The Medieval Town Generator

Oh my, this medieval town generator tool is super fun to play around with. By adjusting parameters like size, color palette, bui | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Meeting Gorbachev

Werner Herzog's latest film is called Meeting Gorbachev, in which he sits down with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for a | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Pulling Birds From the Sky

For his photo series The Pillar (which is also a book), Stephen Gill set up a camera next to a post near his home in Sweden and se | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Playboy Interview: Google Guys (2004)

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@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Beginning of Recorded Sound

Centuries of Sound is a podcast that creates mixtapes by year. So far, that's pretty standard. The main difference is that CoS's | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

How Amazon Created Prime

I recently had to put my Amazon newsletter, The Amazon Chronicles, on a two-month hiatus because I'm going to have surgery to repl | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

When Lost Recordings Get Found

Strictly speaking, there are plenty of live recordings of Iggy Pop playing with The Stooges. They're just all bootlegs. And most | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Diego Maradona

Asif Kapadia, the director of Senna and Amy, has directed a documentary film about footballer Diego Maradona, one of the best to | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Tactical Driving Looks Fun (But Don’t Try This at Home)

Wyatt Knox is a former rally car driver and driving instructor at Team O'Neil Rally School and in this video, he shows us some o | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Norway’s Proposed New Passports Are Beautiful

Back in 2014, a design studio called Neue won a national competition to redesign the Norwegian passport. What they came up with is | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

17-year-old Chance the Rapper Performing at a Public Library

One of the places where Chance the Rapper got his start was at YOUmedia, a youth center at the Harold Washington Library in down | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Eight Ways to Teach Climate Change in School

According to a poll conducted by NPR/Ipsos, over 80% of American parents want climate change to be taught in our schools, but only | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Shuudan Koudou Is the Japanese Art of Synchronized Precision Walking

For more than 50 years, students at the Nippon Sport Science University in Japan have practiced shuudan koudou, which translates a | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

David Attenborough on How to Save Our Planet

In this short video essay, David Attenborough succinctly describes the main problem of the anthropocene (that modern humans are | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Grace Hopper Explains a Nanosecond

In this short clip from 1983, legendary computer scientist Grace Hopper uses a short length of wire to explain what a nanosecond i | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Headshots

Kaija Straumanis took a series of portraits of herself being hit in the face with all sorts of different objects, from a dodgeball | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Fighting Climate Change with CO2-Eating “Ideal Plants”

At the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Dr. Joanne Chory is working on a project to create plants capable of storing more ca | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Avengers Characters in the Style of Japanese Ukiyo-e Prints

Japanese illustrator Takumi made these illustrations of characters from Avengers: Endgame in the style of Ukiyo-e prints. As Joh | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

How to Make Data-Driven Visual Essays

Ilia Blinderman of The Pudding has written a pair of essays about how to make data-driven visual essays. Part 1 covers working wit | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Fan-Made Productions Celebrate Alien’s 40th Anniversary

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of Alien, 20th Century Fox commissioned six fan-made short films that continue th | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

How Disco Made Pop Songs Longer

In the latest episode of Earworm, Estelle Caswell notes that the length of a pop single was rarely more than 3m30s because you c | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

How Does Venice Work?

The canals, the sewers, the buildings, the bridges and the rest of the Venice's infrastructure has all been engineered to deal wit | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

In Remembrance of Photographer Michael Wolf

German photographer Michael Wolf, who documented life in our densest cities, has died at the age of 64.Though seldom commented o | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Good Things By Their Nature Are Fragile

From a 2005 post by Michael Barrish:In 1988 Laura and I created a three-stage model of what we called "living process." | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Balanced Anarchy or Open Society?

A clip from 1985 of James Burke talking about how microchips will change politics by making it possible for everyone's opinion abo | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Birds in the Ancient World

Birds play an outsized role in most cultures' collective imaginations, which makes sense; they're our near neighbors, yet retain | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Monk Hacks: Dealing With Distraction in Late Antiquity

For monks, concentration wasn't just a practical necessity, but a spiritual discipline. Consequently, they spent a lot of time t | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Books Shakespeare Read

Five Books is a pretty cool website I'd never heard of before; it's a recommendations website, anchored by interviews with exper | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Why Everyone Is Watching TV with Closed Captioning On These Days

A few months ago I noticed that several friends (who speak English and aren't deaf) routinely watch TV and movies with closed ca | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Cultural Cartography

In 2017, BuzzFeed's Publisher Dao Nguyen did a TED Talk about how the company thinks about producing content.In it, she introd | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Fred Rogers’ 2002 Dartmouth College Commencement Address

In 2002, Fred Rogers gave the commencement address at Dartmouth College, where he attended school as a freshman before transferrin | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Tiny Impressionist Oil Paintings Inside the Covers of Altoids Tins

Painter Matthew Betancourt paints these miniature works of art inside the covers of Altoids tins. Aside from the playfulness a | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

A Short Summary of the Contemporary Republican Party’s Strategy

In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky gave a short summary of how the modern Republican Party coalition between the rich and the rel | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Fantastical Drawings of an Inventive 15th-Century Italian Engineer

Sometime in the early 15th century, an Italian engineer and inventor Johannes de Fontana produced a sketchbook that would later be | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Stunning Overhead View of Shaolin Kung Fu Training Exercises

As part of their show Earth From Space, the BBC Earth team shows the coordinated movements of thousands of Shaolin Kung Fu train | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Beautiful Ones, a Forthcoming Memoir From Prince

Before his death in 2016, Prince had begun work on a memoir about his wonderfully creative life. The Beautiful Ones, due out in | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Perfectly Normal, How Autism Feels From the Inside

This short film by Joris Debeij features Jordan Kamnitzer talking about his experience as someone who is on the autism spectrum. | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Winter Is Coming, the Climate Change Message at the Heart of Game of Thrones

In a Q&A with the NY Times back in October, George R.R. Martin connected the goings-on in Westeros with the challenges raised | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Extinction Symbol

With its recent use by the participants in the Extinction Rebellion, the extinction symbol has become much more widely known, on | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

David Attenborough Hosts “Climate Change: The Facts”

From the BBC and hosted by David Attenborough, "Climate Change: The Facts" is an hour-long program on the science of c | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Resources for Living a More Ethical Life Online

Ethical.net has compiled a list of resources for "discovering ethical alternatives to stuff". Their list includes web br | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Physical Data Visualizations

For almost as long as we've had civilization, people have been making data visualizations.1 The availability of paper and screens | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Secret Pigeon Service

This short piece in the London Review of Books about pigeons is fascinating. I learned many new things about pigeons and now hold | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Life Aboard a Finnish Icebreaker

Monocle has produced a pair of videos about what Finland's fleet of icebreakers do and what daily life is like for the crew. | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Public Sans, a New Typeface from the US Government

As part of their recent announcement of a new web design system for US government websites, the General Services Administration | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Colorful Pixelated Murals by Alberonero

I love these colorful pixelated exteriors by Italian artist Alberonero. These are going on the mood board for my theoretical f | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Saturday Night Live Portrait

Since 1999, Mary Ellen Matthews has been the official photographer of SNL. For each show, Matthews captures a stylized portrai | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Failure of the Great Tip-Free Restaurant Experiment

Over the past three years, a number of restaurants across the geographic and economic spectrum of America have experimented with e | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago