My favorite presentation at XOXO this year was Ed Yong’s talk about the pandemic, journalism, his work over the past four years, and the personal toll that all those things took on him. I just watched the entire thing again, riveted the whole time.
Hearing how thoughtfully & compassionately he approached his work during the pandemic was really inspirational: “My pillars are empathy, curiosity, and kindness — and much else flows from that.” And his defense of journalism, especially journalism as “a caretaking profession”:
For people who feel lost and alone, we get to say through our work: you are not. For people who feel like society has abandoned them and their lives do not matter, we get to say: actually, they fucking do. We are one of the only professions that can do that through our work and that can do that at scale — a scale commensurate with many of the crises that we face.
Then, it was hard to hear about how his work “completely broke” him. To say that Yong’s experience mirrored my own is, according to the mild PTSD I’m experiencing as I consider everything he related in that video, an understatement. We covered the pandemic in different ways, but like Yong, I was completely consumed by it. I read hundreds(/thousands?) of stories, papers, and posts a week for more than a year, wrote hundreds of posts, and posted hundreds of links, trying to make sense of what was happening so that, hopefully, I could help others do the same. The sense of purpose and duty I felt to my readers — and to reality — was intense, to the point of overwhelm.
Like Yong, I eventually had to step back, taking a seven-month sabbatical in 2022. I didn’t talk about the pandemic at all in that post, but in retrospect, it was the catalyst for my break. Unlike Yong, I am back at it: hopefully more aware of my limits, running like it’s an ultramarathon rather than a sprint, trying to keep my empathy for others in the right frame so I can share their stories effectively without losing myself.1
I didn’t get a chance to meet Yong in person at XOXO, so: Ed, thank you so much for all of your marvelous work and amazing talk and for setting an example of how to do compassionate, important work without compromising your values. (And I love seeing your bird photos pop up on Bluesky.)
I hope that makes sense? Sometimes you can feel the pain of others so intensely that it renders you useless to help them or to keep yourself afloat. So you’re still empathetic and open to the experiences of others, but in a much more functional and constructive way.↩
Songs played back at much slower speeds were a thing several years ago — the effect can turn even the harshest rock song or bounciest pop tune into something that sounds like Enya or an ethereal Gregorian chant. I listen to these while I work sometimes and I’ve got a new one for the rotation: Radiohead’s Everything in Its Right Place, but played 800% slower.
I attended the XOXO Festival back in August, and video of some of the talks are starting to trickle online. I’m going to highlight a couple of my favorites here on the site; the first one I’d like to share is Erin Kissane’s talk about fixing the social internet.
The talk was about why I left the internet, how the Covid Tracking Project got me back online, and most of all how the work we did at CTP led to me to believe that we — the weirdos of internet-making and online life — have to not merely retreat from the big-world social internet, but fix it.
I really liked this entertaining short film by Eric Kissack (editor & producer for The Good Place), in which a couple moving into a new apartment together discovers a previously unnoticed feature of their new space, which in turn…well, I don’t want to spoil anything. Just watch it.
The food documentary series Chef’s Table returns with chefs & culinary experts from Italy, China, Cambodia, and the US who all work in the medium of the noodle. Here’s the trailer for Chef’s Table: Noodles:
Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment, Some Like It Hot) was both a great director and a great writer. In this video essay, Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou examine how Wilder balanced the verbal, dramatic, and situational ironies of his scripts with making it all work on the screen, emotionally and structurally.
Separated is the newest documentary film from Errol Morris. Based on Jacob Soboroff’s 2020 book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, the film probes the inhumane family separation and immigration policies of the Trump administration. From a review in The Guardian:
The Trump administration’s southern border policy began with the dream of a wall in the desert and ended with the nightmare of family separation: children torn from their parents and loaded en masse into wire-mesh cages. It was inhumane treatment, which was precisely the point. The White House’s intention was to use terror as a deterrent and effectively write every parent’s worst fear into law. “When you have that policy, people don’t come,” Donald Trump said blithely. “I know it sounds harsh, but we have to save our country.”
