Me Cookie Monster. Ask Me Anything.

We've established that I'm a huge fan of Cookie Monster, the most orally challenged but also the most literarily adept muppet. B | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Remembering J Dilla On His 45th Birthday

On his 32nd birthday, February 7, 2006, J Dilla (born James Dewitt Yancey, in Detroit, MI) released an unusual instrumental albu | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Skipping Stones: “Every Throw Is a Complete New Puzzle”

In this video, Wired's Robbie Gonzalez talks to world record stone skipper Kurt Steiner, who achieved 88 skips with a stone in 2 | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Buy the Cheap Thing First

Beth Skwarecki has written the perfect Lifehacker post with the perfect headline (so perfect I had to use it for my aggregation | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Mad Men but with All the Cigarettes Replaced by Kazoos

Cignature Films is showing the first episode of Mad Men in its entirety but with all of the cigarettes replaced with kazoos. Here' | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Three Chords and the Truth: Where Did Punk Music Come From?

Punk music seems like one of those things that sprang, fully-formed, out of nowhere. But in this video, Trash Theory traces the | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

One Breath Around the World

I've followed the work of world champion free diver Guillaume Néry for several years now and this video might be his | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Watch a Single Cell Become a Complex Organism in Just Six Minutes

In this time lapse filmed by Jan van IJken, the embryo of a salamander is shown transforming into a hatched tadpole, from a sing | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Confessions of a Letterhead Collector

Design historian Steven Heller collects vintage letterheads and shares some examples at Design Observer.The design of blogs | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Colonization of the Americas Cooled the Earth

A new paper from researchers at University College London argues that the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americans after Co | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

“Freedom River”, an Animated Parable about the Erosion of Freedom

In 1971, director Sam Weiss released this short animated parable narrated by Orson Welles.Concentrating on an area of growing | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Forgotten Father of Pizza in the USA

A recent series of discoveries have upended the widely accepted story of the history of pizza in America and have the NYC food wor | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

Randall Munroe, proprietor of the excellent XKCD and author of What If? and Thing Explainer, is coming out with a new book in a | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets

The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets is a collection of "indigenous and minority writing systems", gathered together in t | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Lessons from the Brilliant Screenplay for Groundhog Day

Using screenwriter Danny Rubin's book How To Write Groundhog Day as a guide, Lessons from the Screenplay examines how the protag | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Cybersecurity Tips and Beauty Product Reviews, Together at Last

In her series "opsec and beauty", artist Addie Wagenknecht efficiently combines two YouTube genres into one, giving tips | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

(Gimme Some of That) Ol’ Atonal Music

Merle Hazard bills himself as "America's foremost country singer/economist". In this delightful performance, he sings ab | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Purl, an Animated Short from Pixar

Purl, directed by Kristen Lester, is an animated short from Pixar about a ball of yarn that starts a new job at B.R.O. Capital a | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Peculiar Pyongyang, a 4K Time Lapse Video of the North Korean Capital

Time lapse video tours of big cities are a common sight on YouTube -- see this Dubai hyperlapse or this Paris time lapse -- and | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Threadstories

For the past few years, visual artist Threadstories has been making these amazing masks and posting selfies of her wearing them | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

On the Ethics of Refugee Camps

At the World Economic Forum held in Switzerland at the end of January, Mohammed Hassan Mohamud, a refugee in Kenya for the past 20 | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

More on Ancient Scripts and the History of Writing

One post last week that y'all loved was The Evolution of the Alphabet. I loved it too; anything breaking down the history of wri | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Why James Baldwin Is This Century's Essential Voice, Too

Back in 2015, I wanted to write an essay for The Message (where I was working at the time) about James Baldwin. At that time, it | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Why James Baldwin Is This Century’s Essential Voice, Too

Back in 2015, I wanted to write an essay for The Message (where I was working at the time) about James Baldwin. At that time, it | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Happiness Spells: A Podcast About Everyday Joys

