This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Back in 2016, I wrote about The Most Relaxing Song in the World, an ambient track by Marconi Union called Weightless. Today I learned the band’s record label hosts a 24/7 streaming video of their music on YouTube:
I am adding this to my chill working music rotation immediately, alongside this 10-hour version of Weightless.
(via jodi ettenberg)
Ernest Wright has been making scissors in Sheffield, England since 1902. This video takes a look at how they make one of the their most sought after models.
In this episode of Sheffield Makes we visit Ernest Wright to follow the production of the Kutrite kitchen scissor, a complex design that’s woven into Ernest Wright history.
The Kutrite pattern of flat kitchen scissors was designed by Philip Wright in the early sixties and produced till the eighties. After an absence of decades, the Kutrite model is proudly being produced in Sheffield once again.
I first featured Ernest Wright on kottke.org more than 10 years ago:
A person who makes scissors by hand is called a putter, short for putter togetherer. The Putter is a four-minute silent film by Shaun Bloodworth that shows putter Cliff Denton making scissors.
I have a pair of their Turton kitchen scissors and they are great and will last pretty much forever.
In this excerpt from Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive, author Eliot Stein travels to a city in Sardinia to learn how to make the world’s rarest pasta, su filindeu.
As much as I would hate to see su filindeu fade away, I understand why Abraini doesn’t want to teach it to any Canadian or Greek chef who calls her out of the blue. Sure, after several years, she may succeed in passing on the skill, but as she told me, when you take something that is so intertwined with a specific place, a specific event, and a specific pastoral code, and you present it in a different context, “it’s no longer the threads of God; it’s just pulled pasta.”
Only a few people in the world know how to make this pasta properly, and they all belong to the same family.
“There are only three ingredients: semolina wheat, water and salt,” Abraini said, vigorously kneading the dough back and forth. “But since everything is done by hand, the most important ingredient is elbow grease.”
Abraini patiently explained how you work the pasta thoroughly until it reaches a consistency reminiscent of modelling clay, then divide the dough into smaller sections and continue working it into a rolled-cylindrical shape.
Then comes the hardest part, a process she calls, “understanding the dough with your hands.” When she feels that it needs to be more elastic, she dips her fingers into a bowl of salt water. When it needs more moisture, she dips them into a separate bowl of regular water. “It can take years to understand,” she beamed. “It’s like a game with your hands. But once you achieve it, then the magic happens.”
Here’s a 30-minute video on how su filindeu is prepared — there are a couple of shorter videos as well.
Have you ever wanted to browse art from the Metropolitan Museum in a first-person shooter interface? You are in luck because DOOM: The Gallery Experience exists.
DOOM: The Gallery Experience was created as an art piece designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world of gallery openings.
In this experience, you will be able to walk around and appreciate some fine art while sipping some wine and enjoying the complimentary hors d’oeuvres in the beautifully renovated and re-imagined E1M1 of id Software’s DOOM (1993).
They sourced the art from the Met’s Open Access collection and in the game you can click through to see each piece on the Met’s website. Here’s a video of the gameplay:
And of course people are speedrunning it. (via waxy.org)
Today is the fourth anniversary of the attack on Congress and attempted coup of the United States government and the man who incited it will be sworn in as President of the United States later this month. On this dark day, it is important to remember what happened and why, so I went back and looked at some of what I posted in the aftermath of the attack. Here are a few of the videos, articles, and thoughts worth a second look.
This video investigation by the NY Times (YouTube video) lays out what happened that day very clearly:
Most of the videos we analyzed were filmed by the rioters. By carefully listening to the unfiltered chatter within the crowd, we found a clear feedback loop between President Trump and his supporters.
As Mr. Trump spoke near the White House, supporters who had already gathered at the Capitol building hoping to disrupt the certification responded. Hearing his message to “walk down to the Capitol,” they interpreted it as the president sending reinforcements. “There’s about a million people on their way now,” we heard a man in the crowd say, as Mr. Trump’s speech played from a loudspeaker.
Another excellent video of Jan 6 footage was taken by Luke Mogelson, a war reporter for The New Yorker:
Mogelson’s accompanying article, Among the Insurrectionists, is a must-read:
The America Firsters and other invaders fanned out in search of lawmakers, breaking into offices and revelling in their own astounding impunity. “Nancy, I’m ho-ome! ” a man taunted, mimicking Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Shining.” Someone else yelled, “1776 — it’s now or never.” Around this time, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country. … USA demands the truth!” Twenty minutes later, Ashli Babbitt, a thirty-five-year-old woman from California, was fatally shot while climbing through a barricaded door that led to the Speaker’s lobby in the House chamber, where representatives were sheltering. The congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, later said that she’d had a “close encounter” with rioters during which she thought she “was going to die.” Earlier that morning, another representative, Lauren Boebert — a newly elected Republican, from Colorado, who has praised QAnon and promised to wear her Glock in the Capitol — had tweeted, “Today is 1776.”
