kottke.org posts about lists
The NY Times recently asked 100 scientists from across dozens of disciplines: “What is a big unanswered question in your field?” Here are some of their questions that caught my eye:
4. When and where did the cognitive capacities that made language, mathematics and complex societies possible first emerge?
9. Why does full writing — complete sentences that can make sense to readers out of context — appear so late in human history?
37. Why are humans the only species with a chin?
40. What is dark matter?
48. Do organisms use quantum effects, such as entanglement and superposition?
54. Will we ever decipher Linear A, Cypro-Minoan and other important ancient scripts?
61. What would be the global impact of a supervolcanic eruption in modern times?
70. Blue whales are the biggest animals ever to exist on Earth. Where are their babies born?
81. Chemical reactions have had a speed limit, described more than a century ago. Can we learn to surpass it?
93. Can environmental sustainability be achieved under capitalism?
In the wake of Patrick Stewart’s death the other day, I watched a couple episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation — the two-part series finale All Good Things… in fact.1 Wanting to add more Picard-centric episodes to my watchlist, I did some research.
There are several lists out there of the episodes of ST:TNG and Star Trek: Picard where Captain Jean-Luc Picard particularly shines. Some episodes appear on nearly every list; these are the consensus favorites:
- The Inner Light. “Captain Jean-Luc Picard is struck unconscious by an energy beam from an alien probe. While just 25 minutes pass for the rest of the crew between Picard being struck unconscious and eventually regaining consciousness on the Enterprise bridge floor, the probe makes Picard experience 40 years of lifetime as Kamin, a humanoid scientist whose planet is threatened by the nova of its sun.”
- Family. “Captain Jean-Luc Picard visits his brother’s family in France, where he begins to come to terms with his treatment by the Borg.”
- The Best of Both Worlds. “In this two part episode, the Enterprise must battle the Borg who are intent on conquering Earth, with a captured and assimilated Captain Picard as their emissary.”
- Darmok. “The crew of the Enterprise is unable to establish meaningful communication with the crew of an alien vessel, which is resolved by the struggle of the ships’ captains to defend each other from a vicious beast.”
- All Good Things… “The plot involves Captain Jean-Luc Picard jumping through time and the formation of an anomaly that defies causality, the whole situation being a test that allows Picard to demonstrate human potential to the Q Continuum by making an intuitive leap of faith to understand the cause of, and how to eliminate, the anomaly before it destroys humanity.”
- The Measure of a Man. “In this episode, the rights of the android officer Lt. Commander Data are threatened by a scientist who wishes to dismantle him to produce replicas of him. Captain Jean-Luc Picard fights in a Starfleet court for Data’s right of self-determination, not to be declared mere property of Starfleet, while Commander William Riker is obliged to argue on behalf of the scientist.”
- Starship Mine. “While the Enterprise is evacuated for hazardous maintenance, Captain Picard must, alone, contend with thieves posing as a work crew aboard the ship. The plot has been noted for its similarity to the 1988 action film Die Hard.”
- Chain of Command. “Jean-Luc Picard is relieved of command of the Enterprise and reassigned to lead a covert mission, while his replacement is assigned to deal with the Cardassians openly. The second part of the episode is noted for the intense performance of Patrick Stewart and its depiction of brutal torture and interrogation scenes.”
- Tapestry. “Q allows a supposedly deceased Captain Jean-Luc Picard to re-visit a pivotal event in his youth that he since regrets. Picard changes the past, but upon returning to the present he finds that the event made him the man he became.”
- The Drumhead. “An explosion aboard the Enterprise leads to a high-level investigation headed by Admiral Norah Satie, a retired officer renowned for her skill at exposing conspiracies.”
You can check out the lists at Screen Rant, Collider, Comicbook.com, That Love Podcast, and Popular Mechanics for more good Picard episodes.
The movies seemed to be out of scope for these lists, but I’ve always loved First Contact and Picard’s unhinged pursuit of the Borg — “The line must be drawn here!”
Last week, the NY Times dropped a list of The 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century, as picked by a panel of “more than 500 influential stars, showrunners and other notable names in the world of TV”. The rankings have already been dissected online six ways from Sunday, but the link got lost in my forest of browser tabs and so here it is, a bit late but still interesting.
Here are some of my personal favorites from the list and arrowed opinions on whether some should be higher or lower on the list: Halt and Catch Fire (↑), Reservation Dogs (↑), Shogun (↑↑↑), The Great British Bake Off, Planet Earth, Downton Abbey (↓), The Good Place (↑), Normal People, Schitt’s Creek, Andor (↑↑), Severance (↓), Band of Brothers (↑), Deadwood (↑), The Crown (↓), Chernobyl (↑), The Americans (↑), Six Feet Under (↓), Girls (↓), Arrested Development, The Office (US), 30 Rock, Game of Thrones, Fleabag (↑), Succession, Mad Men, The Wire (↑), and Breaking Bad (↓).
