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To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the band, Talking Heads have released a new music video for their iconic 1977 single, Psycho Killer. The video stars Saoirse Ronan and was directed by Mike Mills.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson is now doing visual versions of her daily newsletter on YouTube. Yesterday’s video explains the origins and significance of Juneteenth.
Black people in Galveston met the news Order No. 3 brought with celebrations in the streets, but emancipation was not a gift from white Americans. Black Americans had fought and died for the United States. They had worked as soldiers, as nurses, and as day laborers in the Union army. Those who could had demonstrated their hatred of enslavement and the Confederacy by leaving their homes for the northern lines, sometimes delivering valuable information or matériel to the Union, while those unable to leave had hidden wounded U.S. soldiers and helped them get back to Union lines.
But white former Confederates in Texas were demoralized and angered by the changes in their circumstances. “It looked like everything worth living for was gone,” Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight later recalled.
The Criterion Collection is releasing a new boxset of Wes Anderson films, The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years.
Wes Anderson’s first ten features represent twenty-five years of irrepressible creativity, an ongoing ode to outsiders and quixotic dreamers, and a world unto themselves, graced with a mischievous wit and a current of existential melancholy that flows through every captivating frame. This momentous twenty-disc collector’s set includes new 4K masters of the films, over twenty-five hours of special features, and ten illustrated books, presented in a deluxe clothbound edition.
The boxset’s trailer is predictably Andersonian:
More details:
New 4K digital masters of Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, and The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, supervised and approved by director Wes Anderson, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks
This boxset will set you back a cool $400 ($350 on Amazon), but look at all that stuff!
Hank Green believes how grocery stores are organized is broken. (True.) His solution is to take inspiration from libraries and organize the shelves of every grocery store in the entire world according to the Chewy Decimal System.
TIL that maybe librarians don’t like the Dewey Decimal System?
Dewey sucks so much and it’s never going away. It was designed in a 19th century white dude mindset that splits religion (200-299) into Christianity (200-289) and Other (290-299), sections books about indigenous peoples in the history section (900s) rather than the culture section (300s) as if they don’t continue to exist, and arbitrarily separates wild animals (in the 500s) from pets and working animals (600s). It’s particularly unintuitive for kids, who often are taught it before they’re taught what decimals are, and has multiple better alternatives that aren’t used because it’s financially unfeasible for large collections to be changed.
(thx, caroline)
The Quilters (trailer) is a short documentary about a group of men in a Missouri prison who spend 40 hours a week making birthday quilts for foster kids and kids with disabilities.
The Quilters follows the daily lives of several quilters inside the sewing room at South Central Correctional Center, a Level 5 maximum-security prison in a small town two hours south of St. Louis, MO. From design to completion, the men reveal their struggles, triumphs, and sense of pride in creating something beautiful in this windowless, sacred space deep within the prison walls.
The Quilters is now available to watch on Netflix.
In a recent Vlogbrothers video and in his newsletter, Hank Green talked about how we don’t take enough notice of the things that quietly keep us alive, healthy, and safe.
The tragedy of prevention goes like this: The most effective way to save lives (prevention) is the least noticeable, which leads us to undervaluing it in our individual choices, in what we celebrate, and in public policy. That undervaluing of prevention leads to a great deal of needless death and suffering.
But there’s a second tragedy here, which is that we spend way less time celebrating the accomplishments of humanity than I think we should. If every person who had their life saved by a vaccine, or an airbag, or a clean air regulation felt the same as a firefighter carrying an unconscious person out of a burning building, I think we’d feel a lot better about humanity, and maybe that would help us move forward more effectively.
This follows Green’s Bluesky post from early April:
A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die.
Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.
In the early days of the pandemic, I wrote about a related concept: The Paradox of Preparation.
Preparation, prevention, regulations, and safeguards prevent catastrophes all the time, but we seldom think or hear about it because “world continues to function” is not interesting news. We have to rely on statistical analysis and the expert opinions of planners and officials in order to evaluate both crucial next steps and the effectiveness of preparatory measures after the fact, and that can be challenging for us to pay attention to. So we tend to forget that preparation & prevention is necessary and discount it the next time around.
In this video, musician Armin Küpper performs a saxophone duet with the echo of his past self by playing near the end of a large pipe. That’s pretty cool. And it’s also a learning opportunity! Hey wait, come back…you haven’t finished your bowl of physics yet:
What you hear after each note is an echo, a sound wave reflecting off the far end of the pipe and traveling back to him.
