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  Quick Links for November 2019

November 30
You may recognize some of the names of these Brooklyn slaveholding families from 1790 – Boerum, Nostrand, Bergen, Ditmas, Lefferts, etc.  twitter.com
A short documentary of two rival alt-right groups beefing at a Denny's. This is surreal but also completely predictable.  vimeo.com
November 29
The first magazine profile of Adam Sandler since 1996. "Being rich, he told me later, can buy you a chef or a personal trainer, but it cannot buy the self-control to not pound a whole thing of ice cream on the weekend."  nytimes.com
Go champ Lee Se-dol retires because AI is unbeatable. "I've realized that I'm not at the top even if I become the number one through frantic efforts."  theverge.com
"30 seconds of sunlight on your butthole is the equivalent of a full day of sunlight with your clothes on!"  jezebel.com
November 27
Noah Kalina is publishing a book of his photographs of bedmounds  yoffypress.com
"The Baltimore Museum of Art announced that in the coming year, all new acquisitions will be works by female-identifying artists."  thisiscolossal.com
Ed Yong wrote about the slow heart rate of deep-diving blue whales (2 beats per minute). The piece is designed so that when you're reading it, each paragraph takes one whale heart beat to read. "(Ba-bum.)"  theatlantic.com
Ten Years Ago, I Called Out David Letterman. This Month, We Sat Down to Talk. "It's not often that you speak truth to power and power responds, 'Oops, sorry.'"  vanityfair.com
33 Ways to Remember the 2010s. Unsurprising but still incredible how the internet enabled and infused everything on this list.  nytimes.com
A ranking of movie journalists, from Nightcrawler's Louis Bloom to Anchorman's Ron Burgundy to Woodward & Bernstein in All the President's Men. No Phil Connors from Groundhog Day tho?  theringer.com
Eater takes a tour of the Impossible Foods factory to see how their meatless burger is made  youtube.com
David Lynch explains transcendental meditation, which he's practiced since the beginning of his career  openculture.com
The top 100 films directed by women. The Piano is #1; Lost in Translation, The Hurt Locker, and Lady Bird all make the top 25. I have not seen enough of these...  bbc.com
November 26
On the Origin of Feces  fastcompany.com
"SwarmCloak: Landing of a Swarm of Nano-Quadrotors on Human Arms"  arxiv.org
Why is this cooking video without the food so soothing?  twitter.com
Gorgeous video of a murmuration of starlings trying to avoid the predations of peregrine falcons  vimeo.com
More historical context on what Sam Klein calls "The Great .org Heist"  blogs.harvard.edu
The rights to the .org registry are being sold to a private equity firm and price caps have been removed. I don't know how concerned I should be about this...  savedotorg.org
The process behind the massive photorealistic advertisements hand-painted on the sides of buildings is pretty interesting, especially the "pouncing" technique  youtube.com
Tim Berners-Lee: "I Invented the World Wide Web. Here's How We Can Fix It."  nytimes.com
NYC bans foie gras starting in 2022. Meanwhile, the US production of most chicken, eggs, and pork is much more cruel & unethical and happens on a much larger scale.  nytimes.com
November 25
Nick Paumgarten writes about his year of concussions playing "beer league" hockey. "The thud was thicker than I'd expected. It felt as if my head had been slammed in a car door."  newyorker.com
A recent study of mass shooters reveals the four things they have in common, including "an experience with childhood trauma" and "access to a firearm".  vice.com
Olga Khazan, one of my favorite writers at The Atlantic, has a book coming out in the spring: "Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World".  amazon.com
Information Is Beautiful picks the best data visualizations of 2019  informationisbeautifulawards.com
Will Oremus nails the potential problem with the Cybertruck: "Elon Musk made a pickup truck for Tesla fans, instead of a Tesla for pickup truck fans."  twitter.com
November 22
How to Move Abroad. "You've always dreamed about working by the beach, but how do you make that a reality?"  nytimes.com
Whatever else he was – a saint, an educator, a man of faith – Fred Rogers was also an uncompromising, demanding, workaholic artist.  nytimes.com
The world record for the fastest Formula 1 pitstop is now 1.82 seconds. The footage is incredible...all four tires changed in under 2 sec.  youtube.com
Tesla introduces the Cybertruck. I cannot improve on what @mathowie said about it: “What the truck was he thinking?”  tesla.com
November 21
There's always something interesting in Spencer Wright's The Prepared newsletter. This week's was particularly good.  theprepared.org
People share answers to common questions they get related to their professions. "Literally, all I do as a volcanologist: Yellowstone is not going to erupt & kill us all any minute."  twitter.com