Importantly, Mogelson’s piece connects Jan 6th to other right-wing militant actions incited by Republicans and Trump:
In April, in response to Whitmer’s aggressive public-health measures, Trump had tweeted, “Liberate Michigan!” Two weeks later, heavily armed militia members entered the state capitol, terrifying lawmakers.
In an Instagram video and a Buzzfeed news interview a few days after the insurrection attempt, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was quoted as saying:
Wednesday was an extremely traumatizing event. And it was not an exaggeration to say that many members of the House were nearly assassinated.
And:
The Democrat said that she worried during the storming of the Capitol about other members of Congress knowing her location and did not feel safe going to the same secure location as her colleagues because of members who believe in the QAnon collective delusion and “frankly, white supremacist members of Congress … who I know and who I have felt would disclose my location,” saying she was concerned there were colleagues “who would create opportunities to allow me to be hurt, kidnapped, etc.” She said that she “didn’t feel safe around other members of Congress.”
AOC’s comments and concerns highlight something I’ve been trying to be clear about in my own writing here: this was not an attack on the Capitol Building. This was an attack on Congress, the United States Government, and elected members of our government. It was a coup attempt. Can you imagine what the mob in those videos would have done had they found Nancy Pelosi? Kidnapping or a hostage situation at the very least, assassination in the worst case. Saying that this was an “attack on the Capitol” is such an anodyne way of describing what happened on January 6th that it’s misleading. Words matter and we should use the correct ones when describing this consequential event.
From the Washington Post, an account of the attack from the perspective of the DC police:
“We weren’t battling 50 or 60 rioters in this tunnel,” he said in the first public account from D.C. police officers who fought to protect the Capitol during last week’s siege. “We were battling 15,000 people. It looked like a medieval battle scene.”
Someone in the crowd grabbed Fanone’s helmet, pulled him to the ground and dragged him on his stomach down a set of steps. At around the same time, police said, the crowd pulled a second officer down the stairs. Police said that chaotic and violent scene was captured in a video that would later spread widely on the Internet.
Rioters swarmed, battering the officers with metal pipes peeled from scaffolding and a pole with an American flag attached, police said. Both were struck with stun guns. Fanone suffered a mild heart attack and drifted in and out of consciousness.
All the while, the mob was chanting “U.S.A.” over and over and over again.
“We got one! We got one!” Fanone said he heard rioters shout. “Kill him with his own gun!”
Here are two of those DC police officers speaking to CNN:
For This American Life, Emmanuel Felton interviewed “several Black Capitol Police officers in the days after the attack on the Capitol on January 6th to find out what it was like for them to face off with this mostly white mob”:
Emmanuel Felton: Have you ever been in a fight like that?
Officer Jones: No, not like that. No way. These people were deranged, and they were determined. I’ve played video games before. Well, you know, zombie games — Resident Evil, Call of Duty. And the zombies are just coming after you, and you’re just out there. I guess that’s what I could relate it to — Call of Duty zombies. And the further you go, the more and more zombies just coming. You’re just running, running, running. And they wouldn’t stop. You’re seeing they’re getting their heads cracked with these batons, and we’re spraying them, and they don’t care! It was insane.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson placed January 6th within the context of the history of right-wing terrorism in the US, setting it alongside Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Bundys:
Right-wing terrorism in American has very deep roots, and those roots have grown since the 1990s as Republican rhetorical attacks on the federal government have fed them. The January 6 assault on the Capitol is not an aberration. It has been coming for a very long time.
The team at Howtown closed out 2024 by investigating the spice level (i.e. the Scoville ratings) of the lineup of hot sauces on the popular YouTube interview series Hot Ones while also teaching us about how hot peppers evolved and how pepper spininess is measured. (Spoiler: the sauces are not as hot as advertised.)
Cheers to Adam Cole for Peter Pipering this particular passage:
By picking peppers, they could pinpoint the precise percentage of each patch that was pungent, and some patches were more pungent than others.
Perfect.
Somehow I missed that Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent book on The Troubles, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, has been turned into a 9-part TV series (now available on Hulu in the US & on Disney+ elsewhere).
Spanning four decades, the series opens with the shocking disappearance of Jean McConville, a single mother of ten who was abducted from her home in 1972 and never seen alive again.
Telling the story of various Irish Republican Army (IRA) members, Say Nothing explores the extremes some people will go to in the name of their beliefs, the way a deeply divided society can suddenly tip over into armed conflict, the long shadow of radical violence for all affected, and the emotional and psychological costs of a code of silence.
It’s gotten good reviews and has also attracted at least one lawsuit from one of the people depicted in it.
Veteran Republican Marian Price intends to sue Disney+ after she was depicted shooting Jean McConville in one of the most notorious murders of the Troubles, a law firm has said.