Sound travels at around 343 meters per second (1,235 km/h or 767 mph) through air. In this video, the echo takes about 1.5 seconds to return. That means the reflected sound traveled about 514.5 meters (1,688 feet) round-trip, so the end of the pipe is at around 257 meters (843 ft) away.
It seems more like a second to me (so ~563 feet), but whatever…still cool.
George Wendt, who played lovable barfly Norm Peterson on Cheers for 11 seasons, died yesterday at the age of 76. Here’s an 18-minute supercut of every time Norm entered the bar. I loved Cheers when I was a kid; I’ve seen every episode multiple times (though not for many years) and of course Norm was a favorite. 🍺💞
Lagarto Films is a film collective based in Puerto Rico that makes interactive YouTube videos and games. This is pretty clever actually…they use keyboard shortcuts to skip to different parts of the video, Choose Your Own Adventure style. So you can play a game of Uno:
Or direct the action in a short cops & robbers film:
Play Grand Theft Auto in real life:
There are many more of their interactive videos in this playlist. (thx, ollie)
A group of three students at Purdue University have shattered the world record for the fastest Rubik’s Cube solve by robot — their bot solved the cube in just 0.103 seconds (103 milliseconds). As a comparison, the former record was 305 milliseconds and “a human blink takes about 200 to 300 milliseconds”. As one of the students said, “So, before you even realize it’s moving, we’ve solved it.”
The world record for a human solve is 3.13 seconds by Max Park in 2023 (not anymore, see comments. (via we’re here
The NY Times has a nice feature on NASA astronaut Don Pettit’s photography from his latest stay in space, a 220-day mission aboard the ISS.
Now, you know I like a good astronomical image (like the one above of an ISS sunrise), but the thing that really caught my eye was the video of Pettit’s experiment involving charged water droplets and a teflon needle:
I could watch that allllll day long.
More Pettit: Swirling Green Aurora Captured From the ISS.
At the end of March, I posted some news about three prominent scholars of fascism and authoritarianism who were leaving the United States to live and work in Canada. In this video for the NY Times, We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S., Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley explain their reasons for going. Here’s some of what they had to say:
I’m leaving to the University of Toronto because I want to do my work without the fear that I will be punished for my words.
The lesson of 1933 is you get out sooner rather than later.
My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, “We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.” And I thought my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship. Our ship can’t sink. And what you know is a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.
I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency.
Toni Morrison warned us: “The descent into a final solution is not a jump. It’s one step. And then another. And then another.” We are seeing those steps accelerated right now.
This video feels like a throwback to a simpler time on YouTube: 331 film clips edited together to recreate Eminem’s Lose Yourself. A particularly well-done example of a time-worn genre. I lol’d at “let it go!!”
I love me some Wallace & Gromit and so I was delighted to see that this guy made a real life version of Wallace & Gromit’s breakfast machine, complete with a spoonful of jam flying through the air perfectly meeting a piece of toast popping out of a toaster.
It starts with this crazy part here, where he falls out of bed into a pair of trousers, landing in a chair, and then his sleeves go on, and the vest. And then, probably the hardest part of all, is throwing jam — through the air — and hitting toast — in the air — perfectly. Some of these stunts are going to be the most challenging things I’ve ever attempted.
Cracking toast, Gromit! (via the kid should see this)
Daft Punk are famously secret about, well, most everything they do. Marc Edwards recently took a detailed look at some of the devices that the duo probably used for the vocal effects on their albums.
Talk boxes are relatively simple devices — they’re a speaker in a sealed box with a small opening. One end of a hose is fitted to the opening, and the other end is placed into the performer’s mouth, blasting noise towards their throat. The performer can pretend to speak, shaping and filtering the sound coming out of the tube with their vocal tract. A microphone is then needed to record the resulting sound. A keyboard or guitar is typically connected to the talk box unit as the sound source for the speaker. This lets the keyboard or guitar sound like it’s singing. If you’ve heard Chromeo, 2Pac’s California Love, Peter Frampton’s Do You Feel Like We Do, or Bon Jovi’s Livin’ On A Prayer before, you’ve heard a talk box.
