kottke.org posts about lists
Gwyneth Paltrow runs an online lifestyle site/newsletter called GOOP. It has both been widely panned by snarky news outlets and proved successful at attracting subscribers who would otherwise shy away from such things. (Hello, A & M!)
Anyway, the most recent GOOP newsletter shares DVD rental picks from some of Gwyneth’s friends…you know, Sofia Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson. The inexplicable crush I have on Gwyneth was only strengthened by this bit of her introduction:
I’m not one of those film people who can tell you who the cinematographer was on On The Waterfront or who most influenced Truffaut. When it comes to knowledge of film history, I’m semi-rubbish (a friend of mine once left the dinner table when I admitted I had never seen one of the most famous and most well-regarded films of all time). I can do the whole rap at the end of The Revenge of the Nerds and all of Jeff Spicoli’s dialogue, but sadly, my expertise ends there.
Like I said, inexplicable. If you could only see the fun time she and I are having in my head as we quote memorable Fast Times at Ridgemont High moments to each other. She loves my Spicoli impression!
Time has a list of ten ideas that are changing the world right now. This is not a typical mindless list (e.g. green energy! um…more green energy)…there’s some good stuff here. Jobs Are The New Assets asserts now that making money with money (i.e. stocks and property) while you sit on your ass all days doesn’t fly, your job is your main source of income and financial stability.
All the while, we blissfully ignored a little concept economists like to call human capital. The cognition you’ve got up there in your head — your education and training — it’s worth something. We can extract value not just from our homes and our portfolios but from ourselves as well. The mechanism for extracting that value? A job. “The income you earn from working is like the stream of interest income you might get from owning a bond,” says Johns Hopkins University economist Christopher Carroll. “Think of it as a dividend on your human wealth.”
Michael Lewis recently said something similar in an interview for Big Think.
When you think of making money, think of what you do for a living, not the financial markets.
Amortality is my favorite entry on the list. It’s a more general version of the Grups theory put forth in New York magazine three years ago. An amortal person is someone who lives a similar lifestyle all throughout their life, from their teens to their 80s.
For all the optimism about how science may prolong life, mice and humans keep turning up their toes. No matter how much the government bullies and cajoles, amortals rarely make adequate provision for their final years. Yet even as faltering amortals strain the public purse, so their determination to wring every drop out of life brings benefits to the private sector. They prop up the tottering music industry, are lifelong consumers of gadgets and gizmos, keep gyms busy and colorists in demand. From their youth, when they behave as badly as adults, to their dotage, when they behave as badly as youngsters, amortals hate to be pigeonholed by age.
From the Guilty Secrets survey by Spread the Word, the top ten books that people say that they’ve read but haven’t.
1. 1984 by George Orwell (42%)
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (31%)
3. Ulysses by James Joyce (25%)
4. The Bible (24%)
5. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (16%)
6. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (15%)
7. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (14%)
8. In Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (9%)
9. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (6%)
10. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (6%)
I’ve read 1, 6, bits of 4, and started on 10 but didn’t get more than 20 pages in. (Sorry, Dawkins!) This is a UK-centric list…I wonder what the US list would look like.
Fifty reasons why Return of the Jedi sucks. Number one with a bullet is “Ewoks, Ewoks, Ewoks”.
But aside from what we see onscreen, the Ewoks are miserable little creatures for a completely different reason: they are the single clearest example of Lucas’ willingness to compromise the integrity of his Trilogy in favor of merchandising dollars. How intensely were the Ewoks marketed? Consider this: “Ewok” is a household word, despite the fact that it’s never once spoken in the film.
When I was a kid, I had a friend who knew all the names of even the most minor characters from the Star Wars movies and had no idea where he got that information. Was there a fourth movie I didn’t know about? It wasn’t until much later that I realized his extensive collection of SW action figures had filled in all the blanks for him.
BTW, the current definition of an Ewok on Wikipedia reads:
Ewoks are a fictional species of teddy bear-like hunter-gatherers that inhabit the forest moon of Endor and Settlement operations at Goldman Sachs.
Goldman, you’ve been burned!
