The American Society of Magazine Editors picks
The American Society of Magazine Editors picks their magazine favorite covers of 2007.
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Tokyo, Seattle, and Moscow all have laptop orchestras.
Tokyo, Seattle, and Moscow all have laptop orchestras.
The Mafia’s ten commandments
When Italian police recently arrested Salvatore Lo Piccolo, the suspected head of the Sicilian Mafia, they also found a list of ten commandments that served as a guide for the behavior of Mafia members.
1. No one can present himself directly to another of our friends. There must be a third person to do it.
2. Never look at the wives of friends.
3. Never be seen with cops.
4. Don’t go to pubs and clubs.
5. Always being available for Cosa Nostra is a duty - even if your wife’s about to give birth.
6. Appointments must absolutely be respected.
7. Wives must be treated with respect.
8. When asked for any information, the answer must be the truth.
9. Money cannot be appropriated if it belongs to others or to other families.
10. People who can’t be part of Cosa Nostra: anyone who has a close relative in the police, anyone with a two-timing relative in the family, anyone who behaves badly and doesn’t hold to moral values.
I smell a future bestseller: Leadership Secrets of the Cosa Nostra…it’s the new 48 Laws of Power.
Update: There are already business books inspired by the Mafia: The Mafia Manager: A Guide to the Corporate Machiavelli and Tony Soprano on Management: Leadership Lessons Inspired By America’s Favorite Mobster for a start. (thx, gleb)
87 bad predictions about the future. Irving Fisher,
87 bad predictions about the future. Irving Fisher, economics professor at Yale University, in 1929:
Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.
And Variety, passing judgement on rock ‘n roll in 1955:
It will be gone by June.
But we all know expert predictions are crap, yeah?
A list of thirty illnesses, sorted according
A list of thirty illnesses, sorted according to whether or not you can eat the victims. Oh McSweeney’s lists, we’ve been parted too long.
As a supplement to Alex Ross’ musical
As a supplement to Alex Ross’ musical recommendations, a reader recommends NPR’s list of 50 essential classical music CDs and Jazz 100, a list of the best jazz on CD. (thx, john)
A list of seven topics to avoid
A list of seven topics to avoid talking about so as to not seem boring, including “the route you took to get here”.
What do these subjects have in common? The listener has nothing to add. He or she must just hear you describe your experience.
I’m particularly sensitive to the “recent changes in your child’s nap schedule” one these days. I remember how bored I was as a non-parent with the tendency for baby-talk to completely dominate conversations.
GOOD Magazine lists seven instances in which
GOOD Magazine lists seven instances in which the old-fashioned way still works best, including the use of maggots for cleaning wounds, beekeeping, and letterpress printing.
The basic idea of beekeeping is still the same as it was in the 1800s. The Langstroth hive is named after the scientist who first discovered what we called bee space-three eighths of an inch. That’s their travel space, they won’t junk it up with honey or anything. Beekeepers take advantage of that, and that’s how the hives work.
A list of fast food menu items
A list of fast food menu items that are really high in trans fats. The list is a bit misleading as no attempt is made to normalize portions (the top two items are multi-portion side orders) but still handy, especially for the list of places that had no items on the list (Subway, Pizza Hut, Wendy’s, In-N-Out, etc.). (via serious eats)
Update: Many Eyes user Michael created two charts to accompany the list above: a bar chart and a treemap. (thx, michael)
If you’re overwhelmed by the thought of
If you’re overwhelmed by the thought of switching to an organic diet, here’s five easy organic foods you can introduce into your household with minimal fuss and maximum impact.
Potatoes are a staple of the American diet — one survey found they account for 30 percent of our overall vegetable consumption. A simple switch to organic potatoes has the potential to have a big impact because commercially-farmed potatoes are some of the most pesticide-contaminated vegetables.
10 questions that are illegal to ask during
10 questions that are illegal to ask during a job interview, including Where were you born? and Do you have children?
A comparison of the Last.fm chart
A comparison of the Last.fm chart and the official UK downloads chart after Radiohead’s In Rainbows was released online last week. The top 10 on Last.fm: all Radiohead. Official chart: nada. (via adactio)
Every once in awhile, my friend Matt
Every once in awhile, my friend Matt takes a photo of the whiteboard at Orbital Comics in London. The most recent one features a list of the top 10 greatest moments in movies from comics. Orbital’s MySpace page has more of their whiteboard lists.
