Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari — a little too on the nose? Michael Mann hasn't made a film since 2015's Blackhat and hasn't made an award-winning film since 2004's Collateral, so it's nice to see him back in the director's chair. The film is based on Brock Yates' 1991 book Enzo Ferr … | Continue reading
Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland is a 5-part documentary series from director James Bluemel on the Troubles in Northern Ireland that is available to watch on PBS and BBC. A short1 trailer is above. "Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland" weaves together the personal stories of … | Continue reading
In 1856, a 17-year-old girl named Adeline Harris started making a unique quilt. Over the next two decades, she sent pieces of silk to famous people from around the world and they signed them and sent them back to her. She assembled them into a quilt with a tumbling blocks pattern … | Continue reading
What an amazing, info-dense composite photograph taken by Casey Sims of the semi-finals of the men's 110-meter hurdles at the 2023 World Athletics Championships in Budapest from last month. You can see and analyze the entire race, just from this one image. Eventual finals winner … | Continue reading
Oh yay, I had been wondering just the other day what Errol Morris has been up to and it turns out to be a project with Apple TV+ called The Pigeon Tunnel, which is billed as the final interview with espionage novelist John le Carré (born David Cornwell). It's terribly difficult t … | Continue reading
Market researcher Clotaire Rapaille was interviewed for an episode of Frontline on advertising and marketing back in 2003. I like what he had to say about the differences in how the French and Americans think about cheese. For example, if I know that in America the cheese is dead … | Continue reading
In a lecture given in 1924, German mathematician David Hilbert introduced the idea of the paradox of the Grand Hotel, which might help you wrap your head around the concept of infinity. (Spoiler alert: it probably won't help...that's the paradox.) In his book One Two Three... Inf … | Continue reading
I found myself nodding at this short essay by Mandy Brown on the tradeoffs between work, life, time, energy, responsibility, and art, particularly this bit about what happens if you can make the leap from not having enough time for the essential things in life to having more time … | Continue reading
Yesterday, there was yet another school shooting on a college campus, this time at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A UNC graduate student walked into a classroom building and murdered a science professor with a gun. The campus was on lockdown for hours. The front … | Continue reading
When's the last time I let you down? Ok, maybe don't answer that. But, when I tell you that a short film about the hand gestures used by a quarry boss guiding massive excavators harvesting marble is well worth watching, you're gonna go ahead and watch it, right? Because this is a … | Continue reading
Oh, this is delightful: a short documentary about a group of Mayan women in the tiny town of Hondzonot in the Yucatan peninsula who formed a softball team called Las Diablillas (Little Devils). As a girl, Ay Ay loved playing sports at school. But, when she asked her parents' perm … | Continue reading
Ahh, it seems like only yesterday that I read the news about David Fincher's upcoming film The Killer. And it was. So now here's the teaser trailer — interest piqued. What will tomorrow bring? The Killer stars Michael Fassbender and will make its premiere at the Venice Film Festi … | Continue reading
From the Journey to the Microcosmos YouTube channel, this is an exploration of the tiny worlds contained in rainwater puddles and their connection to the discovery of microbial organisms in the 1670s by Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. What a trip that must have been, to … | Continue reading
A McDonald's restaurant apparently appears in season two of Loki on Disney+ and to mark the occasion, the fast food giant made a commercial featuring a number of other appearances by the brand in movies and TV, including The Office, The Fifth Element, Coming to America ("They're … | Continue reading
The climate crisis has hit home this year for many Americans — its effects have been nearly inescapable in most parts of the country. With that, writes Bill McKibben, has come a sense of unease about the future, particularly about the places we live and will be able to live. Draw … | Continue reading