The Online Colleges blog has collected a list of the oddest college courses in the US, including Arguing with Judge Judy: : Popular ‘Logic’ on TV Judge Shows, The Science of Superheroes, and The Strategy of StarCraft.
I’m sure that in South Korea one could major in StarCraft, but it’s a bit strange seeing a college course about the game here in the US. The class uses StarCraft to teach the art of war, discussing strategy and tactics in the famous game.
Bruce Haley shares his Tao of War Photography.
11. Do you believe in a personal, loving God who really cares about us mortals down here…? Go to a few war zones and famine areas and watch all those innocent children die, then answer this question………..
61. Yes, those really are gruesome hacked-up snake parts in that big glass of homebrew you’re expected to chug down, and YES, your hosts will be extremely dishonored and upset if you try to weasel out of it (or if they catch you dumping it under the table when they look away)… quit being such a pussy and just drink the damn thing…..
Wikipedia has a listing of unusual software bugs — “mostly named after scientists who discovered counterintuitive things” — that are difficult to identify or fix.
A mandelbug (named after fractal innovator Benoit Mandelbrot) is a computer bug whose causes are so complex that its behavior appears chaotic. This word also implies that the speaker thinks it is a bohrbug rather than a heisenbug. Some use mandelbug to describe a bug whose behavior does not appear chaotic, but whose causes are so complex that there is no practical solution. An example of this is a bug caused by a flaw in the fundamental design of the entire system.
My all-time favorite bug is still the 500-mile email. (thx, jake)
Similar to the list of books That Changed The World is this list of mono-histories, biographies of singular items.
Salt: a world history, by Mark Kurlansky - Published in 2002, Kurlansky’s history of the world’s most important commodity is probably the best known mono-history and the only one to appear on the best-seller lists. I found it fascinating and inspiring. Kurlansky must have enjoyed his foray into mono-history because he’s followed up on Salt with Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell.
Other topics covered by these books are pizza, pencils, and the alphabet. (via rebecca’s pocket (welcome back!))
Update: Several people have noted that Cod was published five years before Salt. (thx, all)
The 10 design commandments of Dieter Rams.
Good design is innovative. It does not copy existing product forms, nor does it produce any kind of novelty for the sake of it. The essence of innovation must be clearly seen in all functions of a product. The possibilities in this respect are by no means exhausted. Technological development keeps offering new chances for innovative solutions.
Rams was the influential designer behind many Braun products and described his design approach as “less, but better”. (via df)
Tom took these rules for a gunfight and adapted some of them to other contexts.
Eating Contest:
8. If you are not chewing, you should be swallowing, communicating, and running. Yell “Fire!” Why “Fire”? Cops will come with the Fire Department, sirens often scare off the sea gulls, or at least cause then to lose concentration and will…. and who is going to summon help if you yell “Hot Dog,” “Ketchup” or “Worchestire?”
Bodyguard Carrying Contest:
16. Don’t drop your guard.
Along the lines of “what’s your mother’s maiden name?”, here are some even more secure user authentication questions.
What time was it when, in a drunken rage, you threw your novel into the fire?
If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently?
1. Forget about knives, bats and fists. Bring a gun. Preferably, bring at least two guns. Bring all of your friends who have guns. Bring four times the ammunition you think you could ever need.
10. Someday someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it is empty.
21. Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet if necessary, because they may want to kill you.
27. Regardless of whether justified of not, you will feel sad about killing another human being. It is better to be sad than to be room temperature.
See all 28 rules here.
The best lines from Star Wars that are improved by replacing a word with “pants”.
I find your lack of pants disturbing.
Chewie and me got into a lot of pants more heavily guarded than this.
I cannot teach him. The boy has no pants.
In his pants you will find a new definition of pain and suffering.
Han’ll have those pants down - we’ve gotta give him more time!
I have altered the pants, pray that I don’t alter them further.
Matthew Baldwin lists sixteen of his favorite mindfuck films, including La Jetée, Dark City, and Memento.
As I stood in line to buy my tickets, I noticed a small hand-lettered sign in the box-office window that read, “People arriving five or more minutes late to Memento will not be allowed entrance.” This was at a small art-house cinema — not one to place arbitrary restrictions on its patrons — and it struck me as odd that the limitation applied solely to this one film, so I asked the cashier about it when I reached the front of the line.
“You can’t understand anything about the film if you miss the first five minutes,” she told me with a roll of her eyes. “We’ve had late-comers charge out here after the end and demand that we explain the whole thing to them.”
Baldwin gives Primer some much-deserved love, which is always appreciated around here.
Bob Woodward offers ten lessons that the Obama administration can learn from the eight long years that George W. Bush held office. The advice basically boils down to “keep your head out of the sand and your ass”.
[Bush] made probably the most important decision of his presidency — whether to invade Iraq — without directly asking either Powell, Rumsfeld or Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet for their bottom-line recommendations. (Instead of consulting his own father, former president George H.W. Bush, who had gone to war in 1991 to kick the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, the younger Bush told me that he had appealed to a “higher father” for strength.)
(via lined & unlined)
Men’s Health has a listing of the 20 worst foods of 2009, all of which fit the description of “calorie bombs”. For instance, the worst “healthy” sandwich is the Blimpie Veggie Supreme, which contains 1100 calories, and 33 grams of saturated fat. And Jesus, the worst food is a shake from Baskin Robbins that has 2600 calories.
We didn’t think anything could be worse than Baskin Robbins’ 2008 bombshell, the Heath Bar Shake. After all, it had more sugar (266 grams) than 20 bowls of Froot Loops, more calories (2,310) than 11 actual Heath Bars, and more ingredients (73) than you’ll find in most chemist labs. Rather than coming to their senses and removing it from the menu, they did themselves one worse and introduced this caloric catastrophe. It’s soiled with more than a day’s worth of calories and three days worth of saturated fat, and, worst of all, usually takes less than 10 minutes to sip through a straw.
Sasha Frere-Jones lists a bunch of people who are on Twitter.
people who are just back from a really awesome run
people who are involved in “social networking” and optimizing the power of re-Tweeting and “computers”
people who can’t figure out what their kids want to eat
Shaquille O’Neal
people who have never seen snow
people who like Battlestar Galactica
A review of 2008’s best cinematographic moments: part one, part two.
This year the challenge was of a different sort. The field was curiously thin. It wasn’t that the talent wasn’t on display. God knows, a number of the greats were lining up behind the camera this year. But the images weren’t as instantly iconic or as viscerally gripping as they were in 2007, which might have left me a bit disappointed on one hand. Then again, it just made searching for my favorites all the more involved and interesting, and I’m happy to offer my findings to you in this space, even if it meant doubling up.
This was one of my favorite “best of” lists from 2007 and I’m glad to see it return this year.
Update: Hmm, all the permalinks on that site appear to be broken. Maybe check back later?
Wikipedia’s list of confidence tricks page is very entertaining. Consider the pig-in-a-poke:
Pig-in-a-poke originated in the late Middle Ages, when meat was scarce, but apparently rats and cats were not. The con entails a sale of a (suckling) “pig” in a “poke” (bag). The bag ostensibly contains a live healthy little pig, but actually contains a cat (not particularly prized as a source of meat, and at any rate, quite unlikely to grow to be a large hog). If one buys a “pig in a poke” without looking in the bag (a colloquial expression in the English language, meaning “to be a sucker”), the person has bought something of less value than was assumed, and has learned firsthand the lesson caveat emptor.
A trick called the glim-dropper requires a one-eyed accomplice.
One grifter goes into a store and pretends he has lost his glass eye. Everyone looks around, but the eye cannot be found. He declares that he will pay a thousand-dollar reward for the return of his eye, leaving contact information. The next day, an accomplice enters the store and pretends to find the eye. The storekeeper (the intended griftee), thinking of the reward, offers to take it and return it to its owner. The finder insists he will return it himself, and demands the owner’s address. Thinking he will lose all chance of the reward, the storekeeper offers a hundred dollars for the eye. The finder bargains him up to $250, and departs. The one-eyed man, of course, can not be found and does not return.
A con called The Ogged contains a very specific example of its use.
