guidelines, try to be thoughtful and community-minded about faves…at their best, faves are a useful communal signal for others looking for the most interesting and useful comments.
2. If you’re a member, you can see your own comments and those you’ve faved on your new profile page, which you can find in the menu in the upper right of every page — just click on your name and then “Profile”. (If you’re on mobile, click on the menu, then your name, then “Profile”.) I don’t know if this is the right place for profiles to live, but it’ll do for now. As I add more features to the site, I may have to shift things around a little.
No one else can see your profile page right now, but that might change in the future. At the moment, you won’t be able to see all of your comments and faves, only about ~30 of the most recent — I need to add some pagination here soon.
3. For longer comment threads, I’ve added a sorting option. The default is the threaded view but you can also sort by the most recently posted comments and most popular (i.e. by number of faves). Anyone can use this — it’s going to be super useful for keeping up with new comments on popular threads (like What’s The One Thing Only You Noticed?) and for surfacing the best comments.
Ok, that’s all! I’m pretty excited about finally getting this launched — there’s lots of interesting stuff being shared in the comments these days and helping people find it is a good thing! Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions, feedback, or concerns. And as always, thank you to kottke.org’s members for their support in enabling new features like this. ✌️
Once again, The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide. If you’re shopping online, especially from smaller retailers, getting your order in this weekend is probably a good idea for delivery before Xmas or the first day of Hanukkah.
Adam Sharp has curated the most flamboyant ways to tell someone to pound sand in other languages, and it’s delightful. There’s “go ski into a spruce” from Finland, in Brazil you tell someone to “go pick little coconuts,” while in Poland you say “go to the park and paint the ceiling.”
The most devastating in the entire thread, though, is the French saying, “go back home, your mother made you waffles.” If someone said this to me, they would need a dustpan to sweep up the dust of me. If someone said this to me, they’d have to put in the newspaper I wasn’t mad. If someone said this to me, I’d think about the time my 5th grade teacher goaded the entire class to laugh at me because she was wrong about Berlin being on the border between East and West Germany, but I was right! If someone said this to me, all the liquid in my body would heat to one thousand degrees and my skin would melt. If someone said this to me, I’d move away and change my name and miss my family. If someone said this to me, the yellowjackets inside my chest would chew their way out and then sting ME for making them chew through bones. If someone said this to me, all of the songs I’ve heard plus all of the songs I haven’t would play at once inside my brain resulting in a symphony of anguish. If someone said this to me, I would go into debt buying a yacht hoping a gang of orcas wearing dead salmon on their heads would sink it.
Seven benign words on their own collocated into a soul-destroying eviscerator punctuated by a normally pleasant breakfast item. I told the very tall Chris Piasick about this saying and he drew it.
I’m sure there are science or moral reasons I shouldn’t use Jason’s “World’s Best Pancake Recipe” in my waffle maker, but I don’t care, I’ve been doing it for years and the resulting waffles are fabulous.
“What would happen if you spent a nanosecond on the surface of the sun? Would it warm you up, burn you to a cinder, or do nothing at all?”
Watch a stone pine grow from a seed harvested from a pinecone into a small tree, a 2-year growth period compressed into just 110 seconds through the ✨magic✨ of time lapse photography. Don’t you snicker…it is magic! Its invention in the 1870s made it possible to observe, study, and appreciate objects and events in entirely new ways — it’s literal time travel.
Look at feisty confectionary upstart Skittles trying to get in on the NERDS Gummy Cluster candy innovation money bazooka. Freeze-dried Skittles? They sound terrible. I must try them.
This is a really interesting video about something called the gang-nail plate, a construction innovation that enabled larger roofs to be built on houses, removed the need for internal load-bearing walls, and made the process of construction cheaper & more efficient.
While it helped streamline building processes and cut costs, it also encouraged rapid housing expansion and larger, more resource-intensive homes. The result was an architectural shift that contributed to suburban sprawl, increased energy demands, and homes increasingly treated as commodities rather than unique, handcrafted spaces. These changes reverberated through building codes, real estate markets, and even family life, influencing how we interact with our homes and one another.