Mrs McConville was abducted, murdered and secretly buried by the IRA in 1972, becoming one of the disappeared.
Her body was eventually found more than 30 years later at a beach in County Louth in the Republic of Ireland.
Ms Price, 70, also known by her married name Marian McGlinchey, has denied any involvement.
Well, I really don’t know what happened here. One minute it was the second week of January 2024 and the next minute we’re a scant 12 hours away from 2025 — a ludicrously futuristic date, a sci-fi date. And I didn’t do a media diet post all year! I have no excuse; it just…didn’t happen. Over and over and over and over again — it just kept not happening!
As penance, and for my last post of the year, here’s a giant media diet recap of (almost) everything I read, watched, listened to, and experienced in the year of our lord 2024. (I’ll try to break it up into smaller chunks next year… 🤞)
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. I am just totally in the tank for how Rooney writes about power dynamics & interpersonal interactions. I think maybe this is my second-favorite of hers after Normal People? (A)
Shōgun. My favorite show of the year by a mile — so good all around. (A+)
Developing AI Like Raising Kids. Engaging and wide-ranging podcast conversation between Alison Gopnik and Ted Chiang about what caregiving and designing AI systems might have in common. (A)
GNX. The latest album from Kendrick Lamar has been on heavy rotation in my car since it came out. (A)
Dune: Part Two. I loved this, particularly in IMAX. It’s a better film than the first part and very rewatchable (I’ve seen it ~5 times?). I hope Villeneuve does another one. (A+)
Dune. I went back and rewatched this after seeing Dune: Part Two and it all made so much more sense. I can’t remember ever seeing a sequel that improved the first film in retrospect. Empire Strikes Back maybe? (A)
Interstellar (10th anniversary IMAX re-release). An incredible experience, worth the 6-hour roundtrip drive from the boondocks of VT. The docking scene with the damaged ship is one my all-time favorite movie scenes and to see it on massive screen accompanied by the teeth-rattling sound of Han Zimmer’s soundtrack was a real treat. (A+)
XOXO 2024. It was so good to see so many old friends and meet some new ones. (A)
The 2024 total solar eclipse. Not quiiiite as mind-blowing as my first time, but it was great to bust out the telescope and share the experience with friends and eclipse newbies. (A+)
May December. Natalie Portman & Julianne Moore were both fantastic in this. (A-)
Girl, so confusing featuring lorde. The earnestness, the working it out on the remix — I’m so here for it. (A)
The Incredibles. A perfect movie. No flab. Hits all the right notes. (A+)
The Incredibles 2. When this came out, I preferred it to the first movie. Now having seen them back-to-back, the sequel is not quite the equal to the original. But still great. (A)
What Relationships Would You Want, if You Believed They Were Possible? Ezra Klein’s conversation with Rhaina Cohen (author of The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center) was probably my favorite single podcast episode of the year. It really helped me think through what sorts of relationships I want to have in my life in a way that I hadn’t before. (A+)
Anatomy of a Fall. A gripping legal & family drama from director Justine Triet. (A-)
The Big Dig. A nine-part, in-depth podcast on how the massive Boston highway project got done. Would recommend for governance and infrastructure nerds but also for anyone who is curious about how things get done (or not) in America. (A)
Princess Mononoke. My favorite Ghibli movie — so great to be able to see it at the theater. Just gorgeous. (A)
Mad Max: Fury Road. My umpteenth rewatch confirms: a perfect movie. (A+)
Godzilla Minus One. Not a Godzilla scholar, but this is certainly the best Godzilla movie I’ve ever seen. A real gem of a movie. (A)
Funspot. Billed as “the world’s largest arcade”, the real attraction of Funspot for me is the 250+ classic games and pinball machines (Star Wars, Frogger, Donkey Kong, Burgertime, Gorgar, Dig Dug, Mr Do!, etc.) I took my teenaged kids here last summer and they loved it. Plus, $20 in tokens kept the three of us entertained for almost two hours. (A)
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. I watched this twice — the first time I thought it was alright (was Anya Taylor-Joy the right choice for the lead?) but I loved it the second time around (Anya Taylor-Joy was the right choice for the lead). (A)
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham. The most complete account and investigation of how the Chernobyl nuclear disaster happened and its aftermath, from both the technological and political angles. Fantastic book. (A)
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It’s been awhile since I’ve fallen in love with a Star Trek series, but this one got me hooked right away. (The commenters in this thread were spot on with their recommendations.) I absolutely love the cast and the episodic format. I blazed through season one, am still stinge watching season two, and am delighted that the show has been renewed for two more seasons. (A)
All Fours by Miranda July. A truly weird book that I loved. Listen to the audiobook version if you can…July’s voice acting (I can’t really call it mere narration) really adds to the experience. (A)
Lawrence of Arabia. I’d never seen this before but I got a chance to see it on a big screen this summer and was blown away by it. A truly gorgeous film. (A)