A new con trick born in the age of blogs. For this scam, the con artist creates a pseudonymous internet persona and befriends a group of people online who will become his marks. Then the scammer feigns some terrible disease, such as stomach cancer. Finally, the scammer subtly pushes the idea that his online “friends” could pitch in for something to make him feel better, such as a $700 gift certificate to the French Laundry. After the boon is received, the scam artist claims a miraculous recovery or doctor error. Finally, once the gift certificate has been cashed, the con artist claims that he must “go on hiatus” or even quit blogging altogether.
I can’t find any evidence that the FL gift certificate incident ever happened or documentation of a trick called “The Ogged” anywhere aside from Wikipedia. Anyone? (via bb)
Update: Several people wrote in about “The Ogged”. The inclusion of the term appears to be a joke. A couple of years ago, a blogger named Ogged posted that he had cancer (but not really), he gets a gift certificate to The French Laundry, the cancer comes back, and then it was added to Wikipedia as a joke. (thx, everyone…especially andy)
The 50 most loathsome people in America for 2008. George W. Bush and Barack Obama both make the list but She Who Shall Not Be Named Ever Again is #1. “You” makes the list at #43 and is my favorite.
You’re hopping mad about an auto industry bailout that cost a squirt of piss compared to a Wall Street heist of galactic dimensions, due to a housing crash you somehow have blamed on minorities. It took you six years to figure out what a tool Bush is, but you think Obama will make it all better. You deem it hunky dory that we conduct national policy debates via 8-second clips from “The View.” You think God zapped humans into existence a few thousand years ago, although your appendix and wisdom teeth disagree. You like watching vicious assholes insult each other on TV. You support gun rights, because firing one gives you a chubby. You cuddle falsehoods and resent enlightenment. You think the fact that 43% of whites could stomach voting for an incredibly charismatic and eloquent light-skinned black guy who was raised by white people means racism is over. You think progressive taxation is socialism. 1 in 100 of you are in jail, and you think it should be more. You are shallow, inconsiderate, afraid, brand-conscious, sedentary, and totally self-obsessed. You are American
Exhibit A: You’re more upset by Miley Cyrus’s glamour shots than the fact that you are a grown adult who is upset about Miley Cyrus.
A list like this could spark endless debate: a ranking of all the songs by The Beatles, from #185 (Revolution 9) to #1 (A Day In The Life).
To novice Beatles fans, I warn you not to believe the hype about “Revolution 9.” I’ve listened to it many times over the years, waiting for the light in my head to switch on so I could unlock its mysteries. All I’ve ever gotten out of it is the vague feeling that immediately after listening to it, something is going to rise out from under my bed and butcher me in my sleep.
Each choice is extensively annotated and defended; start here if you want to work your way through them all.
Discover has a list of the top 100 science stories of 2008 (scroll a bit for the whole list). Post-oil, LHC, ice on Mars, cheap genomes, quantum spookiness, etc.
A wide-ranging and carefully considered list of the top 50 special effects shots in movies. The Matrix bullet-time effect doesn’t make this list because:
An effect extraordinarily limited in what can usefully be done with it, it has nonetheless been flogged to death in the 10 years since The Matrix.
The Burly Brawl from the second Matrix movie thankfully didn’t make the list either, likely because the whole thing looks like a cartoonish video game (and not in a good way). The only quibble I can think of: maybe Titanic should have been on there somewhere? (via fimoculous)
Update: Titanic actually made the worst effects list. (thx, rob)
This is the fifth annual selection of my favorite things I’ve linked to on kottke.org. This year’s list includes games, photography, top-notch journalism, time-related material, architecture, design, and even politics, about 100 links in all. The format of the list is a bit different this year. Sprinkled amongst the usual high quality links are collections of links which fit into accidental categories that sprang up while going over the material, including my picks for the sites/blogs of the year. Enjoy.
Passage is a game that takes 5-minutes to play which possesses a poignancy that you wouldn’t expect from such a simple game.
Beautiful slow-motion skateboarding with explosions. Directed by Spike Jonze. See also this video of slow-mo skateboarding tricks filmed with an ultra high resolution camera.
An extensive history of visual communication, from cave paintings on up to the present-day computer.
The NY Times published a stacked graph of movie box office receipts from 1986 to Feb 2008. More about stacked graphs.