The story of gang-nail plate illustrates an inescapable reality of capitalist economics: companies tend not to pass cost savings from efficiency gains onto consumers…they just sell people more of it. And people mostly go along with it because who doesn’t want a bigger house for the same price as a smaller one 10 years ago or a 75” TV for far less than a 36” TV would have cost 8 years ago or a 1/4-lb burger for the same price as a regular burger a decade ago? (via @mariosundar.bsky.social)
I really like this: “If you think about it, the very best books are really just extremely long spells that turn you into a different person for the rest of your life.” —Jonathan Edward Durham
Watching these expert restorers mend & refresh a pair of vintage Star Wars posters (neither of which features the logo we’re familiar with today and one of which is signed by the designer) is both fascinating and relaxing. It’s like the posters are having a spa day: bit of a soak, a gentle scrub, some light bodywork, and voila, you’re brand new. (via meanwhile)
Evan Gershkovich, recently freed by the Putin regime, has the lead byline on a story revealing the secret Russian agency that was responsible for his arrest and is “leading the biggest campaign of internal repression since the Stalin era”.
Six Childhood Scourges We’ve Forgotten About, Thanks to Vaccines. “Parents in the early 1950s lived with a terror: the substantial prospect that their child could touch the wrong toy and end up in a wheelchair, an iron lung or a grave.”
Museums should be free, but if they can’t be free, they should be free for kids, so good job anonymous MAM donor. The Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) will now be free for kids age 12 and under through an anonymous gift of $3.54 million.
Wow, look at this video of wild skating — a thin layer of water on the ice makes for an unbelievable visual effect. It’s like skating on a mirror.
I’m sorry, but if you need to fact-check an interview with your Person of the Year to this degree, maybe you should have picked someone who is not a liar and a con man.
The largest nuclear weapon ever tested was Tsar Bomba, a 50-megaton device detonated by the Soviet Union in 1961. That made it “3,300 times as powerful” as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — an almost unimaginable level of potential destructive power. But Tsar Bomba wasn’t even close to being the biggest nuclear weapon ever conceived. Meet Project Sundial, courtesy of Edward Teller, one of the inventors of the hydrogen bomb, and his colleagues at Los Alamos:
Only a few months later, in July 1954, Teller made it clear he thought 15 megatons was child’s play. At a secret meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, Teller broached, as he put it, “the possibility of much bigger bangs.” At his Livermore laboratory, he reported, they were working on two new weapon designs, dubbed Gnomon and Sundial. Gnomon would be 1,000 megatons and would be used like a “primary” to set off Sundial, which would be 10,000 megatons.
10,000 megatons. In the video above, Kurzgesagt speculates that exploding a bomb of that size would result in a fireball “up to 50 kilometers in diameter, larger than the visible horizon”, a magnitude 9 earthquake, a noise that can be heard around the entire Earth, a 400 km in which everything is “instantly set on fire – every tree, house, person”, and, eventually, the deaths of most of the Earth’s population.
Sundial would bring about an apocalyptic nuclear winter, where global temperatures suddenly drop by 10°C, most water sources would be contaminated and crops would fail everywhere. Most people in the world would die.
Fun fact: Edward Teller was one of Stanley Kubrick’s inspirations for the bomb-giddy character of Dr. Strangelove in the 1964 film of the same name.
A list of medieval English dog names, including Fyndewell, Sturdy, Plodder, Harmeles, Mercurye, Paris, Achilles, Jeester, Beste-of-all, Pretiboy, and Havegoodday.
This is interesting and somewhat counterintuitive: “Fare-free transit is not an environmental policy. The reason is simple: It doesn’t reduce driving.” People shift trips from walking and biking but drivers keep driving.
For his book Feed the Planet: A Photographic Journey to the World’s Food (Bookshop), George Steinmetz travelled the world with his drone, spending “a decade documenting food production in more than 36 countries on 6 continents, 24 US states, and 5 oceans”.
In striking aerial images, he captures the massive scale of 21st-century agriculture that has sculpted 40 percent of the Earth’s surface.
He explores the farming of staples like wheat and rice, the cultivation of vegetables and fruits, fishing and aquaculture, and meat production. He surveys traditional farming in diverse cultures, and he penetrates vast agribusinesses that fuel international trade. From Kansas wheat fields to a shrimp cocktail’s origins in India to cattle stations in Australia larger than some countries, Steinmetz tracks the foods we eat back to land and sea, field and factory. He takes us places that most of us never see, although our very lives depend on them.
You can read more (and watch a video) about the project and view a bunch of photos from the book.
I missed this back in August: the excellent Art of the Title site is on hiatus due to lack of funds (in part due to a skyrocketing Vimeo bill). Join me in supporting them? And can anyone at Vimeo help w/ their video hosting?
Tressie McMillan Cottom: “Whether you call it crony capitalism or just an unfair economy, the market sets the rules for which lives matter. We have set up a system of interlocking ninth circles of hell for all of our basic needs.”