Errol Morris’s forensic, procedural documentary walks us through the bureaucratic backrooms to show how the policy was hatched and implemented. It explains how its principal authors — Trump adviser Stephen Miller and attorney general Jeff Sessions — junked the pre-existing catch-and-release scheme (which had allowed migrants to remain in the country until their immigration hearing) in favour of a bold new tactic of forced separation and mass imprisonment. If Separated lacks the rueful exuberance that typifies much of Morris’s early work (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, even last year’s John le Carré film), that is entirely understandable. The material is sobering and the mountain of evidence needs unpicking. The film-maker handles his brief with the cold, hard precision of an expert state prosecutor.
“Harm to children was part of the point,” says Jonathan White, a committed public servant who saw his department, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, hijacked by a blatantly inhumane strategy that the Trump administration implemented for its deterrent potential. “They believed it would terrify families into not coming.” White isn’t exactly a whistleblower, although he comes across as no less courageous in describing a dictated-from-the-top family separation scheme for which he had a front-row seat.
And here’s an interview with Morris & Soboroff about the film:
For his second term, Trump and his team are planning a blockbuster sequel to these inhumane crimes entirely in the open: deporting up to 20 million people (undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, and political opponents) with a minimum of due process, which will require a massive increase in the scale of the police state and concentration camps. That’s 6% of the US population. We don’t know if they will succeed but they will try. Those are the stakes.
Music By John Williams is a documentary film about the legendary composer who did the scores for Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Close Encounters, Superman, E.T., Home Alone, Schindler’s List — seriously, one person composed all these?! — Saving Private Ryan, Harry Potter, Lincoln, etc. etc. etc. Oh, and the Olympic Fanfare and Theme that NBC uses for the Olympics.
I got a lot out of this interview with The Message author Ta-Nehisi Coates by Jon Stewart for The Daily Show.
Best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates sits down with Jon Stewart to talk about his latest book, “The Message,” and reconciling past and present vestiges of oppression. They discuss his visits to Senegal, South Carolina, and The West Bank, how past atrocities like slavery and the holocaust can create a zero-sum game of control, the need for safety and statehood despite morally problematic systems, his exposure to Palestinian stories that have been hidden in American media, understanding the physical traumas of the Black community, and the purpose in writing to shape the world around us.
It’s been awhile since I’d checked in on one of my favorite YouTube channels, Great Art Explained. In the past year, curator James Payne has done videos on Duchamp, Manet, Magritte, and that one painting by Caspar David Friedrich (you know the one). But this one, on Vincent van Gogh’s final painting, particularly caught my attention:
The mystery of what [his final painting] was and where it was painted would take over a century to solve, and that was only thanks to a worldwide epidemic. What it means is that we now have a deeper insight into what van Gogh’s final last hours were like — before his tragic death.
Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of books that need to be sorted alphabetically by author. What’s the fastest way to accomplish this task? Luckily, efficient sorting is a problem that’s been studied extensively in computer science and this TED-Ed video walks us through three possible sorts: bubble sort, insertion sort, and quicksort.
“Barbaric.” A “nightmare of vulgarity.” “Monstrous.” “A violent mess.” “The work of a madman.” Those are just some of the reactions that Henri Matisse’s Dance received after its public debut in 1910. In this video, Evan Puschak shares How Matisse Revolutionized Color In Art with this painting and other Fauvist work.
In 1888, the Eastman Kodak Company rolled out a new camera and a new slogan. “You press the button, we do the rest.” To say this moment revolutionized photography would be an understatement. But this story isn’t just about Kodak. It’s about what happens when a powerful technology, originally only understood by a select few, can suddenly fit in your hand.
And then, fast-forwarding to the 90s and 00s, Kodak gradually, then suddenly, missed a similar shift that further democratized photography: the move to digital.