The Zone of Interest. I’m not a particular fan of Jonathan Glazer, but this film was brutal and chilling and boring. The sound design was absolutely brilliant. (A-)
Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Brodesser-Akner is a hell of a writer. (A)
Capitalism. Another banger from Scene on Radio, which you may remember from their excellent podcast series on whiteness, American history, and the climate crisis. Their series on capitalism is typically thought-provoking and informative. (A)
The Great British Bake Off (2023 season). When each new season of Bake Off starts, I’m always like “who are these chuck-a-lucks?” and by about the fourth episode I’d run through a wall for any of the bakers. Such a great format & vibe to this show. (A)
Poor Things. Really enjoyed this. Emma Stone was fantastic. (A-)
Scriptnotes, Episode 622: The One with Christopher Nolan. Fascinating conversation with Christopher Nolan about how he approaches scriptwriting and then translating those scripts into action on the screen. (A-)
Ratatouille. The scene near the end, when Ego tastes the ratatouille that Remy cooks for him, always gives me chills — one of cinema’s great flashbacks. (A)
The Diplomat (season two). I can’t tell if this show is actually good or if I just really, really like it. But I’ll tell you who’s actually good though: Allison Janney — she swooped in for the final two episodes and upstaged the rest of the really talented cast. (A-)
Gladiator. Rewatched in anticipation of the sequel. A neeeearly perfect movie. I can’t really even put my finger on why it isn’t quite flawless — there’s like 3-5 minutes that could be reworked or cut or something. But still, a great film that I love to watch. (A)
Things Become Other Things. I regret to inform you that the irritatingly nice & talented Craig Mod is also good at writing memoirs. The bastard. (A)
Chernobyl. I rewatched this with my son this fall and I’d forgotten just how good it is. One of the best TV things of the past decade. The courtroom scene with Legasov and his blue & red cards is one of the best & simplest explanations of the reactor’s explosion you’ll find anywhere. (A)
James by Percival Everett. It’s a close call, but I think this retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was my favorite book of 2024. The audiobook version, narrated by Dominic Hoffman, is fantastic. (A)
Dookie Demastered. Green Day “demastered” their 1994 album Dookie into 15 “obscure, obsolete, and inconvenient” formats, like wax cylinder, Fisher Price record, Teddy Ruxpin, and player piano roll. Brilliant. (A)
Shōgun by James Clavell. I’m nearly halfway through this 1300-page behemoth, but I wanted to include it here because I’m blazing through it and enjoying it so much. (A-)
How Playwright Annie Baker Made the Movie of the Summer. This podcast conversation between Sam Fragoso and Annie Baker is fascinating because of Baker’s polite but insistent refusal to adhere to the social conventions of a media interview. (A)
Conclave. I can’t decide if this film is overwrought or just the right amount of wrought. Well-acted though and compelling. (B+)
Cléo from 5 to 7. I appreciated this film more than I enjoyed it. (B)
Fallout. A promising first season; I’m glad they’re doing another. (B+)
Past Lives. Greta Lee is great in this. And that last scene, ooof. (B+)
Moonbound by Robin Sloan. Was pretty charmed by this, in part because it was fun trying to connect the narrative & themes of the book to Sloan’s preoccupations on his mailing list over the past 2-3 years. (B+)
Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Solidly entertaining and the teens liked it. (B)
For All Mankind (season four). My pre-season musing about this show being “a prequel/origin story for The Expanse” hold up pretty well, I think. (B+)
The Holdovers. A mostly wholesome Christmas-time Breakfast Club. (A-)
The Great (season three). This didn’t have the zing of the first season, but it was better than the second. (B+)
Reservation Dogs. I am going to get yelled at for this but I enjoyed the first season more than the subsequent two. I appreciate what they did with the second and third seasons on an intellectual level (it’s brilliant, multi-generational storytelling) but I found my attention drifting as I tried to keep up with all of the connections. (A-)
Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly. A compendium of life advice from one of the most interesting people I know. (B+)
Civil War. I’d like to see this again — I’m still not sure if I liked it or if it was any good. (B)
Constellation. Was disappointed with this show. Would have been an interesting three-episode series — instead we got eight ponderous episodes. (C)
3 Body Problem. Netflix did pretty well with this adaptation and the changes made sense. Looking forward to see where they go with the next season. (B+)
The Three-Body Problem trilogy by Cixin Liu. Well, after watching the TV series, I went back to read the three-book series for the third time. Was a little let down this time for whatever reason. (B)
Alien. Saw this in the theater over the summer and didn’t like it quite as much as I have in the past. (B+)
The Gilded Age. A gorgeously filmed and costumed guilty pleasure. Who is going to keep making this kind of series after Julian Fellowes retires? (A-)
Rebel Moon. Aka Zach Snyder’s Star Wars. Couldn’t finish this it was so bad. What a hack. (D)
