Happy 17th anniversary to The Marginalian, Maria Popova's bloggy love-letter to the diversity and profundity of the human experience. | Continue reading
"An off-duty pilot who was in a jump seat in the cockpit of an Alaska Airlines flight on Sunday has been charged with more than 80 counts of attempted murder." 80 counts of attempted murder! | Continue reading
This is wonderful: at the 1976 Grammys, Mel Tormé asked Ella Fitzgerald how she explains to people what jazz is and then the pair of them effortlessly launch into a scat duet that is just fantastic to listen to. Ella Fitzgerald, what a voice! Mel Tormé, what a voice! Here's the p … | Continue reading
Super Mario of the Flower Moon is my personal Barbenheimer. “Two great artworks from important small Italians on the same day?!” | Continue reading
Super Mario of the Flower Moon is my personal Barbenheimer. "Two great artworks from important small Italians on the same day?!" | Continue reading
An analysis by Mona Chalabi: “The New York Times has consistently mentioned Israeli deaths more often than Palestinian deaths.” And Israelis are mentioned by name and Palestinians are often anonymous. I have noticed this as well. | Continue reading
An analysis by Mona Chalabi: "The New York Times has consistently mentioned Israeli deaths more often than Palestinian deaths." And Israelis are mentioned by name and Palestinians are often anonymous. I have noticed this as well. | Continue reading
Running in a Body That’s My Own: runner Caster Semenya’s long struggle to compete as herself. “Its restrictions aren’t about leveling the playing field; they are about getting certain types of women off the field completely.” | Continue reading
Running in a Body That's My Own: runner Caster Semenya's long struggle to compete as herself. "Its restrictions aren't about leveling the playing field; they are about getting certain types of women off the field completely." | Continue reading
I loved playing around with the National Audubon Society's Bird Migration Explorer, which is a beautifully designed interactive map of the Western hemisphere that shows the seasonal migration patterns of more than 450 species of birds. What a resource...so much information to exp … | Continue reading
Evangelical Christians yearning for the Second Coming want Israel to wipe out the Palestinians, followed by the "annihilation of the Jews". "What it amounts to is cheering on Armageddon from the cheap seats — and directing funds to ensure it occurs." | Continue reading
One of the things I was thinking about doing with the comments is having posts on Fridays that are specifically participatory. So let's try it out today. Currently, there's no profile information available for commenters...you can't click on a name to visit their Instagram acct o … | Continue reading
Hey everyone. I rolled out a new comments system (in beta!) on Monday and it seems to have been well-received so far. I've fixed some of the most egregious bugs and rolled out some tweaks and it seems to be holding up pretty well. 🤞 (Is there a knock-on-wood emoji?) It's … | Continue reading
Estonia's capital made mass transit free a decade ago. Transit traffic went up but car traffic increased faster. "Any extra money should be put toward transit service, and not zero fares." | Continue reading
Tape Measure Spider-Man. So dumb and yet perfect. | Continue reading
Scientists lay out a sweeping roadmap for transitioning the US off fossil fuels. "A 600-plus-page report from the National Academies of Science includes 80 recommendations for how the U.S. can achieve its target of net-zero emissions by 2050." | Continue reading
Ed Zitron completely dismantles Marc Andreessen's "outdated and childish" techno-optimist manifesto. "These people do not care about the future. They are eternally mired in the past, grinding their axes and scowling at those who would stop them..." | Continue reading
The influential Whole Earth Catalog, along with a number of related publications, has been uploaded to The Internet Archive and is now available online for free at the Whole Earth Index. From Wired: The Whole Earth Catalog was the proto-blog — a collection of reviews, how-to guid … | Continue reading
Martin Scorsese's 81 Greatest Movie Characters, Ranked. So many great characters here that even Bill the Butcher barely cracks the top 10. | Continue reading
The Economist: "Although the official number of deaths caused by Covid-19 is now 7M, our single best estimate is that the actual toll is 27.1M people. We find that there is a 95% chance that the true value lies between 17.9M and 32.9M additional deaths." | Continue reading
Sandra Newman's Julia is a bold retelling of Orwell's 1984 from the perspective of Winston Smith's lover. From a review: "About halfway through, I began to feel more convinced by Julia's responses to this totalitarian state than I had ever been by Smith's". | Continue reading
Even if you haven't seen Stop Making Sense, you are likely familiar with the herky jerky dance moves of Talking Heads' frontman David Byrne. In this video, which has only recently been made public, you can see Byrne practicing his now-iconic moves. 40 years ago, David Byrne rehea … | Continue reading
Great story about going to see Galaxy Quest in an empty theater near the end of its run. "The projectionist strode down the aisle toward me [and] my first thought was that the matinee was canceled due to low turnout..." | Continue reading
An index of dozens of aesthetic categories, from Boho Chic and Corporate Gen-X Cyber to Whimsigothic and Internet Awesomesauce. | Continue reading
