The 100 best one-hit wonders

Today's playlist is The 100 Best One-Hit Wonder Songs:You can read the rationale behind all 100 picks on Consequence of Sound. | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The Americans is over, The Americans was great.

Given the recent Netflix-driven Cambrian explosion in television shows, there is no Best Show On TV™ anymore. But over t | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Hundreds of amazing 1980s tech company logos

This 1985 catalog for engineers contains hundreds and hundreds of tech logos from the 70s and 80s. They are glorious.Marcin Wi | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

A visual history of light

From the Atlantic, a quick visual history of human-created light sources over the past ~400,000 years, from wood fires to candle | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The top 100 stories that changed the world

BBC Culture recently polled authors, journalists, and other literary types from 35 different countries and asked them "to nom | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The ABCs in motion

For this year's 36 Days of Type project, Ben Huynh submitted this 3D animation of the alphabet from A to Z. You can see animatio | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

An explainer video from 1923 about Einstein’s theory of relativity

In 1923, Inkwell Studios1 released a 20-minute animated explanation of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, perhaps one of th | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

A brief history of fingerprints

Chantel Tattoli's piece for The Paris Review, The Surprising History (and Future) of Fingerprints, is interesting throughout, bu | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

You don’t have a right to believe whatever you want to

Professor of philosophy Daniel DeNicola on the right of people to believe what they want to believe.Unfortunately, many people t | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Sculptures made from scraps

Artist Lydia Ricci collects scraps (of paper, cardboard, etc.) and sculpts them into everyday objects.I love these...and | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The whole world is The Onion now

(A version of this story is an excerpt from this week's Noticing newsletter. You can read more about Noticing here.) In a rare i | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

In defense of boredom

Monica Heisey was recently stuck on an airplane without much to do. Luckily, she made an essay out of it. "Being Bored Is Fun | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Mosaicism, or DNA differences from cell to cell (not just person to person)

Science writer Carl Zimmer has a new book on genetics and heredity called She Has Her Mother's Laugh. The New York Times published | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The history of escape

On the heels of Texas's lieutenant governor blaming school shootings on "too many entrances and too many exits" in build | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Intricate circuit board model sculpted from plasticine clay

When commissioned to create some artwork for a London music duo, Tim Easley spent 80 hours making this model circuit board out | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

My media diet for Spring 2018

I've been keeping track of every media thing I "consume", so here are quick reviews of some things I've read, seen, hear | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The official “Cheaters Edition” of Monopoly

Hasbro has come out with an official "Cheaters Edition" of Monopoly (available at Amazon) where popular game cheats li | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Global warming blankets

Using simple graphic representations of annual temperatures (like this one posted by climate scientist Ed Hawkins), people are kni | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The arrested development of the Arrested Development cast

Sopan Deb recently sat down with some of the cast of Arrested Development (Jeffrey Tambor, Tony Hale, Jason Bateman, Alia Shawkat, | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

A graceful underwater dance by freediver Julie Gautier

Ama is a short film that was written, directed, and performed by freediver Julie Gautier.Ama is a silent film. It tells a stor | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Bill Gates’ reading recommendations for Summer 2018

As he does every year, voracious reader Bill Gates has recommended five books worth reading this summer. Gates' recommendations of | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The Songs of the Years, 1925-2018

Back at the end of 2010, Ben Greenman created a playlist for the New Yorker's holiday party that featured one song from each year | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Muppet outtakes are hilarious

This is a blooper reel from Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas, a 1977 TV special produced by The Jim Henson Company. Take after t | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

MTA Country, a game about the NYC subway

Everyday Arcade, which is responsible for The GOP Arcade (sample game titles include The Voter Suppression Trail and Thoughts &a | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Ultra ultra HD 12K aerial video of NYC

Phil Holland shot some aerial footage of NYC that he stitched together into a video with a resolution of 12K. That's a 100-megap | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The political alignments of Mario Kart characters

In this short video, Art House Politics goes through all of the characters in Mario Kart 8 and describes their political alignment | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Ask An Ice Cream Professional: AI-generated ice cream flavors

Hello, it is I, once and future Kottke.org guest editor Aaron Cohen. In the years since my objectively wonderful and technically p | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

David Foster Wallace was terrible to women

In an Atlantic piece titled The World Still Spins Around Male Genius, Megan Garber writes:The notion that the women's stories ab | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Raymond Loewy’s 1934 chart of the evolution in design

From legendary designer Raymond Loewy, a chart published in 1934 that shows the evolution in design of items such as cars, telep | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Imaginary insects based on Star Wars characters

Illustrator Richard Wilkinson is drawing a series of insects inspired by Star Wars and other pop cultural items.This proje | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The coup has already happened

I've been thinking about Trump's presidency in terms of a coup to come, but Rebecca Solnit makes a compelling case for that event | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

More trippy audio illusions

Hot on the heels of the Yanny/Laurel audio illusion, many people shared other illusions that are just as weird and fun.The McGur | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The United States of Guns

Like many of you, I read the news of a single person killing at least 10 people in Santa Fe, Texas today. While this is an outrage | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Noticing Excerpt: Getting lost on the internet

Each week (more or less), I write a newsletter for Kottke.org called Noticing that summarizes the previous week, looks for deeper | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Against political analogies

It's a common and (on its face) rhetorical move: take something that's happening now and map it onto the past. Better yet, take so | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

A year-by-year history of economic growth and pollution in the Roman Empire

A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzes deep ice cores in Greenland for traces of lead | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Degrees of Uncertainty

Degrees of Uncertainty is an upcoming documentary by Neil Halloran that "uses data-driven animation to explore the topic of | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Plastic iceberg

Speaking of great magazine covers, for their issue on plastic, National Geographic put artist Jorge Gamboa's arresting plastic b | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The respect of personhood vs the respect of authority

In April 2015, Autistic Annie wrote on their Tumblr about how people mistakenly conflate two distinct definitions of "respect | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The hilarious cover of GQ’s comedy issue

I laughed for a minute straight at the cover of GQ's comedy issue. Nicely played. (via taffy brodesser-akner) | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

A fake Modigliani, the Kardashians, and the American Dream

I've never watched a single second of the reality TV show Keeping Up with the Kardashians but I found Rachel Tashjian's When a Mod | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

What America can learn from Europe about redesigning urban traffic patterns

In the NY Times, architect and urban designer John Massengale discusses how four European cities (London, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Co | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Hans Zimmer’s clever use of the Shepard scale in Dunkirk

I've written before about the Shepard scale and its use by Hans Zimmer in the soundtrack for Dunkirk.Zimmer and Dunkirk director | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Optimism

For the Universe in Verse 2018 poetry event, Kelli Anderson created this wonderful papercraft stop motion animation to accompany | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

A breakdown of Black Panther’s visual effects

Black Panther animation supervisor Daryl Sawchuk goes through some of the digital visual effects from the film, with an emphasis | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Sound illusion: Do you hear Yanny or Laurel?

Take a listen to this short audio clip of a computerized voice speaking a single word repeated twice:Do you hear it saying &qu | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

A map of Odysseus’ travels in The Odyssey

I'm currently reading Emily Wilson's recent translation of The Odyssey, but until I looked at this map of Odysseus' journey, I h | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Maira Kalman’s books for kids featuring Max the dog

The New York Review is reissuing five of legendary illustrator Maira Kalman's books for children that were originally published | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago