This is a lovely little short film about the many snowy owls that migrate down from the Arctic and settle at Boston’s Logan airport and the man who safely captures & relocates the owls away from the airport. I love this story about what a fierce hunter the snowy owl is:
A snowy owl, several years ago, took a peregrine falcon. This peregrine came in — it was a young bird — came in, harassed the snowy owl while the snowy owl was roosting and sleeping. Bopped him off the back of the head, woke the owl up. [The peregrine] proceeded to take off and flew into a flock of starlings. It grabbed one of the starlings, it took the starling to the ground. And little did it know but that the snowy owl was right onto its tail. That snowy owl came in and grabbed that peregrine falcon and had him for dinner.
I think we all suspect that world view comes from every day of your life in combination and all those experiences. But where are the moments where you thought, “Oh, here’s a big bloody fork in the road. There’s a powerful day of inspiration or a day of tragedy or something that is going to change your course”?
I’ve talked before about one of the big inflection points in my life:
When I tell people about the first time I saw the Web, I sheepishly describe it as love at first sight. Logging on that first time, using an early version of NCSA Mosaic with a network login borrowed from my physics advisor, was the only time in my life I have ever seen something so clearly, been sure of anything so completely. It was a like a thunderclap — “the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending” — and I just knew this was for me and that it was going to be huge and important. I know how ridiculous this sounds, but the Web is the true love of my life and ever since I’ve been trying to live inside the feeling I had when I first saw it.
I’d have to think hard about whether that was the moment or if it actually happened earlier, like going off to college (which was revelatory to me and opened me up to so many possibilities I didn’t even know existed) or deciding on physics as a major or even, much later, moving to NYC and finally feeling at home somewhere. (via sean breslin)
A few months ago, I wrote about Pee-wee as Himself, a two-part HBO documentary about the life and career of Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) that had then just premiered at Sundance. Now we’ve got a trailer and a premiere date: May 23.
It’s weird to be in this situation, having a documentary made, because I’m used to having control of my alter ego.
Earlier this week, Aaron found this clip featuring a set of twins who were eyewitnesses to an accident and who also speak mostly in unison.
This short clip reveals more about the Powers sisters’ unusual way of communicating (“we don’t know why, but we have tried to talk separately, but it’s not ourselves, it’s not us”):
This synchronicity between twins is uncommon but not unique. In fact, Werner Herzog is filming a movie called Bucking Fastard right now that stars Rooney and Kate Mara as a pair of inseparable twin sisters based on the true story of Freda and Greta Chaplin.
Here’s how Herzog describes the Chaplin twins:
In 1981 they had a short run in the British ‘red tops,’ or tabloid newspapers, and were famous for a few weeks for being the ‘sex-crazed twins’ who were so infatuated with their neighbor, a lorry driver, that he took them to court and had a restraining order taken out against them. Their story is unique. They are the only identical twins we know of who speak synchronously.
We know that twins sometimes develop their own secret language when they are all alone by which they can exclude the rest of the world, but Freda and Greta spoke the same words at the same time. I have had the experience where they open the door, greet me, and ask me inside, all completely synchronous in word and gesture. I suppose this type of a conversation could be a ritual developed by practice. But later on, they answered questions they can’t have been expecting absolutely in unison. Sometimes they spoke separately, then Freda, for the sake of argument, would speak the first half of a sentence, at which point Greta would chime in with a word or two in unison, and then bring the sentence to a conclusion herself. Or the other way around. They wore exactly the same clothes, hairstyles, shoes. Their handbags and umbrellas were identical; they were as coordinated as a Rorschach test ready to be folded in two at any moment. When they walked, they didn’t walk in step like soldiers, left-right, left-right, but they had their inside feet together and kept time with their outside feet. It was the same with their handbags, which they didn’t both carry in their left hands; they carried them in their outer hands and their umbrellas with their inside hands. You could have folded a picture of them, and the two halves would have matched. Their gestures were synchronized, their physical awareness of each other continuous. Who was left and who was right in sitting or walking was for me the only way of telling which one was Greta and which was Freda at our early meetings.
You can see them speaking & interacting in this 1987 short documentary about the twins, A Pair of One.
Primer is an introduction to oscilloscope music, a genre and art form where vector visuals are formed by the music itself. The image is produced by using the left audio channel to control the beam on the X axis, and the right audio channel to control the beam on the Y axis.
Once I wrapped my brain around what was happening here, I found this to be quite an impressive achievement: creating beautiful & coherent visuals from non-discordant music. (via waxy)
On Friday, Heather Cox Richardson spoke at an event marking the 250th anniversary of the lighting of the lanterns at Boston’s Old North Church. The lantern lighting — “one if by land, two if by seas” — was part of years-long effort by some American colonists to resist what they thought of as unjust behavior by a tyrant king, and led to the start of the Revolutionary War. Richardson’s speech is well worth reading.
It was hard for people to fathom that the country had come to such division. Only a dozen years before, at the end of the French and Indian War, Bostonians looked forward to a happy future in the British empire. British authorities had spent time and money protecting the colonies, and colonists saw themselves as valued members of the empire. They expected to prosper as they moved to the rich lands on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains and their ships plied the oceans to expand the colonies’ trade with other countries.
That euphoria faded fast.
Almost as soon as the French and Indian War was over, to prevent colonists from stirring up another expensive struggle with Indigenous Americans, King George III prohibited the colonists from crossing the Appalachian Mountains. Then, to pay for the war just past, the king’s ministers pushed through Parliament a number of revenue laws.
In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, requiring the payment of a tax on all printed material—from newspapers and legal documents to playing cards. It would hit virtually everyone in the North American colonies. Knowing that local juries would acquit their fellow colonists who violated the revenue acts, Parliament took away the right to civil trials and declared that suspects would be tried before admiralty courts overseen by British military officers. Then Parliament required colonials to pay the expenses for the room and board of British troops who would be stationed in the colonies, a law known as the Quartering Act.
But what Parliament saw as a way to raise money to pay for an expensive war—one that had benefited the colonists, after all—colonial leaders saw as an abuse of power. The British government had regulated trade in the empire for more than a century. But now, for the first time, the British government had placed a direct tax on the colonists without their consent. Then it had taken away the right to a trial by jury, and now it was forcing colonists to pay for a military to police them.
You can also watch Richardson give her speech at the Old North Church (she begins at the ~1:18:30 mark):
You can also listen to her read it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. (thx, meg)
While I prefer the charming homemade quality of the original that she made in her small NYC apartment at age 21, this version is pretty great too. It’s going to be super interesting to see what Doechii does next — looking forward to it!
This is a lovely cover of Bush’s Glycerine by Allison Lorenzen and Midwife, set to a poignant series of very short videos of everyday life. Give this 20 seconds of your complete attention and you’ll watch the whole thing, I promise. (via @mariabustillos.com)
If you’re one of those people who watches the Olympics and wishes they’d put a normal person in the competition so we can see how fast the athletes really are, this one’s for you.
An expansive look at the virtues and contradictions of the war and the birth of the United States of America, the film follows dozens of figures from a wide variety of backgrounds. Viewers will experience the war through the memories of the men and women who experienced it: the rank-and-file Continental soldiers and American militiamen (some of them teenagers), Patriot political and military leaders, British Army officers, American Loyalists, Native soldiers and civilians, enslaved and free African Americans, German soldiers in the British service, French and Spanish allies, and various civilians living in North America, Loyalist as well as Patriot, including many made refugees by the war. The American Revolution was a war for independence, a civil war, and a world war. It impacted millions – from Canada to the Caribbean and beyond. Few escaped its violence. At one time or another, the British Army occupied all the major population centers in the United States – including New York City for more than seven years.
An interesting thing about this series that sets it apart from some of his others is the star-studded cast: “Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Keaton, Paul Giamatti, Jeff Daniels, Mandy Patinkin, Claire Danes, Ethan Hawk, Josh Brolin…” These aren’t narrators; they’re playing actual characters in the series (Giamatti reprises his role as John Adams and Claire Danes plays Abigail):
Our cast list has never been surpassed by Hollywood or any streaming service. [No one could afford to] film all the people who have read for us, but they’ve all generously done SAG minimum: Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Liev Schreiber, Laura Linney, Sir Kenneth Branagh, Damian Lewis, Matthew Rhys — and that’s [just] a third.
In this recent interview, a charmingly shoeless Burns shares his team’s philosophy when working on projects like The American Revolution:
Given his and his team’s past few projects, including The US and the Holocaust & The Vietnam War, it will be interesting to see how the Revolution is presented and how the film is received.
Pysanky are raw eggs that are decorated using an ancient wax-resistance method. The word pysanky comes from the Ukrainian word pysaty (писати), “to write.” Pysanka is the singular and pysanky is the plural. The art of making pysanky is called pysankarstvo (писанкарство).
The designs are “written” in hot wax with a special tool called a kistka (кістка) which has a small funnel attached to hold a small amount of liquid wax. The wax protects the pores of the shell from the dye. The artist, known as a pysankarka (писанкарка) writes parts of the design, dyes the egg one color, and writes more until the end, when all the layers of wax are melted off to reveal the final design.
Pysanky are an ancient art, made in Ukraine and other Slavic countries for centuries. Though many people call them Easter eggs, pysanky were made long before Ukraine adopted Christianity. The ancient symbols were then reinterpreted through the lens of Christianity later on.
From more on the regional patterns of Ukrainian pysanky and some images of actual decorated eggs, check out this page. And for a look at how these intricate patterns are made, here’s a video:
A cephalopod captured on video in March has been confirmed as a juvenile colossal squid, the first live colossal squid observed in its native habitat.
It’s been 100 years since the colossal squid was formally described in a scientific paper. In its adult form, the animal is larger than the giant squid, or any other invertebrate on Earth, and can grow to 6 or 7 meters long, or up to 23 feet.
Scientists’ first good look at the species in 1925 was incomplete — just arm fragments from two squid in the belly of a sperm whale. Adults are thought to spend most of their time in the deep ocean.
A full-grown colossal squid occasionally appears at the ocean’s surface, drawn up to a fishing boat while it’s “chewing on” a hooked fish, Dr. Bolstad said. Younger specimens have turned up in trawl nets.
Yet until now, humans had not witnessed a colossal squid at home, swimming in the deep Antarctic sea.
Filmmaker Ryan Coogler (Black Panther, Creed) is a big ol’ movie dork, and it’s endearing to watch him break down all the different types of film, aspect ratios, and projection options as he explains how many ways you can watch his latest movie, Sinners, when it comes out this week. Super informative too if you’ve always wondered about the different IMAX formats and just what the heck it means when someone you love gets excited about 70mm.
Ok so I’ve watched the trailer for the new Wes Anderson movie, The Phoenician Scheme, a couple of times and I still don’t know what it’s actually about? But from the looks of things, it is more of the same for people who like that sort of thing, which is lucky for me.
Also, Michael Cera might be the most Wes Anderson-coded actor that’s never before been in a Wes Anderson movie.
Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom — which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025 — puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.
Oh, and the corruption:
The Hungarian businessman and a Hungarian economist I spoke with — both of whom insisted on anonymity, for fear of retaliation — had separately calculated that NERistan amounts to about 20 percent of the Hungarian economy. That means, as the economist explained to me, that 20 percent of Hungary’s companies operate “not on market principles, not on merit-based principles, but basically on loyalty.” These companies don’t have normal hiring practices or use real business models, because they are designed not for efficiency and profit but for kleptocracy—passing money from the state to their owners.