Swiss Post has released a stamp that features concrete, an important material in the history of architecture. But first of all, look at the aesthetics of this thing: Aaahhh, it looks so nice and clean and Swiss. Love it. Even better: the stamp was designed to feel like concrete: … | Continue reading
Now that the 2024 election campaigns have ramped up in earnest (absurdly & obscenely more than a year before the actual election), a good thing to keep in mind is NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen's guidance for how journalists should cover the election:1 "Not the odds, but the … | Continue reading
From Dell Cameron and Andrew Couts in Wired, Trump's Prosecution Is America's Last Hope: The Trump administration's ever-broadening palette of ethics violations caused Americans to realize, perhaps for the first time on a national scale, that truly there are few if any laws again … | Continue reading
On July 4, 2023, a couple thousand people gathered in Alaska to watch old junker cars get launched off of a 300-foot cliff and just get obliterated on impact. (The launching starts at the 8-minute mark.) It's entertaining to watch in a Jackass sort of way, but the whole thing is … | Continue reading
This didn't feel like 8 minutes at all, which I guess, at my age, is the whole point. (via @mrgan) [This was originally posted on February 5, 2013.] Tags:video | Continue reading
Jan Hakon Erichsen does weird things with dried pasta, mostly spaghetti but also lasagna. This is goofy and fun. Check out his Instagram and YouTube for more artistic hijinks. (thx, clarke) Tags: Jan Hakon Erichsen · art · food · video | Continue reading
There are some things that humans don't need to survive anymore still hanging around on our bodies, including unnecessary arm muscles and vestigial tail bones. [This was originally posted on March 18, 2016.] Tags:evolution humans science video | Continue reading
Great, long piece from Ronan Farrow for the New Yorker on Elon Musk's considerable influence over the US government. This doesn't seem good: There is little precedent for a civilian's becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of depen … | Continue reading
There's minimalism and then there's these classic movie posters from Michal Krasnopolski. Each poster is based on a simple grid of a circle, a square, and four intersecting lines. It would be a challenge to come up with a poster for every movie in this style, but the ones he pick … | Continue reading
"You see this goblet?" asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master. "For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when … | Continue reading
These railway safety posters from Thailand are kind of amazing — very straightforward, graphic, and often gruesome in their illustration of the dangers involved with improper train travel. See also The Horror of Vintage Dutch Safety Posters. (thx, chelsea) Tags: advertising · … | Continue reading
Hey folks, a quick word. Newsletter. I've revamped it in recent weeks and now it's a digest of posts and Quick Links from the site, delivered to your inbox twice a week on Tuesday and Friday. It's free and you can subscribe here. [Brief newsletter colophon interlude because I kno … | Continue reading
Right now, the Portland, OR area is suffering through a heat wave, with high temperatures some 20-25°F above normal. Earlier this year, meteorologist Guy Walton began naming North American heatwaves after oil companies: Obviously, I'm naming heatwaves to highlight this worsening … | Continue reading
Very Expensive Maps is, well, I can't say it much plainer than host Evan Applegate: "Very Expensive Maps is a podcast by cartographer Evan Applegate in which he interviews better cartographers." A podcast about a visual medium like maps is maybe a tiny bit like dancing about arch … | Continue reading
Watch and listen as Anna-Maria Hefele demonstrates polyphonic overtone singing, a technique where it sounds as though she's singing two different notes at the same time. This blew my mind a little, particularly starting around the 3:00 mark, where she actually starts to be more … | Continue reading
This is a lovely, mesmerizing short video made by artist Catherine Chalmers in collaboration with some leafcutter ants. I'm not gonna say why, but you should watch this all the way to the end...there's a bit of a twist that'll make you smile. Earlier this year, Chalmers was the s … | Continue reading
The other day when I posted about iconic hip-hop samples from the past 50 years, I noticed a name that featured prominently in the early years: Sylvia Robinson. Robinson was the CEO and co-founder of the very first rap record label, Sugar Hill Records. She produced the first rap … | Continue reading