Sites/blogs of the year: The growing cache of vintage photos from museums and other public institutions on The Commons project on Flickr barely edges out excellently edited superb photography of The Big Picture for the site of the year.
On the final episode of St. Elsewhere, it was revealed that an autistic child named Tommy Westphall had dreamt the whole show. Since St. Elsewhere had a number of connections to other shows, it turns out that a surprising number of other popular TV programs all took place in Tommy’s mind too.
Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris article on Sabrina Harmon, one of the camera-wielding US soldiers at Abu Ghraib.
From The Onion: Pornography-Desensitized Populace Demands New Orifice To Look At and Researchers Discover Massive Asshole In Blogosphere.
Big Dog is a large robotic dog that can walk in snow and cannot be knocked down, even when kicked.
A 2104 messageboard about time travel reveals that you can’t just go and kill Hitler whenever you’d like.
Maps of the Apollo 11 moon walks superimposed on a soccer pitch and a baseball diamond. They sure didn’t walk very far.
This peeping shrubbery photo taken at a wedding by Mindy Meyers still makes me laugh.
David Attenborough narrates while two leopard slugs mate while hanging off of a tree branch.
An obituary recounting the almost unbelievable life of Charles Fawcett, actor, filmmaker, and adventurer.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: Backed by two huge and clueless media conglomerates, Hulu was never supposed to succeed but NBC and Fox managed to create a simple and compelling site for watching TV and movies online.
Matthew Dent’s awesome designs for the new UK coinage.
Sentence Drawings and other literary visualizations from Stefanie Posavec.
2008 video for Something Good by The Utah Saints. Don’t know why, but this makes me smile.
Elevators and stories about elevators, including an account of Nicholas White, who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. Includes security camera footage of White’s ordeal.
The interesting and extensively documented story behind that famous photo of Elvis Presley with Richard Nixon.
A map of all the streets in the lower 48 United States by Ben Fry.
An account of when Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator segment goes wrong and someone dies.
The financial mess of 2008: Early in the year before the full extent of the chaos was known, n+1 had a lengthy interview with a hedge fund manager and followed up with him a couple months later. This American Life aired two radio programs that did an excellent job of explaining what caused the crisis: The Giant Pool of Money and Another Frightening Show about the Economy. After much of the smoke had cleared, former bond salesman and current bestselling author Michael Lewis sums up what happened in The End of Wall Street’s Boom.
City of Shadows, timelapse photos of people in St. Petersburg taken by Alexey Titarenko. Particularly this one.
Stunning photos of the electrified plume of the Chaitén volcano in Chile. Some bigger photos at The Big Picture.
John Resig ported the Processing visual programming language to JavaScript.
Photos of a wedding and then an earthquake in Sichuan, China.
A retrospective of the NYC restaurant Florent by Frank Bruni for the NY Times doubles as a history of Manhattan’s ebbs and flows over the past 20 years.
US political election logos from 1960 to 2008.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: It technically launched in 2007, but this was the year that many people realized that Amazon’s MP3 store finally made it easier and more convenient to search for and buy DRM-free music than getting it for free and illegally elsewhere (Bittorrent, etc.). And I haven’t bought a single mp3 on iTunes since Amazon’s MP3 store opened.
Unbeknownst to the family who hired him to renovate their house, architect Eric Clough hid a puzzle in their apartment that remained unsolved for more than a year.
Atul Gawande writes about itching in the New Yorker. Really, really interesting.
Urban prankster Remi Gaillard kicks soccer balls into all sorts of unlikely goals, such as garbage cans, drive-thru windows, and police station entrances. The AC/DC soundtrack makes it perfect.
The covers for the books in Volume III of Penguin’s Great Ideas series, most notably the brilliant cover for The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
A classic text on the economics of POW camps in Europe during WWII.
A 1985 BBC documentary about the painter Francis Bacon. Entertaining and enlightening even if you don’t care about painting.