Leave the World Behind. I watched this way back in January and had to paste the title into Google to see what it even was. I remember it being pretty uneven. But it also introduced me to Myha’la. (B-)
The Marvels. I honestly don’t remember much of this, just that it didn’t have the, uh, goodness of the first one. (B)
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Saw this on the big screen this summer, which was worth it for the pod race and the “duel of the fates” lightsaber battle at the end. (B-)
Petite Maman. A film of quiet impact by Céline Sciamma. I didn’t know anything about this going in and was delighted by where it went. (A-)
Frankenstein. Hot Frank Summer! I really tried to get into this but just couldn’t…I got bored and gave up a third of the way in. (C+)
The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson. Not Larson’s best effort but it was illuminating to read about how the Civil War started. (B)
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (season two). I was somewhat in the minority in liking the first season of this show, and I liked this season even more. Patiently awaiting the next season. (A-)
Devs. Rewatched this with my son and didn’t like as much as I did the first time. I found it a little too self-serious. (B+)
Star Wars: The Acolyte. Uneven but with some good moments. Glad I watched it, even though the show got cancelled. (B)
Avatar: The Last Airbender. I thought they did a good job casting the characters for this live-action series. But there’s a magic to the animated series that they didn’t capture. (B)
Fall Guy. Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt were charming and the rest of it was fine. I enjoyed the dragging of Tom Cruise. (B)
Deadpool & Wolverine. Rotten Tomatoes has this at 78% and that seems right…I liked it about 78%. (B+ (I grade on a scale apparently))
Ponyo. Another Ghibli movie I got to enjoy on the big screen. (B+)
North Woods by Daniel Mason. I would have liked this more without the magical realism. Some great parts though. (B+)
Rebel Ridge. I really enjoyed this one. This movie felt like a throwback of sorts: a solid thriller with no bells and whistles. Reminded me a bit of The Fugitive. (A-)
A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon. I enjoy the Shaun shorts more than the films, but this one had an impressive number of sci-fi references in it…the kids got annoyed at me pointing them out. (B+)
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Clare North. An interesting twist on the Groundhog Day plot mechanic that…well, I won’t spoil it. (B)
The Wild Robot. Hilarious at times, but a bit too pat when it came to the main plot/emotional core. (B)
The Good Place. Third time through on this one…a comedy classic that stuck the landing. (A)
Gladiator II. I wanted this to be better. Denzel Washington was fantastic, as was his sleeve-work. Love that the co-emperors were basically crypto YouTube bros. (B)
Alien: Romulus. Very good Alien installment. I was on the edge of my seat for the last third of the movie as the heroes raced against the inevitability of gravity — one of the best action/thriller sequences of the year, I’d reckon. (B+)
Moana. Watched in preparation for Moana 2. You can see why this movie is the #1 streamed movie over the last 5 years. (A-)
Moana 2. Watched this with an audience filled with little kids and when Maui appeared on the screen for the first time, a little boy said “Maui” in a quietly awed voice, instantly charming the entire theater. (B)
Mr Salary by Sally Rooney. I had no idea this short story existed until a few months ago. It was written before she published her debut novel. (B+)
Elf. It was nice to see Bob Newhart — I’d forgotten he was in this. (B)
Inside Out 2. Pixar is still the best studio for making kids’ movies that appeal to all ages. My kids were like, yep, pretty much what it’s like being a teenager. And I identified both with Riley and her parents. (A)
Radical Optimism. Underwhelming compared to Future Nostalgia, but I do like Houdini a lot. (B)
Philip Glass Solo. Lovely and personal. (A-)
Cowboy Carter. This is not my cup of tea, but I love that it exists. (B-)
Brat. My favorite track (other than the aforementioned Girl, so confusing featuring lorde) is Von Dutch. (B+)
Dos Hermanos Bakery. The chopped sandwiches here are very messy but very delicious. (B+)
Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody. Loved seeing this retrospective of Haring’s work at the Walker. (A-)
Zoozve. A very entertaining episode of Radiolab. (B+)
Past installments of my media diet are available here. Butter shipping container photo by yours truly.
What were your favorite things that you watched, read, or listened to in 2024?
Curator James Payne’s Great Art Explained channel is one of YouTube’s gems. For his latest video, he takes a look at Leonardo da Vinci’s mural The Last Supper and explains what makes it such an unusual, impressive, and revolutionary work of art. Here’s how the main part of the video begins:
Milan, 1494: Leonardo da Vinci was an exceptional man, and everyone who met him described him as a genius. And yet, he was now 42 years old — a middle-aged man in an era when life expectancy was 40 — And he still hadn’t produced anything that would be considered a masterpiece by his contemporaries. Many of his works were unfinished or in private collections, there were no great public works that people could see, no architectural marvels and no distinguished altarpieces for cathedrals. Nothing that could be considered worthy of his potential.