The makers of Alto's Adventure and Alto's Odyssey, two of my all-time favorite video games, are back with a game called Laya's Horizon, which brings the familiar Alto vibe to a 3D open-world situation. In the game, you fly & glide around, navigating different terrain to achieve v … | Continue reading
The Illustrated Book of Poultry by Lewis Wright, first published in 1870 and revised several times in the decades following, was "regarded as the most desirable of the English poultry books". Poultry was very popular in Victorian England and the book housed a tremendous amount of … | Continue reading
This started off a little slow for me but once it hit the early-to-mid 80s, I was hooked — and bobbing my head uncontrollably throughout. The visualizations really help you see how the various samples were modified, repeated, and layered to achieve the desired sounds — geniuses a … | Continue reading
Alexey Molchanov, one of the best freedivers of all time, recently set two new world records at a competition at Dean's Blue Hole in the Bahamas: An FIM dive that took 4m 42s and went to a depth of 133 meters (442 feet). Molchanov pulled himself down and up using a guide rope wit … | Continue reading
Tom Scott visits the small Swiss ski town of Zermatt, where petrol cars have never been allowed. In the 1980s, the town skipped right from horse-drawn carriages to locally-built electric vehicles, which are made pretty much by hand and are expensive — but they are also easy to ma … | Continue reading
In the Scope of Work newsletter, Anna and Kelly Pendergrast look at various trade secrets and secret ingredients — some that are still necessary, and others that are merely legendary. When Chicago's Vienna Sausage Company moved from its original premises which were "put together … | Continue reading
Craig Mod has my favorite take to date on Oppenheimer: that it should have been more like Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb: My ideal version of this film would have begun in the 1900s or '10s, with flashes of Relativity and then the steps of Quantum Mechanics with Pl … | Continue reading
Produced by Venus & Serena Williams and US soccer star Alex Morgan and directed by Rachel Ramsay & James Erskine, Copa 71 is a forthcoming documentary about a women's soccer tournament that took place in Mexico City in 1971 that was the first, albeit unofficial, Women's World Cup … | Continue reading
From Greg Maletic, glamour shots of his collection of calculators from 1968-1983 (and here). In the 1970s, calculators weren't just for calculating. They were luxury items. In a world before iPods and iPhones, calculators were the first aspirational personal electronics. Calculat … | Continue reading
Catia Lattouf and an assistant run a medical clinic and rehab center for hummingbirds in her Mexico City apartment. With dozens of the tiny birds buzzing overhead, along walls and the window of her bedroom, Lattouf explained that she began caring for them a year after surviving c … | Continue reading
I think this might be my favorite Every Frame a Painting yet: Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou explore how a film editor does what she does. Or as Zhou puts it, "how does an editor think and feel?" The point about emotions taking time is especially interesting, as is the accompanying c … | Continue reading
Madeline Miller (Circe, Song of Achilles) got sick in February 2020 with what turned out to be Covid, which then turned into Long Covid. It has profoundly affected her life (gift link). I reached out to doctors. One told me I was "deconditioned" and needed to exercise more. But m … | Continue reading
A short TED-Ed video on the flow state of creativity and how you might enter it more easily. Flow is more than just concentrating or paying attention; it's a unique mental state of effortless engagement. And those who more frequently experience flow report higher levels of positi … | Continue reading
Oh wow, I love these spaceship paintings from Karla Knight. They're from a series called 33 Spaceships for Another Planet but she's been doing these diagrammatic/picographic paintings and drawings for some time now. It's fun to back through Knight's older work and see how her anc … | Continue reading
This short, relaxing, mesmerizing video of an Martian impact crater called Aram Chaos was taken by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The images were run through an enhanced color red-green-blue filter, which tends to highlight the structure and geology rather … | Continue reading
You know me; I love a good book cover. The AIGA's annual roundup of the best designed books and covers is usually aces and the results of the 2022 competition (announced at the beginning of July 2023) is no exception. Here are a few I picked out that I didn't feature in The Best … | Continue reading