A.V. Club has taken on the task of ranking the best 50 music videos, from the first video ever played on MTV (Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles, featuring none other than soundtrack composer Hans Zimmer on keys) to Thriller, Sabotage, Addicted to Love, and Sledgehammer. … | Continue reading
Thanksgiving FYI is a seasonal newsletter from Jim Ray ("an enthusiastic and dedicated home cook with more than a dozen Thanksgivings under [his] belt") that'll bring you tips and recipes to help with your T-Day festivities. | Continue reading
I like Jason’s guidelines—very in keeping with The Session’s house rules. And I really like his motivation for trying out comments: The timing feels right. Twitter has imploded and social sites/services like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon are jockeying to replace it (for variou … | Continue reading
This is great and I loved it to bits: a 15-minute video from the Life Where I'm From YouTube channel about a tiny izakaya (13 seats!) in Tokyo owned and operated by a woman called "Mama" by her regulars. When Mama is busy, regulars at this izakaya will serve themselves, get their … | Continue reading
How has the design of romance novel covers changed over the past 13 years? They've become less raunchy, more racially diverse, and much more likely to use illustration. | Continue reading
Name Sans is a typeface based on the tile mosaic lettering found in NYC subway stations. The architects and craftworkers who designed & laid these tiles used a letter construction that was part geometric and part grotesque, with typographic optical corrections often either exagge … | Continue reading
If the first solar entrepreneur hadn't been kidnapped, would fossil fuels have dominated the 20th century the way they did? "The condition for his release required forgoing his solar patent and shutting down the company. Cove refused..." 1905! Wow. | Continue reading
Mona Chalabi asked ChatGPT, in two separate questions, if Israelis and Palestinians deserve justice; its answers were tellingly different. "ChatGPT, like all artificial intelligence, has been taught by us." | Continue reading
Artist Wendy MacNaughton sat strangers down in pairs to draw one another, maintaining eye contact the whole time. "Go slow and pay attention. Really, slow waaaay down, and draw what you see, not what you expect to see." This is lovely. | Continue reading
For the past few months, I've been working on a new commenting system for kottke.org and today I'm launching it in beta. If you're a kottke.org member, you can try it out by heading to the comment section of this very post. (More on this in a bit but: comments are public but only … | Continue reading
An appreciation of Jaleel White and the iconic television character he created: Steve Urkel. I had completely forgotten that Urkel was not part of the main cast of Family Matters, came in mid-season one, and took over the show. | Continue reading
I loved this letter in the recent Metropolitan Diary from the NY Times (gift link). It begins: My friend Tom runs a popular whale watch cruise out of Sheepshead Bay. Recently, an avid whale watcher and good friend, Buddy, died. One of Buddy's wishes was that Tom spread his ashes … | Continue reading
Black Success, White Backlash. "Throughout American history, every moment of significant Black advancement has been met by a white backlash." Obama → Tea Party. | Continue reading
A New York Museum's House of Bones. "The American Museum of Natural History holds 12,000 bodies — but they don't want you to know whose." The remains of nearly 100,000 people are held in the collections of US museums, most of them Native Americans. | Continue reading
Pete Davidson hosted Saturday Night Live last night and somehow said exactly the right thing to open a comedic television program after an unspeakably tragic week. Tags: Pete Davidson · Saturday Night Live · TV · video | Continue reading
This piece on How to Compete with Patreon by Siderea is interesting throughout, but this bit on enabling "non quid pro quo patronage" caught my eye: There is an entire little universe of people using Patreon to be funded to do good works in the world. These may be open source con … | Continue reading
A sharpness classification chart for knives, including how you can test them by cutting paper and hair in different ways. The edge of a "very sharp" knife doesn't reflect light while an "insane sharp" blade "cuts a free hanging hair". | Continue reading
This is a great overview and review by Teri Kanefield of Heather Cox Richardson's new book, Democracy Awakening. She opens with: "America is at a crossroads." But crossroads aren't new. We've been at them before. She shows how this moment is part of an ongoing struggle between a … | Continue reading
One of these days, I'm going to find the time to try this 5-minute baguette recipe. "It's a super easy recipe with no kneading required." | Continue reading
Ozempic Can't Fix What Our Culture Has Broken. "Solving for obesity will require more than drugs. It will require solving for a culture that makes being fat a woman's burden, a means test for dignity, work, social status, and moral citizenry." | Continue reading
Last month we got a glimpse of the newest season of the Apple+ series For All Mankind ("Imagine a world where the global space race never ended.") in the form of a teaser trailer that did not give a whole lot away. Well, a proper trailer has dropped and it looks like the gang wil … | Continue reading
Mary Lou Retton Crowdfunded Her Medical Debt, Like Many Thousands of Others. From winning gold medals & being on a Wheaties box to medical debt: only in America. It's almost like we should have a national crowdfunding initiative for health care... | Continue reading
Emily Witt on a family that fled Tennessee because the state's anti-trans laws denied their trans teen access to gender-affirming health care. Forced migration, denial of health care: let's be honest: this is genocide, official definition be damned. | Continue reading