For the New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr reviews a new book, Steven Conn's The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is — and Isn't (Bookshop.org), which makes the case that what we typically think of as rural America or "real America" is a mirage. A piercing, unsentimen … | Continue reading
Poet Lemn Sissay: "Superman was a foster child. Harry Potter was a foster child. Jane Eyre was adopted. Luke Skywalker was fostered. The fostered, adopted, and orphaned child is central to popular culture." | Continue reading
One of the best uses of technology is to make people laugh. In this three-part series, the Numerical YouTube channels uses some simple editing to increase the size of the goal until some laughably off-the-mark strikes by professional footballers Ousmane Dembélé, Harry Kane (his p … | Continue reading
While Ikea was refurbishing a building for a new store in London, they covered it with scaffolding that looks like a giant, blue Ikea bag. "It's a simple idea, maybe the most obvious idea, and all the better for that. Nothing else needed." | Continue reading
One of my recent favorite YouTube channels is James Payne's Great Art Explained, which does exactly what it says on the tin, showcasing works of art like Starry Night, the Great Wave, and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Payne recently launched a new channel in the same vein: Great B … | Continue reading
Nomophobia is the fear of being without your mobile phone. “The term is short for ‘no mobile phone phobia’.̶ | Continue reading
She Was Oprah Before Oprah. A profile of Alice Travis, the first Black woman to host a nationally syndicated talk show. "Travis's goal was to treat her audience with respect and to present a nuanced portrait of modern Black womanhood..." | Continue reading
Nikon has announced the winners of the Small World Photomicrography Competition for 2023. I've included a few of my favorites above. From the top: The optic nerves of a rodent by Hassanain Qambari & Jayden Dickson. A heart shape is visible amongst breast cancer cells shot by Malg … | Continue reading
Analogue is making a console that will play Nintendo N64 games with 100% compatibility (no emulation). 4K, Bluetooth for controllers, more features to come. You'll never get one though — all their stuff sells out in like 4 seconds. | Continue reading
Sure, Trump Is an Authoritarian Grifter, but at Least He's Three Years Younger Than Biden. NY Times op-ed page 🤝 independent moderate voters. | Continue reading
At their recent creativity conference, Adobe showed off Project Primrose, in the form of a dress that changes colors and patterns at the click of a button. The garment could also display animations, including ones that respond to the wearer's movements. From The Kid Should See Th … | Continue reading
Mario Can't Be Super Without Psychedelic Power-Ups. "Nintendo's mascot is boring. So for nearly four decades, it has fed the jumping plumber an increasingly bizarre diet of items." | Continue reading
Extremely relevant to my interests: the New England Cider Donut Map. Over 350 donut destinations, including my favorite: Burtt's Apple Orchard. | Continue reading
Just announced: The World’s 50 Best Bars. I’ve been to a few of these and would like to go to the rest sometime please | Continue reading
Pepper X, developed by the founder of PuckerButt Pepper Company, is now the spiciest pepper in the world, measuring 2.693 million on the Scoville scale. The old record was 1.64 mil. "That scale's logarithmic, so it's more like three times hotter." | Continue reading
How Far Does $1 From 1999 Go Today? A visualization that uses the Consumer Price Index to measure how much prices have increased for things like food, housing, medical expenses, and education. Would love to know why medical exp. is a straight line! | Continue reading
To promote his forthcoming book on keyboards called Shift Happens, Marcin Wichary game a little quiz game based on the book's slipcase cover (which consists of 45 shift keys from 100+ years of keyboards). | Continue reading
From illustrator Pablo Carlos Budassi, this is a circular map of the universe. The solar system is located in the center. Towards the edges, the scale is progressively reduced to show in detail the most distant and biggest structures of the observable universe sphere. There are s … | Continue reading
It was cloudy and I worked all weekend (on comments), so I didn't get to see much about the annular solar eclipse. I dug up some eclipse photos online but am curious if you've seen (or taken!) any worth sharing? | Continue reading
A quick update about the Design Squiggle t-shirt: the other day I sent another donation to the National Network of Abortion Funds for $2,352.00. Thanks so much for helping support an organization working to provide vital health care to those who need it. | Continue reading
This is a heck of a time capsule: back in 2011, Chris Floyd photographed 140 people that he followed on Twitter over the course of a year and made a video featuring their portraits and audio of them "talking about Twitter and it's effect on the way we communicate and form relatio … | Continue reading
Out today: Deb Chachra's new book, How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World. This has been getting great reviews in my feeds from folks who got an early look at it. | Continue reading
What To Know About What's Happening In Israel And Gaza. "Q: Where can I learn more? A: This is a logistically and morally complex situation involving decades of recent history and thousands of years of context, so try your cousin's Instagram stories." | Continue reading
A Vermont utility company wants to install batteries in most customers' homes and bury more power lines. As a VT resident and GMP customer (and EV owner) whose power goes out probably once a month because of downed trees, I like this a lot. | Continue reading