Manufacturers say you should destroy used child car seats because they could be unsafe. But there's no data to back up the claim that car seats expire or grow less safe over time.  marketplace.org
On healthy self-doubt and blowhard syndrome. "We're great the way we are, level-headed self-assessments and all. Stop rewarding them for being jackasses."  xuhulk.tumblr.com
Border Tuner is a interactive public art installation where people shine powerful lights across the US/Mexico border. If lights are shined at each other, a communications channel opens between the two.  bordertuner.net
"Web Design: The Evolution of the Digital World 1990-Today" is a visual history of the pioneering websites that influenced the look & feel of the web today.  amazon.com
Sponges are really good at pumping water  youtube.com
Rex Sorgatz is collecting all of the "best of the 2010s" lists in one place. (It was either going to be me or him and I'm glad it's him.)  fimoculous.com
November 20
142 new geoglyphs have been discovered in Peru with the help of AI technology. The glyphs are ~2000 years old and some are up to 300 feet across.  yamagata-u.ac.jp
Oxford Dictionaries has named its word of the year for 2019: "climate emergency". The shortlisted words all relate to climate change in some way: "flight shame", "plant-based", "ecocide", etc.  languages.oup.com
I have been told by reliable sources that Heather Cox Richardson's "Letters from an American" newsletter is the most informative & level-headed daily recap of the impeachment proceedings.  heathercoxrichardson.substack.com
FYI, The Irishman is opening wider this weekend. For some reason, listings aren't available everywhere yet, so check the official site for showtimes.  theirishman-movie.com
South Dakota's campaign against meth addiction has received national attention due to its cheeky slogan: "Meth. We're on it." (Couldn't help but think of Succession's "We here for you" though...)  onmeth.com
November 19
This is an interesting article about boring machines. Tunnel boring machines.  cat-bus.com
Predictions about the year 2029 using headlines from 2019. "President Xi Will Be Our Stalin", "Racism Will Thrive, But No One Will Say the Word", "Child Separation Will Never Be Forgotten".  nymag.com
Well, everyone knows that Midtown Manhattan sucks. What this blog post presupposes is... maybe it doesn't? (I have always liked Midtown for reasons that are unknown even to myself.)  gothamist.com
Four Favorite Tools, a collection of the coolest tools compiled from the responses of dozens of creative people  amazon.com
Freakonomics: Why Does Tipping Still Exist?  medium.com
Emoji Storm: every emoji being used on Twitter in real time  observablehq.com
Hamidashimono is a whittle-your-own kit for making izakaya-grade chopsticks from wood scraps collected from a family-owned chopstick factory in Japan's Nara prefecture.  hamidashimono.com
Illustrated chronicle of a night spent in a NYC bodega. "1:46am: I just got off a bat mitzvah... I motivate people to dance. There's a lot of new dance moves I learn on TikTok. I learned the Woah and the Milly Rock."  nytimes.com
November 18
Lunch Therapy, an entertaining podcast hosted by Adam Roberts (aka the Amateur Gourmet) in which he "playfully teases out people's psychological issues as we talk about what everyone eats for lunch".  podcasts.apple.com
Find a "Drake beat" on YouTube, google "long breakup text", rap the text over the beat and you've got basically every Drake song  twitter.com
November 17
Every Matt Damon Movie Performance, Ranked  vulture.com
November 15
Singer Rod Stewart is also, surprisingly, a master model railroad builder  bbc.com
The Hayabusa2 spacecraft is headed back to Earth after collecting chunks of an asteroid. "The main spacecraft will sail on past us, but not before ejecting a capsule where the samples are safely stored."  syfy.com
Research from the Salk Institute suggests that intermittent fasting works. "Restricting one’s calorie intake to an 8- to 10-hour window could confer a host of health benefits, including weight loss."  massivesci.com
"Every shot in [Pixar's] Piper is composed of millions of grains of sand, each one of them around 5000 polygons." What? WHAT?!  fxguide.com
Oh my, the replies to this... "If you're in love at the current time, what was the moment you realized it?"  twitter.com
November 14
Taffy Brodesser-Akner's profile of Tom Hanks in the NY Times is a delight. "It doesn't matter why you do nice things; all that matters is that you do them."  nytimes.com
Recent climate activism by Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion, and many others appears to be having an effect, "driving huge increases in individuals and businesses choosing to offset their emissions".  theguardian.com
"How did you decide where to live?" asks @lauraolin. Interesting responses.  twitter.com
"dopamine fasting" *rolls eyes*  nytimes.com
Bond film anagrams. "English Tutor Hoedown" from "The World Is Not Enough" made me LOL.  twitter.com