There are many excellent shows that didn’t make the list — the one that immediately pops into my mind is My Brilliant Friend. As for stuff that’s on there that perhaps could be replaced with something more worthy, I’ll hold my tongue. I do think the inclusion of some of the more recent shows on the list will not age well when this is looked back on in, say, 10 years.
I keep a list of things I want to do for KDO in Apple Notes, organized into four sections: small, medium, large, and longshots/obsolete. This note contains tweaks, bug fixes, code refactoring, new site features, roadmap items,1 infrastructure migrations, potential project ideas, vague prompts, and even things I don’t want to do but should maybe consider doing anyway at some point. I keep already-completed items on the list so progress can be gauged, noticed, and appreciated.
I was looking at the list today, and thought I’d share some of the items with you:
- Reposting social posts (in comment threads) for members
- Do a podcast
- Publish posts to Instagram. (How?)
- Implement site-wide search
- Make newsletter daily?
- Write a book based on kottke.org
- Sell Blue Line Air Express t-shirts
- Build a Substack competitor
- Make a gift link search engine
Some of these are partly finished or would take very little to implement if I wanted. Some will never happen. Weirdly, some of the projects and site tweaks I most want to make aren’t even on my list. They live only in my head and I mull them over in the shower or while walking until they’re “done” enough to start working on. I guess maybe ideas don’t go on the list unless they’re not that urgent or interesting.
Do you have to-do lists for your creative projects? Care to share an item or two with the group?
Wes Anderson steps into the mobile Criterion Closet to select some films that he enjoys.
One unsurprising thing about this video: Anderson says he has his own Criterion closet at home with all of the Criterion films. That’s maybe a $40-50K investment? (He probably gets them free from Criterion tho.) I wonder how many films he watches a day? Two? Three? If Soderbergh’s yearly watch/read lists are any indication, it’s probably in that ballpark.
One surprising thing about this video: I was expecting Anderson to go for Kurosawa, Tati, Truffaut, Welles, and some other of his big influences but instead selected family friendly fare suitable for a trip. The man has a wide array of influences. Here’s the full list:
The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)
The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch, 1943)
Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933)
The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)
Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)
Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024)
Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982)
Charulata (Satyajit Ray, 1964)
I love seeing Flow on there. What a great little film.
See also Wes Anderson Talks Up Some of His Favorite Movies in a Parisian Video Store and this delightful video from 20 years ago or so featuring Anderson and Jason Schwartzman picking out music & movies in a Borders:
I ran across this post on Threads the other day: “What’s the hardest record in sports history to ever break?” A sampling of the replies:
- “Bill Russell’s 11 NBA championships including 8 in a row.”
- “Lionel Messi scored 91 goals in the 2012 calendar year.”
- “Cy Young 749 complete games.”
- “Fernando Tatis (Sr) - 2 Grand Slams in the same inning. Most of the others mentioned here are highly improbable, but there’s no way anyone ever hits 3 slams in one inning.”
- “Lionel Messi’s 8 Ballon d’or”
- “Sir Donald Bradman’s batting average in Test cricket. His 99.94.”
- “Russian wrestler Aleksandr Karelin. Undefeated for 13 years. 887 wins and 2 losses, both by single point.”
Last year, The Athletic offered a list of their own, which included Wayne Gretzky’s 1,963 career assists, the furthest goal in soccer (96.01 meters), Michael Phelps’ 23 Olympic golds, and Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game.
Poking around the internet a bit, there’s also FloJo’s 100m record, UConn women’s basketball team’s 111 wins in a row, Cal Ripken’s consecutive game streak, and Simone Biles’ 30 world championship medals.
Any additions to the list?
Every year since 2016, Literary Hub has asked a group of book cover designers for their picks for the best book covers of the year. Using 10 years of data, here are their picks for the best covers of the last decade. I’ve included a few of my personal favorites below.
For finding a good book, there is no substitute for going into your local independent bookstore and browsing what’s on the front tables, the bestsellers shelf, and the staff picks. But bookshop.org is an amalgam of online sales some of the best indie bookstores in the country (and websites like kottke.org), so the list of their bestselling nonfiction books for 2025 is pretty darned good. Here are a few from the list that I’ve featured (or should have featured) here this year:
Bit too late to order in time for the holidays, but there are also bookshop.org digital gift cards.
One of my favorite end-of-year lists is Tom Whitwell’s annual record of 52 things he’s learned in the past year. Some favorites of mine from the 2025 installment:
4. You can unlock the wheels on a shopping cart by playing sounds on your phone. [Joseph Gabay]
5. In the UK, water companies and offshore rigs communicate by bouncing radio waves off trails created by millions of small meteorites as they burn up in the atmosphere. [Meteor Communications Ltd]
14. Nearly 0.7% of US exports, by value, are human blood or blood products. [dynomight]
16. The Ceremonial Bugle is a small plastic device that slides into a real bugle and allows a non-musician to perform at a funeral. It has a discreet switch to select ‘Taps’, ‘Last Post’ or one of ten other calls. [Simon Britton via Nicolas Collins]
27. Researchers at MIT have developed a fibre computer that is stretchable and machine washable with 6 hours of battery life, weighing about as much as a sheet of A4 paper. [Nikhil Gupta & co]
49. Marchetti’s Constant is the idea that throughout human history, from cave dwellers to ancient Greeks to 21st century Londoners, people tend to commute for about an hour a day — 30 minutes out, 30 minutes home. So faster travel leads to longer distances, not less time. [Cesare Marchetti, plus a 2025 update]
In a 2014 preface for his 1978 book The Ohlone Way, a description of how the indigenous peoples of California’s Bay Area lived before Europeans arrived, Malcolm Margolin shared a list of what he thought constituted a healthy society:
- Sustainable relationship with the environment. In a healthy society, the present generation doesn’t strip-mine the soil, water, forest, minerals, etc., leaving the future impoverished and the beauty of the world degraded.
- Few outcasts. A healthy society will have relatively few outcasts — prisoners, homeless, unemployed, insane.
- Relative egalitarianism. The gap between those with the most wealth and power and those with the least should be moderate, and those with the least should feel protected, cared for, or rewarded in some other way.
- Widespread participation in the arts.
- Moderation or control of individual power.
- Economic security attained through networks of family, friendship, and social reciprocity rather than through the individual hoarding of goods.
- Love of place. The feeling that one lives with emotional attachment to an area that is uniquely beautiful, abundant in natural recourses, and rich in personal meaning.
- Knowing one’s place in the world. A sense, perhaps embodied in spiritual practice, that the individual is an insignificant part of a larger, more abiding universe.
- Work is done willingly, or at least with a minimum of resentment.
- Lots of laughter.
(thx, swati)
In looking over the shortlist for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 competition, I thought about how I’ve seen thousands or even tens of thousands of incredible astronomical images and yet there are always new, mind-blowing things to see. Like this 500,000-km Solar Prominence Eruption by PengFei Chou:
Or Close-up of a Comet by Gerald Rhemann and Michael Jäger:
Or Electric Threads of the Lightning Spaghetti Nebula by Shaoyu Zhang (Lightning Spaghetti Nebula!!!):
Or Dragon Tree Trails by Benjamin Barakat:
Teasingly, the official site only has a selection of the shortlisted entries but if you poke through the posts at Colossal, PetaPixel, and DIY Photography, you can find some more of them. (via colossal)
In 1966, Huey Newton & Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party and wrote a 10-point manifesto of what the group stood for and what they wanted. Here’s the full text of the plan.
4. We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter of Human Beings.
We believe that if the White Landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. We Want Education for Our People That Exposes The True Nature Of This Decadent American Society. We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History And Our Role in the Present-Day Society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
Online bookseller bookshop.org recently released a list of their bestselling books of the year (so far). The list is quite a bit different than what you might see from larger booksellers and looks more like what your local bookstore has on their bestseller list. The top five:
- On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder. “Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”
- Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. “An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.”
- Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins. “As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes. Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances.”
- Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. “In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable’ books may be unmatched.”
- We Can Do Hard Things by Abby Wambach, Amanda Doyle, and Glennon Doyle. “When you travel through a new country, you need a guidebook. When you travel through love, heartbreak, joy, parenting, friendship, uncertainty, aging, grief, new beginnings — life — you need a guidebook, too. We Can Do Hard Things is the guidebook for being alive.”
Others on the list that caught my eye:
- One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. “From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values.”
- James by Percival Everett. “A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view.” (So, so good.)
- Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba. “What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.” (Buy direct from the publisher.)
- The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. “A revolutionary program for personal renewal, The Artist’s Way will help get you back on track, rediscover your passions, and take the steps you need to change your life.” (I think I saw, via Insta, Doechii reading this recently.)
- Bad Company by Megan Greenwell. “A timely work of singular reportage and a damning indictment of the private equity industry told through the stories of four American workers whose lives and communities were upended by the ruinous effects of private equity takeovers.”
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)
For The Guardian, the film critic Guy Lodge has complied a list of 25 films that “shed light on the US under Trump”. From the introduction by filmmaker Alex Gibney:
This is a dire moment in the US. It’s a moment where there’s an opportunity for people with a lot of money to rip apart all of the guidelines enacted by the Roosevelt administration, way back in the day, to guard against the brutality of unfettered capitalism. Capitalists like to have all the power that they want, whenever they want it. They’re not much interested in democracy either, it turns out. Nor, apparently, the rule of law. The government is not the solution — it’s the problem. And now a vengeful president who just wanted a get-out-of-jail-free card is going to punish his enemies and show us all how to destroy the American administrative state by using the big stick of Elon Musk’s chequebook.
Here are a few of the films and their trailers — you can check out the article for the rest.
I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2016):
Election (Alexander Payne, 1999):
White Noise (Daniel Lombroso, 2020) {Note: this is not the DeLillo adaptation}:
American Factory (Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, 2019):
I’m curious…what films would you add to the list?
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