Last week, I posted about the discovery of a “new” piece of music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
A previously unknown piece of music composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart when he was probably in his early teens has been uncovered at a library in Germany.
The piece dates to the mid to late 1760s and consists of seven miniature movements for a string trio lasting about 12 minutes, the Leipzig municipal libraries said in a statement on Thursday.
Via Smithsonian Magazine, here’s the one of the first public performances of the rediscovered work:
Researchers say the music fits stylistically with other works from the 1760s, when Mozart was between the ages of 10 and 13. Ulrich Leisinger, head of research at the foundation, tells Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) that the young composer was no longer creating pieces that sounded like this one by the time he was in his late teens.
In his early years, however, Mozart wrote many chamber works like Serenade in C, which his father recorded on a list of his son’s compositions. Many of these works were thought to have been lost to history, as Leisinger says in the statement. Fortunately, this particular piece was saved — thanks to the composer’s sister.
“It looks as if — thanks to a series of favorable circumstances — a complete string trio has survived in Leipzig,” Leisinger adds. “The source was evidently Mozart’s sister, and so it is tempting to think that she preserved the work as a memento of her brother. Perhaps he wrote the trio specially for her.”
In coastal cities in Iceland, including on the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago, it’s common to see people out at night, hunting for baby puffins (called pufflings). Once they’re caught, they’re chucked off of cliffs the next day and fly out to sea:
Many residents of Vestmannaeyjar spend a few weeks in August and September collecting wayward pufflings that have crashed into town after mistaking human lights for the moon. Releasing the fledglings at the cliffs the following day sets them on the correct path.
This human tradition has become vital to the survival of puffins, Rodrigo A. Martínez Catalán of Náttúrustofa Suðurlands [South Iceland Nature Research Center] told NPR. A pair of puffins – which mate for life – only incubate one egg per season and don’t lay eggs every year.
“If you have one failed generation after another after another after another,” Catalán said, “the population is through, pretty much.”
Jessica Bishopp’s meditative short film follows a pair of teen girls and their friends as they drive around in the middle of the night collecting pufflings.
Interspersed with the puffling search are brief moments of the quotidian: we see Selma talking to her friends about acrylic nails and also braiding her younger sister’s hair. These scenes illustrate how the teens’ environmental action is only a part of a larger routine of caretaking, revealing a world in which environmental protection is both normal and necessary. “I think it’s important that we tell alternative stories of girlhood, and it’s not led by trauma or romance,” Bishopp said. The girls show themselves to be responsible stewards. They are also in the midst of their own coming of age, and they’re aware of the parallel between their own experiences and those of the birds, who are separating from their parents.
For his first movie since 2019’s Parasite, filmmaker Bong Joon-ho is coming out with a sci-fi dark comedy film called Mickey 17. The trailer is above and the synopsis from Wikipedia is:
Wanting to get out of Earth, Mickey Barnes signs up to be an “expendable”: a disposable employee where after one iteration dies, a new body is regenerated with most of their memories intact. After one of his “multiples”, Mickey 17, unintentionally survived a human expedition to colonize the ice world Niflheim, he goes head-to-head with a new multiple, Mickey 18.
Mickey 17 will be out in theaters in late January. I found the trailer for this from Aaron Stewart-Ahn, who says:
David Zaslav’s Warner Bros has been trying to bury Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi follow up to Parasite for over a year now, refused to let it play Cannes, and is now dumping it in January. Rumors are Robert Pattinson’s weirdo performance also bothered them which to me means it must be friggin’ awesome.
Per Wikipedia, production wrapped in late 2022 so yeah, it sounds like they didn’t know what to do with it.
Apollo 13: Survival is a documentary film that uses original footage and interviews to tell the story of NASA’s Apollo 13 mission, what went wrong, and how the astronauts returned safely to Earth. It’s now playing on Netflix.