I can confirm firing loud sounds into your mouth while holding a tube with your teeth is a bit uncomfortable. In terms of vocal effects used by Daft Punk, I think talk box might be the least used and least interesting, in terms of hunting down the exact hardware used. Talk boxes are simple devices and typically all sound similar. The sound source and performance play a bigger role in the result than the hardware itself.
The two videos above are worth watching for their comparisons of the effects of the different devices. They don’t include any direct Daft Punk samples (rights issues?), but if you’re familiar enough with their oeuvre, it’s easy enough to compare w/o samples.
At a recent Princeton Public Schools’ Board of Education meeting, Teddy, a fourth-grader from one of the district’s schools, got up and delivered a speech about the many reasons that PPS should teach about autism and other disabilities, including “so we don’t have people like RFK Jr in the future”. Here are Teddy’s full remarks:
Recently, the U.S. Secretary of Health, RFK Jr, made false comments about autism like people with autism are broken, that autism is caused by vaccines, and that people with autism will never have jobs or families. But that’s not true. I have autism and I’m not broken, and I hope that nobody in Princeton Public Schools believes RFK Jr’s lies.
Autism and all disabilities should be taught in the Princeton Public Schools curriculum at all grade levels because it will raise awareness, increase acceptance, and improve the quality of life for kids with disabilities.
But first, here is a quote from a Changing Perspectives article called Disability Inclusion in Education: “A truly inclusive environment does not value one marginalized group over another; instead, it recognizes the unique backgrounds of all members of the community, including but not limited to cultural heritage, religion, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, gender, disability, or any other differences.”
Princeton Public Schools already recognizes Autism Awareness Month, but not much. There are posters in the cafeteria that say to be kind and inclusive. Students wear blue on April 2nd. But we are never taught about the spectrum of autism. Kids need to be taught more about the different kinds of autism, that autism is a natural variation in the genes that you are born with, not caused by vaccines, and about successful people with autism. The lessons should also be extended to other disabilities like ADHD, cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, dyslexia, apraxia, and more.
This is important because it will teach kids how to accept people with disabilities. Accepting someone means really understanding someone for who they are and not minding their differences. I want everyone to know that people with autism and other disabilities are not tragedies, but just different, like all people. If everyone understood more about autistic people, and about people with other disabilities, they would know more about how to treat them, what their lives are like, and that they don’t need to be fixed or cured. This will help kids with disabilities have a better life.
When people are aware of disabilities and are accepting them, they will have friends and less bullying. Also, the teachers might be more aware because they learned about the disabilities also. Kids and teachers should know more about disabilities so they do not believe RFK Jr is right about autism, and they choose to treat them in a nice way that is good for the kid. By knowing more about it, kids and teachers will be nicer to the kids with disabilities.
This is important to me and Princeton Public Schools because I have a disability, and I noticed that disabilities are not being taught, only a few people mentioning autism. When teaching about culture, we teach many different cultures to accept them better — because that’s what disabilities are like, a culture, a culture of differences. Princeton Public Schools must add this to the curriculum of all grades and students, so we don’t have people like RFK Jr in the future.
I want to end with the district mission statement: “Our mission is to prepare all of our students to lead lives of joy and purpose as knowledgeable, creative, and compassionate citizens of a global society.” Adding disabilities to kids’ education will make them knowledgeable and compassionate, and help kids with disabilities to lead lives of joy and purpose.
Come on, challenging the district to uphold their own mission statement? That’s an S-tier move right there.
In this video, 98-year-old British WWII veteran Ken Turner demolishes a Tesla with a Sherman tank. Here’s what Turner had to say before getting down to business:
I’m old enough to have seen fascism the first time around; now it’s coming back. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is using his immense power to support the far-right in Europe, and his money comes from Tesla cars. Well, I’ve got this message for Mr Musk. We’ve crushed fascism before and we’ll crush it again.
(via @prisonculture.bsky.social)
HuffPost gathered a diverse group of girls and women for this video on the sexist things that they hear throughout their lives that men don’t.
Don’t be so bossy. Why are you getting so emotional? You’d be much prettier if you smiled. I was just trying to give you a compliment.
See also 48 Things Men Hear In A Lifetime (That Are Bad For Everyone):
In this episode of Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak takes a look at a simple scene from one of my favorite recent films and shows how director Steven Soderbergh makes it sing.