My friend Amanda Meyncke (who's been a guest on Kottke before, talking about musician Bill Callahan) has a new(ish) podcast, cal | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Ellsworth Kelly US Stamps

The USPS will release a set of stamps in 2019 honoring the artist Ellsworth Kelly. Some art works better on stamps than others...K | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

A Journey Along the Mekong

National Geographic sent illustrator Christoph Niemann to Cambodia and Vietnam and he returned with this series of drawings and | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

A Writing Shed of One’s Own

In the first couple of minutes of this video, Roald Dahl introduces us to the writing hut behind his house that he used to write a | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

What Time Is the Super Bowl? (According to a Theoretical Physicist)

Ever since the Huffington Post struck SEO gold in 2011 with their post about what time the Super Bowl started, pretty much every o | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Making of an Iconic Photograph: Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother

At the end of a long day in March 1936, Dorothea Lange stopped in a migrant workers camp in California for just 10 minutes and too | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Creating Saturday Night Live’s Cue Cards

As part of their YouTube series on how the Saturday Night Live sausage is made, this short video details how the cue cards that | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Scenes from the Anthropocene, an Earth Forever Changed by Humans

These are photographs by Edward Burtynsky from The Anthropocene Project, a multimedia undertaking that showcases the effect hu | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

El Chapo, Master of the Drug Tunnel (and Escape Tunnel)

In this video, Vox takes a look at how El Chapo leveraged his use of tunnels for transporting drugs into the United States and b | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

“Closeness Lines”: Lovely Visualizations of Relationships Over Time

I *love* these simple visualizations of how different kinds of relationships change over time by writer and cartoonist Olivia de R | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

It’s So Cold Out! Where’s the Global Warming?!

In what is now an annual tradition, when the temperatures in some part of the US plunge below zero degrees on the Fahrenheit scale | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

It’s Time for Some Queueing Theory

Queueing theory is the scientific study of waiting in line. It can apply to familiar lines like those at the grocery store or bank | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

In a Race to the Edge of the Solar System, Which Star Trek Ship Would Win?

These visualizations of the speed of light I posted last week somehow demonstrate both how fast light speed is and how slow it is | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

“Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth” Exhibition in NYC

The "Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth" exhibition at NYC's Morgan Library & Museum is "the most extensive public | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

“Ask a Native New Yorker” in Book Form

One of the most popular recurring features on Gothamist is Jake Dobkin's "Ask A Native New Yorker" column (which I've me | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

American Football Commentary, Animated!

For this video, freelance animator Nick Murray Willis took the audio from football commentators and made these little animated v | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Lure of the Spider-Tailed Horned Viper

Meet the spider-tailed horned viper, native to western Iran. As the name suggests, the snake has a tail that, when moved about in | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The Amazon Chronicles

My pal and collaborator Tim Carmody is launching a newsletter all about Amazon called Amazon Chronicles. You can subscribe here an | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Life Without the Everything Store

Kashmir Hill is a remarkable and inventive reporter. She came up with a great concept called "Goodbye Big Five": one by | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Thirty Years of Spike Lee

Spike Lee's first film, She's Gotta Have It, came out in 1986, but the writer/director/actor's best film, the one that made him | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Roald Dahl: Not Vaccinating Your Kids Is “Almost a Crime”

Roald Dahl's oldest daughter Olivia died from the measles when she was seven years old. She died because there wasn't a reliable m | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

The World of Sneaker-Buying Bots

Buying vintage and collectible sneakers online has become so complicated that a secondary industry has sprung up. Programmers cr | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

Visualizing the Speed of Light

Light is fast! In a recent series of animations, planetary scientist James O'Donoghue demonstrates just how fast light is...and al | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago

How the Relentless Robert Caro “Turns Every Page” in Pursuit of Powerful Prey

Since 1976, Robert Caro has been writing a multi-volume biography of former US President Lyndon B. Johnson -- the first volume is | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 5 years ago