Sports: Three 2008 sports happenings stick out for me. 1. The epic Federer/Nadal final at Wimbledon. It was almost 5 hours long (not including the rain delay) and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. 2. Usain Bolt winning both the 100m and 200m in world record time at the Beijing Olympics. Bolt celebrating so early before crossing the finish in the 100m was impressive but the margin of victory in the 200m was an astounding athletic feat. 3. The Michael Phelps / Milorad Cavic photo finish in the men’s 100m butterfly final provoked much discussion and some of the only excitement on the way to Phelps winning a record eight golds at the Beijing games.
Christopher Hitchens writes about being waterboarded. Here’s the video of his experience.
This Lego version of Stephen Hawking is uncanny.
A selection of thirty stunning satellite photos of the Earth that appear abstract.
David Carr recounts his time as a single parent and crackhead in Minneapolis.
Dorothy Gambrell documents a trip around the world, part of which happened aboard a cargo ship. Read from the bottom and keep clicking “Next Entries”.
Things which aren’t so much links as products:The Apple keyboard is the best keyboard ever made. RjDj is an iPhone app that samples sounds from your immediate environment and plays them back to you with music.
On June 19th, the Mars Phoenix Lander twittered that it had discovered evidence of ice on Mars.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats showcases vintage photography in categories such as The Cool Hall of Fame, The Heretofore Unmentioned, and When Legends Gather.
Frédéric Bourdin is a French con man who made his way to the United States posing as an abducted teenager even though he was in his mid-20s at the time.
Brain researcher Jill Boyte Taylor tells the audience at TED about the time she had a massive stroke and how the experience informed her later research.
Bill Sizemore, a long-time observer of Pat Robertson’s activities, pens a lengthy profile of the fundamentalist Christian for VQR.
Lenny “Nails” Dykstra, former Met and Philly, is faring well in the business world and remains highly entertaining.
Fantastic Contraption, an incredibly addictive Flash game where you build machines out of seemingly simple parts to solve increasingly difficult puzzles.
Switched at Birth tells the tale of two girls who were swapped for one another at the hospital and didn’t find out more than 40 years later even though one of the mothers knew the whole time. See also The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: Roger Ebert’s blog demonstrates that he might be a better cultural commentator than film critic. Either way, he’s never been better.
Some well-meaning kids show off their unintentionally hilarious science project posters.
Dyna Moe’s excellent illustrated moments from Mad Men.
Merlin Mann wants to do Better.
Improv Everywhere used a Jumbotron, dozens of crazy fans, color programs, mascots, NBC sportscaster Jim Gray, and the Goodyear blimp to make a typical Little League game between the Lugnuts and Mudcats into The Best Game Ever.
Dan Hill explains extensively about the process for designing the web site for Monocle magazine.
Footage from a 1975 CBS News report about the final flight out of Da Nang near the end of the Vietnam War.
The literal version of A Ha’s Take On Me video.
R.I.P. David Foster Wallace: Wallace gave what I think is his final interview to the WSJ’s Christopher Farley about Wallace’s book about John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign. After Wallace died, I collected a number of online remembrances. David Lipsky’s The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace for Rolling Stone and McSweeney’s reprint of a 1987 profile of Wallace both capture who Wallace was and how much he gave of himself to his family, friends, and the world.
Test your visual geometric accuracy with the eyeballing game.
Michael Pollan’s letter to the next President of the United States: “we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine”.
Filip Dujardin stitches together parts of different photographs of buildings to make pictures of new and sometimes crazy & impossible buildings. This one of those “I wish I’d thought of that” projects.
A segment from the This American Life TV show about a Chicago restaurant called The Wieners Circle which turns into a sexually and racially charged free-for-all on weekend nights, much to the delight of the patrons, the heavily tipped workers, and the owners.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: The Art of the Title blog obsesses over the increasingly elaborate and celebrated craft of movie title sequences.
Steward Brand posted the entirety of How Buildings Learn online. The 1997 BBC documentary was based on Brand’s excellent book of the same name.
Charles Mann on the Earth’s soil for National Geographic Magazine.
Google’s archive of millions of photographs from Life magazine.