After a little over a year on the market, sales of the 6,600-pound vehicle, priced from $82,000, are laughably below what Musk predicted. Its lousy reputation for quality — with eight recalls in the past 13 months, the latest for body panels that fall off — and polarizing look made it a punchline for comedians. Unlike past auto flops that just looked ridiculous or sold badly, Musk’s truck is also a focal point for global Tesla protests spurred by the billionaire’s job-slashing DOGE role and MAGA politics.
“It’s right up there with Edsel,” said Eric Noble, president of consultancy CARLAB and a professor at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California (Tesla design chief Franz von Holzhausen, who styled Cybertruck for Musk, is a graduate of its famed transportation design program). “It’s a huge swing and a huge miss.”
It’s impossible for me to drive past one of these things without laughing at and/or mocking it. I was out driving with my daughter last week and a Cybertruck came into view and before I could even say anything, she said, “it’s just so *bad*”. (via @mims.bsky.social)
I am still stinge watching my way through the second season of Strange New Worlds, but the third season of the show premieres sometime this summer, so I’d better finish it up before then. Anyway, I love this show and crew and the trailer looks appropriately kooky and wacky so let’s goooo!
Number two: defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of our institutions unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about — a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union — and take its side.
Snyder himself made a series of 20 videos a few years ago in which he reads each lesson and then provides more context on what it means. Here’s the first episode on anticipatory obedience (he starts reading after a short intro, at about the 2:40 mark):
Lesson number one is: do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
So, this is the first lesson because it’s about the basic choice we make when we confront difficulty. It’s about the choice of all choices: are we going to go with the new flow or are we going to stand — if only a little bit, only hesitantly — as long as we can against the current?
This excerpt from Conan O’Brien’s acceptance speech for the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor is quite good.
Twain was suspicious of populism, jingoism, imperialism, the money-obsessed mania of the Gilded Age, and any expression of mindless American might or self-importance. Above all, Twain was a patriot in the best sense of the word. He loved America but knew it was deeply flawed. Twain wrote, “Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time and your government when it deserves it.”
In a stage production that premiered last year in London, Steve Coogan played four roles (Dr. Strangelove, Captain Mandrake, President Muffley, and Major TJ Kong) in an adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. The play was adapted for the stage by Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley. A filmed version of the play is currently playing in theaters…here are some trailers and clips from that:
The play’s run has ended and I don’t know if it will be restaged elsewhere, but like I said above, a filmed version is showing in theaters and you can look for tickets near you.
P.S. In the original version, Peter Sellers was supposed to play the same four characters as Coogan does in the play but was reluctant to play Major Kong. In the end, Sellers sprained his ankle and couldn’t play Kong in the cramped airplane set, but he still played Mandrake, Muffley, and Strangelove. (via @fritinancy.bsky.social)
For some reason, Warner Bros. has uploaded 41 of its movies to YouTube that are free to watch. Among them, Waiting for Guffman, The Accidental Tourist, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Richard Linklater’s SubUrbia, The 11th Hour (Leonardo DiCaprio’s climate change movie), The Science of Sleep, The Avengers (the 1998 non-Marvel spy flick with Ralph Fiennes & Uma Thurman), and Mr. Nice Guy (w/ Jackie Chan — this has the highest number of views on the list by an order of magnitude).
A great behind-the-scenes look at the work and process of artist Amy Sherald in these twovideos from Art21.
In her studio in New Jersey, artist Amy Sherald paints portraits that tell a story about American lives. Her face just inches away from a canvas, the artist carefully applies stroke after stroke, building her narrative through paint. “I really have this belief that images can change the world,” says Sherald, a belief she acts upon in her compelling paintings, which depict everyday people with dignity and humanity. Following the tradition of American realists like Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, the artist uses her paintings to tell stories about America. Searching for models, settings, and scenarios that would convey the kinds of stories she wanted to tell, Sherald began to populate the world of her paintings with everyday people in everyday situations.