Great Casey Johnston piece on how chronic pain & capitalism intersect in contemporary America. “The safety net they were promised would back up their commitment not only isn’t there, but is actually more like a spider’s web that will entangle them…”
“The planet Uranus and its five biggest moons may not be the dead sterile worlds that scientists have long thought.” A new analysis of Voyager 2 data suggests a powerful solar storm distorted the previous analysis.
I just updated the 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide, including some gifts for people you hate (ugly decanters, Baby Yoda s&p shakers). Years ago, a work colleague received a *turtle* as a wedding gift. What’s the worst gift you’ve ever given or received?
Lawson’s, a convenience store in Japan, has begun selling Nomu mayo, a drinkable mayonnaise forgetting the important adage: all mayo is drinkable if you believe in yourself.
The only catch for pedantic mayonnaise lovers is that the label clarifies that Nomu mayo is a “mayonnaise-style drink” and “not mayonnaise”. Currently in a “test sale period”, it still remains to be seen if Nomu mayo actually appeals to Japanese customers, who are used to the thicker and richer taste of Japanese mayo, as opposed to more Western varieties.
Unrelated, the best idea I ever had for a reality television program was “Uh Oh, It’s Mayo!” The premise being kind of like Cake or Not Cake (though this idea is from 2008) where the host goes around offering people the opportunity to taste different food products with some of them being 100% mayonnaise. It even had a theme song, the tune of which you’ll have to imagine unless you want to text me so I can send you a voice memo of it, but the lyrics are, “What’s in the pie, I don’t know. Uh oh it’s mayo!” Call me, Bravo.
Holiday Terms & Conditions (A Christmas Album). Lyrics include: “It’s beginning to look a lot like lawsuits, everywhere you scroll…” and “I don’t want a lot for Christmas, just my intellectual property rights…”
At an event last month marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, actor Bryan Cranston read a passage from the book (it’s about 13 minutes long):
From Literary Hub:
After some loving jabs at the devotion this book inspires and its notorious length (“There are only 50 chapters…”), Cranston reads from Power Broker’s opening pages. The performance is fun, and Cranston gets an ad-libbed laugh by archly reading “Shea Stadium,” a part of Moses’ legacy that was demolished and replaced in 2009. Cranston’s also reads some of the famous list sections that Caro rattles off in The Power Broker’s opening chapters. The drumbeat of names is Caro’s attempt to contextualize the scale of Moses’ impact, a technique cribbed from The Aeneid.
Recently found: a message in a bottle at an archaeological dig left there in 1825 by an archaeologist. “It was an absolutely magic moment. We knew there had been excavations here in the past, but to find this message from 200 years ago…”
Racing’s Deadliest Day. After the 1955 Le Mans disaster, “it would be another 40 years before Mercedes got back into racing”. (In the meantime, they pioneered “anti-lock brakes, anti-collision radar systems, and other consumer safety technologies”.)
Monument Valley 3 is out today on iOS & Android and is free to play with a Netflix subscription.
In the wake of the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, a book published in 2010 by Rutgers Law professor Jay Feinman has hit the bestseller charts: Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It. The book’s title is a reference to an insurance industry strategy of denying legitimate claims to boost profits. Bullet casings at the scene of the shooting referenced the same strategy: they were labelled “deny”, “defend”, and “depose”.
The introduction to the book is available online and it describes the origin of delay, deny, defend:
Delay, deny, defend violates the rules for handling claims that are recognized by every company, taught to adjusters, and embodied in law. Within the vast bureaucracy of insurance companies, actuaries assess risks, underwriters price policies and evaluate prospective policyholders, and agents market policies. The claims department’s only job is to pay what is owed, no more but no less. A classic text used to train adjusters, James Markham’s The Claims Environment, states the principle: “The essential function of a claim department is to fulfill the insurance company’s promise, as set forth in the insurance policy… The claim function should ensure the prompt, fair, and efficient delivery of this promise.”
Beginning in the 1990s, many major insurance companies reconsidered this understanding of the claims process. The insight was simple. An insurance company’s greatest expense is what it pays out in claims. If it pays out less in claims, it keeps more in profits. Therefore, the claims department became a profit center rather than the place that kept the company’s promise.
A major step in this shift occurred when Allstate and other companies hired the megaconsulting firm McKinsey & Company to develop new strategies for handling claims. McKinsey saw claims as a “zero-sum game,” with the policyholder and the company competing for the same dollars. No longer would each claim be treated on its merits. Instead, computer systems would be put in place to set the amounts policyholders would be offered, claimants would be deterred from hiring lawyers to help with their claims, and settlements would be offered on a take-it-or-litigate basis. If Allstate moved from “Good Hands” to “Boxing Gloves,” as McKinsey described it, policyholders would either take a lowball offer from the good hands people or face the boxing gloves of extended litigation.