Barack Obama (and the other guy): Since meeting him more than four years ago, photojournalist Callie Shell has taken a number of great photos of Obama. Just after the election, Newsweek posted an epic seven-part series about the Obama, McCain, and Clinton campaigns resulting from a year of behind-the-scenes reporting. David Remnick weighed in on Obama and race in America. And a March 2008 interview with rapper DMX reveals that he has no idea who Barack Obama is. “The n***a’s name is Barack. Barack? N***a named Barack Obama. What the fuck, man?! Is he serious? That ain’t his fuckin’ name.”
An exploration of the link between the 2008 Presidential election results and the rich loamy soils left by the shallow seas of the late Cretaceous period some 85 million years ago.
The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway.
Video showing how to build an igloo, a must-see for those interested in architecture.
William Langewiesche tells the story of the midair collision in Brazil that resulted in the deaths of 154 people on Gol Flight 1907 in September 2006.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: I couldn’t leave this one off. Christoph Niemann doesn’t post to his NY Times blog very often, but each entry is a gem. I love his kids’ obsession with the NYC subway.
Vanity Fair constructs several menus for George W. Bush’s final days in the White House. Includes such dishes as Gored hearts of Palm Beach, with hanging chad; Deep-fried Halliburton, in Saddam Hoisin Sauce; and New Orleans flounder.
If you’re still information deprived after all that, you can check out the lists from 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004.
As an appetizer before my annual best links of the year post (coming Monday, I hope), I put together a list of kottke.org posts from 2008 that I liked the most and that may be worth a look if you missed them the first time around.
In January, I liveblogged the Mythbusters episode about the airplane on the conveyor belt. I still get email telling me that the plane won’t take off.
Time merge media is a collection of video and photographic works which display multiple time periods at once.
A collection of single serving sites, single-page sites like Barack Obama Is My New Bicycle, Khaaan!, and Is Lost A Repeat?
A liveblog of the Oscars written without actually watching them.
A post about the end of The Wire.
In March, kottke.org turned 10 years old and I collected a bunch of the previous designs together.
One of my all-time favorite threads on kottke.org: saying words wrong on purpose.
My favorite graph which doubles as a picture of my son.
Stanley Kubrick, Pablo Ferro, and Arthur Lipsett.
A photo of Ollie attempting to walk in Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern.
A collection of early movie reviews, including one by Maxim Gorky from 1896.
Survival tips for the Middle Ages, another great thread about how a contemporary person might fend for themselves in 1000 AD.
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is a book printed in 1499 but which looks quite contemporary.
The most beautiful suicide, a photo of Evelyn Hale taken by Robert Wiles a few minutes after she jumped from the Empire State Building
A pair of posts about the Metropolitan Life Tower: the tower’s past and future and an unusual death that occurred in the building shortly after it opened.
A collection of election maps from the 2008 US Presidential election.
Timeline twins.
And finally, the opening space scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey with chickens from The Muppet Show clucking the Blue Danube waltz.
For the fourth year in a row, a list of all the places I visited in 2008.
Waitsfield, VT*
New York City, NY*
Boston, MA*
Orange, MA*
Springfield, MA
London, UK
Paris, France
Buffalo, NY
Binghamton, NY
Cedar Rapids, IA
Nantucket, MA
Las Vegas, NV
Washington DC
One or more nights were spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days. Note: We didn’t actually spend the night in Paris, but we were there all day so I threw it in there. Here are the lists for 2005, 2006, and 2007.
Paul Goldberger, the New Yorker’s architecture critic, lists his ten favorite buildings of 2008.
In time for the 2008 Olympics, the world saw the fruits of China’s decision to put aside nationalism, hire the greatest architects from around the world, and let them do the kind of things they could never afford to do at home. That brought us two of the greatest buildings of the year, Herzog and de Meuron’s extraordinary Olympic Stadium, the stunning steel latticework structure widely known as the Bird’s Nest; and Norman Foster’s Beijing Airport, a project that was not only bigger than any other airport in the world, but more beautiful, more logically laid out, and more quickly built. And the headquarters of CCTV, the Chinese television network, by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture — a building which I had thought was going to be a pretentious piece of structural exhibitionism — turned out to be a compelling and exciting piece of structural exhibitionism.
Big disagree on Eliasson’s NYC waterfalls…they were underwhelming.
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