In a collaboration with Red Bull & Prada (uh, ok) and with the help of the Polish State Railways, Dawid Godziek rode a mountain bike on a ramps course on top of a moving train, performing tricks & flips between cars. The train and rider moved at the same speed in opposite directions, which made it seem as though, from the perspective of someone on the ground next to the train, that the rider is nearly horizontally stationary.
The result is trippy & counterintuitive and also a demonstration of Newton’s laws of motion & frames of reference. But since Godziek was not riding in a vacuum, there were some real world details to contend with:
We observed something interesting — the lack of air resistance. In theory, this could have made it easier, but the opposite was true. The air resistance creates a tunnel that somehow keeps me in a straight line and doesn’t allow me to shift right or left. Luckily on the recordings we had, the headwind gave me artificial air resistance, which helped me to get a feel for the flight on classic hops. On the tests, the wind was blowing weaker or in a different direction, making shooting tricks difficult. Not bad, right? We’re always complaining about air resistance, and when it wasn’t there, we found that it was impossible to fly without it.
The Great Ball Contraption is a class of machines built with Lego that transport small balls from place to place in many different ways.
The otherwise pointless handling of balls, and the myriad ways this is accomplished, gives great ball contraptions the impression of a Rube Goldberg machine.
These machines can be quite large and elaborate and are displayed at Lego events around the world. Here’s a recent GBC at an event in Japan:
It’s worth watching for a bit for the ingenuity and all of the different mechanisms for moving objects around — plus, it’s mesmerizing. And it obviously reminds me of Chris Burden’s Metropolis II.
From British Pathé, a short film clip from 1928 of men racing on penny farthing bikes. See also clips from 1936 and 1937 races.
Most of the crowd seems to have come to see them fall off, but in the end it turns out to be such a great race that when they come round on the third lap, the excitement runs higher than the bicycle.
James Earl Jones did many things during his long career, including acting as Verizon’s pitchman. As part of a 2005 promotion, Jones recited Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven in that amazing rumbly voice of his, reprising his earlier performance on The Simpsons. Here’s the full version on Soundcloud, including his introduction — “he wrote about murder, torture, and being buried alive”:
As part of the same promotion, he also apparently recorded a recitation of the Gettysburg Address, but I cannot locate a copy of that anywhere.1 However, he did recite part of the Gettysburg Address, along with fragments of other Lincoln speeches, in a performance of Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra:
And in 2000, also on behalf of Verizon, he read Dr. Seuss’ Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? to a group of schoolchildren. I would love to hear that recording.↩
I love My Brilliant Friend — it’s one of my all-time favorites and might be the best show you’re not watching. I agree completely with Clare Thorp’s description of it as “criminally underrated”.
As the trailer above shows, the previous two lead actors (who were excellent) have been replaced by older ones, a change I’m a little apprehensive about, but everything else about the show has been pitch perfect so I’m gonna trust the process. From an NPR piece on the new season:
“This child is you, when you were a child,” Maiorino recalled her friend Alessia saying about the novel’s titular protagonist and sometimes antagonist Lila. Like Lila and her friend Lenù, Maiorino is from Naples and stayed in the south, while her friend left to study in the north of the country, get married and have children.
Art has now truly imitated life for Maiorino, who plays Lila in the fourth season of the series.
New episodes of My Brilliant Friend started airing on HBO last night and will drop every Monday for the next 10 weeks. Go check it out!
For some reason, this is a full-length version of Radiohead’s OK Computer by @shonkywonkydonkey that uses his voice for everything (vocals, drums, guitar, etc.) I don’t exactly know if I like this, but it is interesting. (via sippey)
The Great Wave has not been on view in the Art Institute galleries for five years because, like all prints, it is susceptible to light damage and must rest a minimum of five years between showings to preserve its colors and vibrance.
Here’s a video of the print being removed from storage as well as a brief comparison of their three prints:
For other places you can see The Great Wave on display, check out Great Wave Today.
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