I don’t know about you, but the violence implied by the “Boxing Gloves” metaphor is particularly galling — but also germane to the national conversation we’re currently having about violence, culpability, and who is and isn’t sanctioned by the state to decide who suffers or dies.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has released a pair of visualizations of the phases the Moon will go through in 2025, one for the northern hemisphere above and one for the southern hemisphere below:
Look at that sucker wobble! Each frame of the 4K video represents one hour and there are lots of locations labeled on the map, including the landing sites of the Apollo missions.
But also: How have I never noticed that the Moon is upside-down in the southern hemisphere?! I mean, it makes total sense but I’ve just never noticed or thought it through. 🤯 (via the kid should see this)
If you haven’t had the pleasure, you should double back and read the comments on this post from readers who have noticed things everyone else hasn’t. Not surprised to have gathered a community of extreme noticers.
The old school Oregon Trail video game is being adapted into an action-comedy movie. “The movie will feature a couple of original musical numbers in the vein of Barbie.”
I was reminded recently of Stephen Voss’s lovely book, In Training: a book of bonsai photos (Amazon). Voss has a number of bonsai photo prints for sale as well as some videos of bonsai on his blog. This one is of a tree called Goshin, which has been in training since 1953:
A very simple little browser game: open the microwave door as close to the timer hitting 0:00 as you can without the bell dinging. (My best: 9500.)
Using a video game metaphor, John Scalzi explains straight white male privilege for those straight white males who get hung up on the word “privilege”.
Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?
Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.
You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the “Gay Minority Female” setting? Hardcore.
The New Rules of Media. “Everything is a personality cult, and maybe just a cult. You have to cultivate your own, no matter how small.” (No thank you.)
Willem Dafoe interviewed by Matt Zoller Seitz. “If you make it about you, you’re limited. You have to make it about other people and go toward that.” Great stuff in here about the ‘why’ of craft.
“ProPublica’s Claim File Helper lets you customize a letter requesting the notes and documents your insurer used when deciding to deny you coverage.” Greatest nation in the world, etc.
Sally Rooney: When are we going to have the courage to stop the climate crisis? Multinational corporations are destroying Earth for profit. If we want real change, we have to be willing to threaten those profits.
A thread of some letters people wrote to each other on clay tablets in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago. “I am the servant of my lord. May my lord not withhold a chariot from me.”
As you know, I am passionate about sweet things. All different kinds. So imagine my dismay back in 2017 when I discovered the recipe for Heath Bar Klondike had been changed to remove any trace of Heath Bar bits from the Klondike. It wasn’t just one box of Heathless wonders neither, it was box after box, which I kept buying like some kind of fool. This post has a point past petty dessert-themed grievances, I stg, bear with me. But first, look at this nonsense. (If you want the point, just skip to the last paragraph.)
2017 was a time when Google still worked so I searched to see if anyone else had noticed this change and didn’t find anything. I am not a narcissist, but I can spin a yarn, so the narrative I told myself was I was the only person in the world with the following traits: 1) cares a lot about desserts 2) likes Heath Bar Klondike Bars 3) is stubborn enough to buy a product multiple times after being so wronged and 4) is perceptive enough to notice the lack of Heath Bar bits on the Heath Bar Klondikes.
I did what was customary at the time and complained to Klondike on Twitter. Klondike put me in touch with customer service who insisted my lying eyes hadn’t seen what they saw, and the recipe hadn’t been changed at all. It clearly had because sometime in late 2018, I tried another box and the Heath Bar bits were back. Still not as prevalent as they had been, but back nonetheless.
All this to say at some point, my friend Mike, on the other side of the country, also noticed the lack of bits on his bars and mentioned something about it, which thus made me feel less crazy for noticing it. I was no longer alone.
My most recent example of this phenomenon, is Irish Spring changing the formula in 2022, which many people have mentioned online because the scent changed. I don’t care about any of that, but what does bug me is you used to be able to marry an old bar with a new bar. That is, if you put the sliver of your old bar on to the new bar, it would melt into the new bar. After the formula change this doesn’t happen anymore. You stick the old bar on the new bar and never the twain shall meet. IT DRIVES ME CRAZY.
Anyway, I was wondering if any of y’all have any bugaboos like this where you feel like you’re the only one who knows this is happening. Put it in the comments and feel less alone.
Stay Connected