How do I navigate grief and hopelessness after a tragedy? How can I get through my grief and sadness? Sitting with grief can feel like we're frozen in shock or being pulled between heavy feelings and numbness. In this calming visualization, Headspace Meditation and Mindfulness Te … | Continue reading
John Ganz on The Trap: "The division of the world into intrinsically opposed hordes and swarms attacks the very notion of shared humanity. I refuse to indulge in the despair that accepts the logic of the enemies of mankind." | Continue reading
From XKCD, a 3D cutaway map of the many layers of the Earth, from the familiar crust around the outside to the more mysterious layers like nougat, vitreous humor, guacamole, and cork. Tags: Earth · geology · infoviz · maps · XKCD | Continue reading
Over 130 animators, actors, filmmakers, and even puppeteers joined forces to remake a 1994 episode of the TV show Frasier called My Coffee With Niles. The episode was split into 185 sections, each 6-12 seconds long, and a different animator or filmmaker took charge of each sectio … | Continue reading
Taffy Brodesser-Akner profiles Taylor Swift, from the (relatively) cheap seats. "Our only proof that she was actually in the stadium was that the people close to the stage seemed to believe that she was, and we chose to believe them." | Continue reading
The trailer for aka Mr. Chow, a documentary about the legendary restaurateur who has returned to art later in life. Out Oct 22 on HBO. | Continue reading
I ran across this Slate piece by George Saunders yesterday and thought it was worth reposting. (Content warning: this article lists many violent acts, none of which are performed.) At precisely 9 in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in s … | Continue reading
Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible. "The numbers confirm what many of us have long suspected - that Twitter wasn't worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic." Yeah, same here. Don't miss it at all. | Continue reading
The trailer for aka Mr. Chow, a documentary about the legendary restaurateur who has returned to art later in life. Out Oct 22 on HBO. | Continue reading
Hey all. I'm going to be launching a new thing here soon (more on that in a few days), but you may have already noticed some changes around here. Design tweaks mostly. What you don't see is that I pretty much ripped out the main guts of the site and rewrote a key piece of it...pa … | Continue reading
Clip of a TV station switching from black & white to a color transmission for the first time in 1967. | Continue reading
You may have previously read about the Citicorp Center. Joe Morgenstern wrote about the Manhattan skyscraper in a classic New Yorker piece from 1995. The building was built incorrectly and might have blown over in a stiff wind if not for a timely intervention on the part of a mys … | Continue reading
Over a period of eight years, Trevor Traynor took dozens of photos of newsstands and their operators. The project started in NYC but came to include newsstands in LA, Lima, Tokyo, Jerusalem, Marrakesh, London, Rome, Paris, and several other places around the world. (via present & … | Continue reading
The turn-of-the-century volcano photography of Tempest Anderson. "You know, Anderson, you are sure to be killed, but it will be such a very great satisfaction to you afterwards to think that it was in the cause of science." | Continue reading
The turn-of-the-century volcano photography of Tempest Anderson. "You know, Anderson, you are sure to be killed, but it will be such a very great satisfaction to you afterwards to think that it was in the cause of science." | Continue reading
This new series from Netflix looks pretty good — and it's got an impeccable pedigree: it's based on Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, a Pulitzer Prize winner, National Book Award finalist, and a bestseller to boot. The four-part limited series premieres November 2nd. … | Continue reading
What Americans Know About Religion, a Pew Research survey from 2019. Atheists and agnostics tend to know more about religion than Christians do. | Continue reading
What Americans Know About Religion, a Pew Research survey from 2019. Atheists and agnostics tend to know more about religion than Christians do. | Continue reading
The climate crisis has cost $16 million per hour in extreme weather damage over the past 20 years. That's $2.8 trillion total...likely "a significant understatement". And it's only going to get worse. | Continue reading
The climate crisis has cost $16 million per hour in extreme weather damage over the past 20 years. That's $2.8 trillion total...likely "a significant understatement". And it's only going to get worse. | Continue reading
How Red-State Politics Are Shaving Years Off American Lives. "[State-level] investments began to diverge sharply along red and blue lines, with conservative lawmakers often balking at public health initiatives they said cost too much or overstepped." | Continue reading
How Red-State Politics Are Shaving Years Off American Lives. "[State-level] investments began to diverge sharply along red and blue lines, with conservative lawmakers often balking at public health initiatives they said cost too much or overstepped." | Continue reading
US citizens or permanent residents with permanent disabilities can get a free lifetime pass to US National Parks (and other federal lands). | Continue reading
US citizens or permanent residents with permanent disabilities can get a free lifetime pass to US National Parks (and other federal lands). | Continue reading
You have likely heard Yo-Yo Ma play his most famous piece before. Maybe even dozens of times. But Ma's rendition of Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 takes on a whole new dimension when accompanied by a babbling brook and bird calls in the forests of the Great Smoky Mountains. A lovely mo … | Continue reading