Writing for the New York Review (archive), Sally Rooney profiles “genius” snooker player Ronnie O’Sullivan. But much of the piece is spent on the mystery of how O’Sullivan and other athletes are able to do what they do without thinking.
Take the last frame of the 2014 Welsh Open final. The footage is available online, courtesy of Eurosport Snooker: if you like, you can watch O’Sullivan, then in his late thirties, circling the table, chalking his cue without taking his eyes from the baize. He’s leading his opponent, Ding Junhui — then at number three in the world snooker rankings — by eight frames to three, needing only one more to win the match and take home the title. He pots a red, then the black, then another red, and everything lands precisely the way he wants it: immaculate, mesmerizing, miraculously controlled.
The last remaining red ball is stranded up by the cushion on the right-hand side, and the cue ball rolls to a halt just left of the middle right-hand pocket. The angle is tight, awkward, both white and red lined up inches away from the cushion. O’Sullivan surveys the position, nonchalantly switches hands, and pots the red ball left-handed. The cue ball hits the top cushion, rolls back down over the table, and comes to a stop, as if on command, to line up the next shot on the black. O’Sullivan could scarcely have chosen a better spot if he had picked the cue ball up in his hand and put it there. The crowd erupts: elation mingled with disbelief. At the end of the frame, when only the black remains on the table, he switches hands again, seemingly just for fun, and makes the final shot with his left. The black drops down into the pocket, completing what is known in snooker as a maximum break: the feat of potting every ball on the table in perfect order to attain the highest possible total of 147 points.
Watch a little of this sort of thing and it’s hugely entertaining. Watch a lot and you might start to ask yourself strange questions. For instance: In that particular frame, after potting that last red, how did O’Sullivan know that the cue ball would come back down the table that way and land precisely where he wanted it? Of course it was only obeying the laws of physics. But if you wanted to calculate the trajectory of a cue ball coming off an object ball and then a cushion using Newtonian physics, you’d need an accurate measurement of every variable, some pretty complex differential equations, and a lot of calculating time. O’Sullivan lines up that shot and plays it in the space of about six seconds. A lucky guess? It would be lucky to make a guess like that once in a lifetime. He’s been doing this sort of thing for thirty years.
What then? If he’s not calculating, and he’s not guessing, what is Ronnie O’Sullivan doing? Why does the question seem so strange? And why doesn’t anybody know the answer?
I also mention that frames of snooker are expected to continue even after competitive play has concluded. Players don’t just get to a certain number of points and then stop because they’ve won the frame; they continue until the break imposes its own conclusion. There’s something so strange and excessive about that—it seems to belong to the realm of aesthetics rather than sport.
I used to write a lot about what Rooney examines in her essay — the effortless brilliance of top performers — under the subject of relaxed concentration. Still as fascinating as ever.
Shopping for Superman, guides viewers through a 50-year journey revealing the origin story of their friendly neighborhood comic shops and the people fighting to keep their doors open.
Since it began, the retail comics industry has contracted by over 75% with more shops closing every month.
After five years of diminished sales, a global pandemic, and the digitization of retail shopping dominating most markets, Shopping for Superman asks the question, “Can our local comic shops be saved?”
Shopping for Superman, does more than explain the history of retail comic book shops. Its underlying narrative reveals how shops directly influenced comic book publishing to cultivate some of the most daring and controversial materials ever committed to print.
Through the evolution of comics, bolstered by shop owners, local communities gained access to safe spaces for individuals having a crisis of identity, a place that promoted literacy and critical thinking in areas where those things are scarce.
Audiences will see, first-hand, just how necessary their support will be in keeping these shops open and available for future generations.
In this video for Wired, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who studies fascism & authoritarianism, answers questions from the internet about dictators.
Why do people support dictators? How do dictators come to power? What’s the difference between a dictatorship, an autocracy, and authoritarianism? What are the most common personality traits found in tyrants and dictators? Is Xi Jinping a dictator? How do dictators amass wealth?
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