The Onion AV Club tracks which films
The Onion AV Club tracks which films and directors have had the most influence on Wes Anderson, including The Graduate, Peter Bogdanovich, and Francois Truffaut.
The “uniforms” he outfits his characters in are like a variation on Charlie Brown’s zigzag shirt and Lucy’s blue dress, and there’s an atmosphere of wistful melancholy common to Peanuts cartoons and Anderson’s seriocomedies. A Boy Named Charlie Brown echoes Anderson’s persistent “sic transit gloria” theme, as Charlie Brown blazes through the rounds of a local spelling bee, then washes out at the nationals. When he returns home to a group of friends who accept him as much as they mock him, he might as well be walking in slow motion, while “Ooh La La” plays on the soundtrack.
And today they’re going to run a list of films which were influenced by Anderson…I’ll have that link a bit later.
A list of 15 of the top small
A list of 15 of the top small workplaces of 2007. If you run a small company, there are lot of good examples to follow here.
The line of succession to the British
The line of succession to the British Throne, which has on it 1286 members. AKA, the thing you should show someone should they ask you the definition of “thorough”.
Is lazy reporting hurting the visual arts?
Is lazy reporting hurting the visual arts? Jonathan Jones argues that almost all reporting about art takes one of six forms: expensive art, graffiti, plagiarism, earth-shattering discoveries, and restoration. Looking back through kottke.org’s art tag page, I am guilty of linking to stories of all those types. Eep.
Without the associated covers, this list of
Without the associated covers, this list of the AIGA’s 50 Books/50 Covers winners for “outstanding book and book cover design produced in 2006” is pretty useless. (Anyone want to track all of these covers down? I’ll host (or link to) the results on kottke.org.)
Update: Photos of the covers and books are all available on the AIGA Design Archives site. No permalink tho. :( (thx, tbit)
The Guardian has been collecting the best
The Guardian has been collecting the best interviews from the past century. Interviewees include John Lennon, Marlon Brando, Adolf Hitler, and Marilyn Monroe. An impressive trove.
A subjective list — is there any
A subjective list — is there any other kind? — of the top 10 issues of McSweeney’s magazine.
The Guardian has an extensive list of
The Guardian has an extensive list of writers and the rooms in which they write (with photos and descriptions by the authors). For whatever reason, I became very interested in writers’ rooms after reading Witold Rybczynski’s The Most Beautiful House in the World, in which he describes several rooms built by writers specifically for working in, including one author who built a completely separate room apart from his house which combined his need for solitude with a short commute. (thx, youngna)
Twelve essential photographic facts, formulas, and rules
Twelve essential photographic facts, formulas, and rules of thumb.
Anatomical gray card. Metering off an 18-percent neutral gray card is a good way to get a midtone reading that will give you a good overall exposure of a scene. Forgot your gray card? Hold your open hand up so it’s facing the light, take a reading off your palm, open up one stop, and shoot. (Various skin tones rarely account for even a full-stop difference.)
It seems as though the only people
It seems as though the only people who put out manifestos these days are designers and serial killers. 50 manifestos from such designers as Zaha Hadid, Stefan Sagmeister, Rem Koolhaas, and John Maeda.
The top 100 greatest beatdowns in history, most
The top 100 greatest beatdowns in history, most of them related to sports. #1 is Secretariat’s 31-length victory at Belmont, the footage of which is well worth a look if you haven’t seen it. That horse so totally pours it on down the stretch that it gives me goosebumps every time I watch it. (thx, david)
A brief history of programming languages from
A brief history of programming languages from the September 1995 issue of Byte magazine. Amazing how many of these languages are now extinct or otherwise not widely used…and that Perl, PHP, Java, JavaScript, etc. didn’t make the list.
Update: I corrected the above statement about Perl et. al. not existing and modified it to read that they didn’t make the list. Perl, Ruby, nd Java all existed in one form or another in 1995. (thx to everyone who sent this in)
A list of film techniques that Alfred
A list of film techniques that Alfred Hitchcock used in making his movies.
Never mind Transformers, here’s a look at
Never mind Transformers, here’s a look at the possible summer blockbusters of 2008. Here are a couple more lists of 2008 movies: FirstShowing.net and Box Office Mojo.
Top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills, including
Top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills, including Cobol, PowerBuilder, and cc:Mail. “A rough translation of OS/2 could be ‘wrong horse.’”
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