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

The fascinating history of the “orchestra hit” in music

I'm a big fan of Estelle Caswell's Earworm series for Vox, and this most recent one might be my favorite. It's about the "o | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Old memories, accidentally trapped in amber by our digital devices

Part of what humans use technology for is to better remember the past. We scroll back through photos on our phones and on Instagra | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

A short animated explanation of Stoicism

From TED-Ed, Massimo Pigliucci, and Compote Collective, a short animated introduction to the philosophy of Stoicism.What is th | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Intricate miniature models of rusty things

Eddie Putera makes incredibly detailed scale models and miniature scenes, often of rusting and decaying things.I love his ru | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The cultural shift from not selling out to blowing up

In an essay called After Authenticity, Toby Shorin writes:I haven't heard about anyone selling out in a long while. Sometime bet | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Can bacteriophages rescue us from drug-resistant bacteria?

Last month when I posted a video comparing the sizes of various microorganisms, I noted the weirdness of bacteriophages, which a | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Ask A Native New Yorker (and Gothamist!) is back

New York City got an injection of good news earlier this year when WNYC announced they were buying Gothamist with an eye toward re | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Life in the far north

Two stories about human settlements in the arctic north caught my eye this week. The first is about polar bear patrols in wester | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

You can buy almost everything local, except for grain

A number of bakers, farmers, and enthusiasts are trying to create a market for small-batch, locally-grown grain and flour, using e | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The visual divide

This story on the merger of two eyeglass giants, Essilor ("a French multinational that controls almost half of the world's pr | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Dollar Street

Dollar Street is a project by Anna Rosling Rönnlund that imagines the world as a street ordered by income...poor families | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

We found love in a hopeless battle royale game

I love this little piece by Robin Sloan about the world's current video game obsession Fortnite Battle Royale, its relation to Liu | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

Should our machines sound human?

Yesterday, Google announced an AI product called Duplex, which is capable of having human-sounding conversations. Take a second to | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

A world record Super Mario Bros speedrun explained

In this 27-minute video, Bismuth explains how fellow speedrunner Kosmic achieved the world record for the fastest Super Mario Br | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago

The Happiest Guy in the World?

Meet Mario Salcedo, who has spent the last 20 years as a full-time resident of Royal Caribbean cruise ships.For nearly two dec | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 6 years ago