Then, he was asked to paint a wall.
I found the discussion of how Leonardo’s knowledge of theatre — he was charged with “creating lavish plays and pageants for the Duke of Milan” — informed his work on The Last Supper particularly interesting. You’ll never see this painting the same way again after watching this video.
In the city of Poznań, Poland, a group of eight clams controls the local water supply through a clever bio-monitoring system:
These biological systems are comprised of eight mussels with sensors hot-glued to their shells. They work together with a network of computers and have been given control over the city’s water supply. If the waters are clean, these mussels stay open and happy. But when water quality drops too low, they close off and shut the water supply of millions of people with them.
According to The Economist (archive), more than 50 such systems are now deployed in Poland and Russia to help protect water supplies:
The system is nifty. When the molluscs encounter heavy metals, pesticides or other pollutants, they close their shells, explains Piotr Domek of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, who has worked on the project for three decades. To create a natural early-warning system, Mr Domek and his colleagues collect the clams from rivers or reservoirs, and attach a coil and a magnet to their shells. Computers register whether their shells are open or closed by detecting changes in the magnetic field.
“In the case of a terrorist attack, an ecological disaster or another contamination of the water supply, the clams will close,” says Mr Domek. This, in turn, will automatically cut off the water supply. The clams, he thinks, are life-savers. “If contaminated water goes straight to our taps, we will get poisoned,” he says in “Fat Kathy”, a short film that celebrates the invaluable bivalves.
You can watch that short film here:
Each clam serves a tour of duty of a few months:
Each worker mussel spends three months on duty — after that, they become too accustomed to their new surroundings and are no longer sensitive enough to properly monitor the water. For retirement, they are gently tossed back where they came from.
I’ve shared animator Nick Murray Willis’ videos before — he takes snippets of sound & dialogue from sports commentary & movies and creates context-shifted animations from them. For instance, in the two videos above with football (soccer) commentary, a commentator’s chant of “Messi, Messi, Messi” becomes a French street performer thanking the crowd (“merci, merci, merci”).
(Ok, I’ve caught myself attempting to explain humor, so I’m gonna wrap this up by urging you to watch the videos if you want.)
Sleepy Skunk’s end-of-the-year movie trailer mashups are always worth a look. This year’s installment got me wondering how many of these movies I’ve actually seen — not that many, I don’t think. (via @rands)
Food historian Max Miller stumbled upon the original recipe for 1980s/90s school cafeteria pizza (you know, with the iconic rectangular slices) and decided to whip up a batch (with “pourable dough”).
Tastes just like it. You can like — all of those herbs are exactly the same as they were. I think maybe it tastes a little fresher than I remember, like the flavors are a little heightened…but that’s that’s them. This is the pizza…
While the pizza was baking, Miller talked about the history of school lunches (following up on his video about school lunches during the Depression) — it’s a story that features J. Edgar Hoover and The Black Panthers.
You can find the pizza recipe on Miller’s website or in the original 1988 USDA publication Quantity Recipes for School Food Service courtesy of the Internet Archive. The pourable dough recipe is on page B-15 and the cheese pizza recipe is on D-30. (via @ernie.tedium.co)
While poking around for Christmas music, I found this little-known recording of Louis Armstrong reading ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas, recorded shortly before he died.
The poem, first published in 1823, would be Armstrong’s final commercial recording. Armstrong taped it on February 26, 1971, on a reel-to-reel recorder at his home in Queens, New York, during his last spell of good health.
Truly one of the great voices of all time.
Well this is something special, a holiday treat for the end of 2024: a group of archivists (including Chris Person) has uploaded an HBO magic special by Ricky Jay that has been largely unavailable since it aired in 1996.
This is an RF rip of Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, to date the greatest card magic special ever produced, directed by David Mamet of all people. This special was produced by HBO and to date has never had a home release, although poor home recordings of this special exist online.
Person described his process for archiving videos at Aftermath:
Before getting into preservation generally, it’s worth considering how we got here. Why is so much media lost or badly preserved? A recurring reason is that the people in charge are sometimes, but not always, asleep at the wheel. Media is forgotten or stored improperly, and humidity and heat have destroyed more of our history than we will ever know. Sometimes companies handle the material sloppily (I’ve blogged about the use of AI before, but there are countless examples in audio too).
Having shared all that, I feel like the quality of this YouTube video of the special is not perceptibly worse than the one uploaded to archive.org? What am I missing?
And as always when I post about Ricky Jay, I recommend Mark Singer’s irresistible 1993 profile of Jay, which begins with this story:
The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher affirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened:
Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher’s named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card.
“Three of clubs,” Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card.
He turned over the three of clubs.
Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, “Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card.”
After an interval of silence, Jay said, “That’s interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time.”
Mosher persisted: “Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card.”
Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, “This is a distinct change of procedure.” A longer pause. “All right — what was the card?”
“Two of spades.”
Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card.
The deuce of spades.
A small riot ensued.
Al Green released a soulful cover of R.E.M’s “Everybody Hurts,” and it whips.
“I could really feel the heaviness of the song, and I wanted to inject a little touch of hope and light into it. There’s always a presence of light that can break through those times of darkness.”
Last year, Green released a version of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.” (via @allyourscreens.bsky.social)
Vanity Fair has done a video interview Billie Eilish every year since she was a relatively unknown 15-year-old singer/songwriter. They skipped releasing last year’s interview but they are back with year eight.
I’ve said this before but it’s incredible that they picked Eilish for this:
I still marvel that Vanity Fair embarked on this project with this particular person. They could have chosen any number of up-and-coming 2017 pop singer/songwriters and they got lucky with the one who went supernova and won multiple Grammys.
Her selection over a multitude of other talented, rising stars is truly one of the great talent scouting successes ever.
The only Christmas music I want to hear this year is The Muppets doing Carol of the Bells. Beaker, Animal, and the Swedish Chef makes a great trio, don’t you think?
I didn’t know that the whereabouts of one of Vincent van Gogh’s most important works, a 1890 painting called “Portrait of Dr. Gachet”, is unknown and that the painting had not been seen publicly since the 1990s. This investigation into the potential location of the painting is an engrossing read as well as a good opportunity to appreciate van Gogh’s piece.
Many experts encountered along the way had no clue what had happened to the painting. Four art world insiders said they suspect the painting is held by a private, very rich European family. All parties had an opinion on the core question that drives such a quest: Do collecting families have any responsibility to share iconic works of art with the broader public?
The question has grown more relevant as it becomes clearer that most museums can no longer outbid billionaire collectors for the greatest works of art. Few paintings make that point plainer than Dr. Gachet’s portrait, a piece long on public display that has now vanished into someone’s private home or a climate-controlled warehouse.
For many in the art world, such a work is not just a creative expression, but part of a trade that survives because of the interest and deep pockets of collectors who may, or may not, choose to share their work.
“People are allowed to own things privately,” said Michael Findlay, who was involved as a specialist for Christie’s in the 1990 auction sale of the Gachet. “Does it belong to everybody? No, it does not.”
See also a new short documentary on the missing painting:
Then Comes The Body is a great short documentary from Jacob Krupnick about a Nigerian man who taught himself how to dance ballet from watching YouTube tutorials, the ballet school he started in Lagos, and the students who are branching out into the rest of the world.
There’s no ballet here in Nigeria. There’s no one to look up to. There are no theaters. There are no productions. There are no ballet schools at all. The only thing you have is yourself and the internet.
From a piece in Dance Magazine:
The founder of Leap of Dance Academy, Daniel Ajala, was inspired to learn ballet after watching the 2001 American film Save the Last Dance. As there weren’t any ballet schools in Nigeria, he taught himself by watching YouTube videos. Determined to provide his community with opportunities he hadn’t had, Ajala established the Academy in 2017 and offers classes for free, explaining that he doesn’t want anyone “to have an excuse for not following your passion.”
Leap of Dance Academy came to worldwide attention in 2020 via a viral video of student Anthony Madu dancing in the rain, which Krupnick watched and resulted in Then Comes The Body. Madu got a scholarship to a ballet school in the UK and there’s a feature length documentary about him that’s available to watch on Disney+.
Speaking of speaking of Tiny Desk Concerts here are two recent good ones. (Eep, wait, they’re all really good. What if any performance by a very talented performer in an intimate setting is always going to be special?)
Waxahatchee was solo in her 2013 performance, but here she is with an excellent five piece band, including Jeff Tweedy’s son on drums.
And here’s Doechii with a NINE piece. Gosh, this is so good and so fun to watch.
This is also worth a watch about how the NPR engineers make the concerts sound so good.
A teaser trailer for the third season of The White Lotus is out and the release date has been revealed: February 16, 2025. Parker Posey? Walton Goggins? Yes, please. But I’ve got a love/hate relationship with this show (I couldn’t get through the first season but thought the second season was great), so I’m feeling cautiously optimistic.
During the pandemic, Billie Eilish did a Tiny Desk Concert at home amidst a very faithful recreation of the NPR office. Last week, Eilish played a proper set at the actual office. From the video’s description:
Saudade is a Portuguese word that can be roughly defined as a feeling of melancholy, nostalgia or yearning for something that is beloved but not present. There’s no perfect translation, but one of the closest English expressions of the word I’ve ever seen is Billie Eilish’s Tiny Desk performance.
You’d think the Los Angeles-born singer invented the term. Every breath is so full of indulgent melancholy, hopeful regret, at 22 years old she’s become a captivating fixture of what it means, or rather what it feels, to love and lose simultaneously.
Accompanied by a small band and her brother Finneas, Eilish played The Greatest, L’Amour de Ma Vie, i love you, and Birds of a Feather. Lovely.
Watch a stone pine grow from a seed harvested from a pinecone into a small tree, a 2-year growth period compressed into just 110 seconds through the ✨magic✨ of time lapse photography. Don’t you snicker…it is magic! Its invention in the 1870s made it possible to observe, study, and appreciate objects and events in entirely new ways — it’s literal time travel.
This is a really interesting video about something called the gang-nail plate, a construction innovation that enabled larger roofs to be built on houses, removed the need for internal load-bearing walls, and made the process of construction cheaper & more efficient.
While it helped streamline building processes and cut costs, it also encouraged rapid housing expansion and larger, more resource-intensive homes. The result was an architectural shift that contributed to suburban sprawl, increased energy demands, and homes increasingly treated as commodities rather than unique, handcrafted spaces. These changes reverberated through building codes, real estate markets, and even family life, influencing how we interact with our homes and one another.
The story of gang-nail plate illustrates an inescapable reality of capitalist economics: companies tend not to pass cost savings from efficiency gains onto consumers…they just sell people more of it. And people mostly go along with it because who doesn’t want a bigger house for the same price as a smaller one 10 years ago or a 75” TV for far less than a 36” TV would have cost 8 years ago or a 1/4-lb burger for the same price as a regular burger a decade ago? (via @mariosundar.bsky.social)
Watching these expert restorers mend & refresh a pair of vintage Star Wars posters (neither of which features the logo we’re familiar with today and one of which is signed by the designer) is both fascinating and relaxing. It’s like the posters are having a spa day: bit of a soak, a gentle scrub, some light bodywork, and voila, you’re brand new. (via meanwhile)
The largest nuclear weapon ever tested was Tsar Bomba, a 50-megaton device detonated by the Soviet Union in 1961. That made it “3,300 times as powerful” as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — an almost unimaginable level of potential destructive power. But Tsar Bomba wasn’t even close to being the biggest nuclear weapon ever conceived. Meet Project Sundial, courtesy of Edward Teller, one of the inventors of the hydrogen bomb, and his colleagues at Los Alamos:
Only a few months later, in July 1954, Teller made it clear he thought 15 megatons was child’s play. At a secret meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, Teller broached, as he put it, “the possibility of much bigger bangs.” At his Livermore laboratory, he reported, they were working on two new weapon designs, dubbed Gnomon and Sundial. Gnomon would be 1,000 megatons and would be used like a “primary” to set off Sundial, which would be 10,000 megatons.
10,000 megatons. In the video above, Kurzgesagt speculates that exploding a bomb of that size would result in a fireball “up to 50 kilometers in diameter, larger than the visible horizon”, a magnitude 9 earthquake, a noise that can be heard around the entire Earth, a 400 km in which everything is “instantly set on fire – every tree, house, person”, and, eventually, the deaths of most of the Earth’s population.
Sundial would bring about an apocalyptic nuclear winter, where global temperatures suddenly drop by 10°C, most water sources would be contaminated and crops would fail everywhere. Most people in the world would die.
Fun fact: Edward Teller was one of Stanley Kubrick’s inspirations for the bomb-giddy character of Dr. Strangelove in the 1964 film of the same name.
At an event last month marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, actor Bryan Cranston read a passage from the book (it’s about 13 minutes long):
From Literary Hub:
After some loving jabs at the devotion this book inspires and its notorious length (“There are only 50 chapters…”), Cranston reads from Power Broker’s opening pages. The performance is fun, and Cranston gets an ad-libbed laugh by archly reading “Shea Stadium,” a part of Moses’ legacy that was demolished and replaced in 2009. Cranston’s also reads some of the famous list sections that Caro rattles off in The Power Broker’s opening chapters. The drumbeat of names is Caro’s attempt to contextualize the scale of Moses’ impact, a technique cribbed from The Aeneid.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has released a pair of visualizations of the phases the Moon will go through in 2025, one for the northern hemisphere above and one for the southern hemisphere below:
Look at that sucker wobble! Each frame of the 4K video represents one hour and there are lots of locations labeled on the map, including the landing sites of the Apollo missions.
But also: How have I never noticed that the Moon is upside-down in the southern hemisphere?! I mean, it makes total sense but I’ve just never noticed or thought it through. 🤯 (via the kid should see this)
I was reminded recently of Stephen Voss’s lovely book, In Training: a book of bonsai photos (Amazon). Voss has a number of bonsai photo prints for sale as well as some videos of bonsai on his blog. This one is of a tree called Goshin, which has been in training since 1953:
Stay Connected