Leaked emails sent by WH advisor Stephen Miller in 2015/16 included praise for "xenophobic conspiracy theories and eugenics-era immigration laws that Adolf Hitler lauded in 'Mein Kampf.'" What an awful human being.  splcenter.org
November 13
A Curator Boyfriend Is The Hottest Accessory For 2020. Do web curators count? *bats eyelashes*  elle.com
The U.S. Detained a Record 69,550 Migrant Children This Year. "The nearly 70,000 children who spent time in detention in the U.S. is more than anywhere else in the world."  slate.com
Spitting Image is getting a Trump/Brexit-era reboot  designobserver.com
Birds can get drunk from berries and tree fruit that ferment after the first frost, causing unsafe flight. The solution: a bird drunk tank.  audubon.org
Basecamp launches a free plan for "designed specifically for freelancers, students, families, and personal projects"  m.signalvnoise.com
November 12
Mike Bostock wrote a tutorial on how to make animated bar chart races, including code you can fork and drop your data into. What a resource!  observablehq.com
"It's too late for a carbon tax – it's time for a world war against climate change."  fastcompany.com
A list of interesting memos, written by the likes of Steve Jobs & Bill Gates. (Couldn't help but notice the memo writers are all white men though...)  sriramk.com
James Dean will star in a Vietnam-era war movie called Finding Jack. "Dean's performance will be constructed via 'full body' CGI using actual footage and photos. Another actor will voice him."  hollywoodreporter.com
Han Solo with a hat is just a generic cowboy. "Sometimes good design is the act of not putting a hat on someone."  twitter.com
Look, I like memes as much as the next person – narrator: "actually, he doesn't" – but stuff like this is not how history will remember the cultural contribution of the internet. (I hope.)  aux.avclub.com
November 11
Brent Simmons celebrates 20 years of blogging. "The best time to start a blog is 20 years ago. The second-best time is today."  inessential.com
The Colossal is one of my favorite websites and they recently introduced a membership program. If you're a Colossal reader, join me in supporting their efforts!  thisiscolossal.com
Climate scientists badly underestimated how quickly the effects of climate change would arrive. Here's how they got it wrong. "Many worst-case scenarios from that time are now realities."  nytimes.com
Steve Wozniak & David Heinemeier Hansson allege that Goldman Sachs' Apple Card algorithm discriminates against women applicants. "We love our technology but we are no longer in control."  bloomberg.com
November 9
Rating the horse emojis from iOS, Facebook, Android, etc. "This horse is lacking both mouth and nostrils, which could lead to exercise intolerance."  twitter.com
November 8
A company called Emergy Foods is growing "steaks" made of fungi with a process that's a bit like making cheese or miso.  newfoodeconomy.org
November 7
Communities facing relocation as they struggle with melting ground and a rising sea. "Pelly Island, a remote island about 100 kilometres west of Tuktoyaktuk, recede as much as 30-40 metres a year."  vice.com
You've got to admire the dedication. A very, very detailed look at all the changes and additions to the emojis in iOS 13.2, including falafel, maté, and a gender-neutral zombie.  blog.emojipedia.org
November 6
Lovely project in Chicago, where a 70-foot long section of sidewalk is now paved with yellow bricks to mark the former home of Frank Baum, author of “The Wizard of Oz.”  thisiscolossal.com
Paging all modern oligarchs, and French ministries and museums. “The ‘Château du Bouilh’ was tailor made for the last King of France, and has been left virtually untouched since the country’s Revolution.” It’s now for sale.  messynessychic.com
November 5
Incredible research by professor Suzanne Simard. "Never underestimate the intelligence of trees. Plants communicate, nurture their seedlings, and get stressed."  nautil.us
The pronghorn is the second-fastest animal for top speed but first for longer distances. Interestingly, it doesn't have natural predators anymore and doesn't need that speed. It's also where we learn that there was a now extinct American Cheetah!!  generalist.academy
November 4
A short video version of this has been making the rounds but the full page browser version (navigate with the arrows) of Neal Agarwal's The Size of Space is even more impressive and mind melting.  neal.fun
Brisk Norway Landscapes where forests are rendered crimson, while leaving the skies and water a cool blue.  mossandfog.com
November 1
Funny yet very smart (and very long) comic strip about having “The Quantum Computing Talk.”  smbc-comics.com
“At any given moment more than a dozen interstellar visitors at least as large as ‘Oumuamua are passing through the Solar System.”  sciencemag.org
October 2019 Archives »
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