Like Spielberg or Fincher, Soderbergh is a master craftsman, who can translate a scene from page to screen with the confidence of a seasoned pro. You feel that confidence when you watch his movies, and it’s both relieving and engaging.
I thought Black Bag was great (and great fun) — it’s got a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is streaming on Peacock in the US.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail premiered in theaters on April 3, 1975. 50 years on, it remains one of the finest comedy movies ever (though it is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea). If you’re a fan, you can catch it for free on YouTube (with ads, not sure about region restrictions) or in select theaters in North America. You can also stream it for free on Amazon Prime Video, Pluto TV, Roku Channel, Plex, and a few other free movie services. (via open culture)
I don’t have a whole lot to say about this video except wow. Wow wow. It’s almost inconceivable that we live in a world of sights like this. Feels like science fiction but is actually real. Captured by NASA astronaut Don Pettit aboard the ISS.
Photographer Stephen Voss has been working on a project about data centers and recently travelled to Abilene, Texas to document the first data center built as part of the Stargate Project. When completed, it will be the largest data center in the world. Here’s a short drone video he took of the project:
“The place was mesmerizing and deeply unsettling,” Voss told me over email. “When finished, it’ll have the power demands of a mid-sized city and is on a piece of land that’s the size of Central Park.”
The video immediately reminded me of Edward Burtynsky’s work that documents “the impacts of human industry on the planet”.
Do yourself a favor and watch this: Erin Morton is a junior in the BFA Musical Theatre program at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and she absolutely blisters the paint off of the walls with her performance of Radiohead’s Creep. Wow. I actually got some goosebumps watching this.
BTW, other contenders for best Creep cover include Prince and a 1600-person pub choir.
TIL I learned about gravastars (aka a gravitational vacuum star), theoretical objects related to black holes. Both are massive & dense, but instead of a singularity surrounded by an event horizon, gravastars are made up of dark energy surrounded by a extremely thin shell of exotic matter.
The shell of the gravastar is utterly dark and the coldest thing in the universe, only a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. If we look at it in deep infrared, even the cosmic microwave background glows bright in comparison. It is made from an entirely new, unique and extreme matter that is at the very limit of what is physically possible in nature and doesn’t have a name yet. Actually, the shell is so incredibly thin that atoms seem truly gigantic next to it.
Even after 60+ years, Lawrence of Arabia is one of the best-looking films out there; this video explores why. I got to see Lawrence of Arabia on a big screen last fall and it was stunning — the colors, the amount of detail, the cinematography in general.
This is a great data-driven short documentary by Neil Halloran about how smallpox was eradicated from the face of the Earth. And what it took was humanity, through the use of science & humanitarianism, answering its own plea for something to be done about it.
Some philosophers believe there was a secondary humanitarian revolution that followed the scientific revolution. And I note this because the eradication of smallpox also had these two phases. The scientific breakthroughs of inoculation and the vaccine allowed many countries to become virtually smallpox-free — but not all countries. In fact, those 300 to 500 million deaths in the 20th century? They came well after the vaccine had been discovered. So clearly, for much of the world, something more was needed than medical innovation. And fortunately there’s reason to think that these two types of progress might be connected.
Part of being a human is contemplating why some of us get so sick. It’s a practical question and it’s more than that. As we learned about disease, the theory goes that we began to think a little differently about those who fell ill — to see that their suffering truly wasn’t meant to be. We stepped away from thinking it was up to a higher power and into the belief that, well, it was up to us.
See also How smallpox claimed its final victim (I’d never heard this story before watching Halloran’s video), How Children Took the Smallpox Vaccine Around the World, and No One Knows What’s Inside the Smallpox Vaccine.
Ok it’s not one hour of Zemo dancing, but I’ll take it. And the YT comments are better:
“Many Bothans died to bring us this beat.”
“Sir, we have located the Rebel bass.”
This isn’t the first time this song has appeared on Andor — it’s an “intergalactic hit” called Niamos! written for the show by composer Nicholas Britell, who lives in this galaxy and was also responsible for the Succession theme song. (via @moleitau.bsky.social)
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.
(via, sorta, kottke.org)
For his most recent video, Beau Miles (who you might remember from his “Mile an Hour” Marathon or Four-Day Commute to Work Via Kayak) returned to a pair of places (both outdoor camps) where his life took a significant turn.
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.
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