I really enjoyed taking a spin around Felicia Chiao's Instagram (previously) — it's chock full of vibrant, expressive and dreamy work. Oh and take a look at her sketchbook tours — and you can buy a reproduction of her 6th sketchbook here (here too). Tags: art · Felicia Chiao · i … | Continue reading
David Zipper, who researches and writes about mobility and transportation, recently did a big thread on Mastodon (and Bluesky) about car bloat: the way in which cars and trucks have gotten much bigger and heavier in the US over the past few decades and how it's bad for society. T … | Continue reading
Scrabble is one of those games where pro/expert gameplay differs so much from amateur/novice gameplay that it might as well be a totally different game. In this entertaining recap of the finals of the 2023 Scrabble World Championships, former US champ Will Anderson explains how f … | Continue reading
It is astounding to me the number of YouTube channels that I have never heard of with subscriber bases larger than that of many countries. (This goes double and triple for Instagram and TikTok.) Alan Becker has over 23 million subscribers and makes videos pitting animated charact … | Continue reading
In a June piece for The Guardian and the video above from just a few days ago, Robert Reich outlines five crises — including wokeness, the trans panic, and critical race theory — that Republicans have manufactured in order to deflect from their true agenda. Virginia governor Gle … | Continue reading
In the 1994 Caribbean Cup qualifying group stage match between Barbados and Grenada, the 90 minutes of normal time ended with an intentional own goal by Barbados and then with Grenada trying to score either a goal or an own goal and Barbados defending both nets. Say what?! How di … | Continue reading
From Adam Kovacs' YouTube channel Adam Something comes this brisk 10-minute video essay on why European malls are doing better than their American progenitors. I thought his third point, about poor urban planning, was particularly interesting: malls tend to fail in America becaus … | Continue reading
Starting with Jaws, his first big blockbuster movie that defined the genre, Steven Spielberg has filled the audiences of his films with a sense of wonder, that alchemical mix of fear and astonishment of the unknown. No other director does it better and this video essay explores h … | Continue reading
The music for Sinéad O'Connor's 1990 smash hit Nothing Compares 2 U is already pretty stripped down to emphasize the vocals, but in this video, the vocals are almost fully isolated so you can really hear the clarity and emotion in that wonderful voice of hers. The song was appare … | Continue reading
A NYC DJ named Dwells released this mashup of Radiohead's Everything In Its Right Place and Kendrick Lamar's N95 back in March and I love it: You can also find it on Soundcloud and Bandcamp. I ran across it when Radiohead shared a snippet of it on TikTok. FWIW, Dwells seems to b … | Continue reading
Yesterday, a Washington DC grand jury indicted Donald Trump for "for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding", aka trying to steal the 2020 presidential election. Heather Cox Ri … | Continue reading
Cruise ships are a relatively new human invention that look quite different from other ships. Oh, and they are absolutely massive. How did they get that way? The predecessor of today's cruise ships was the ocean liner: big, beautiful ships that sailed across the Atlantic. But oce … | Continue reading
[Note: If you're reading/watching this, I assume you've watched season two or don't care about spoilers; they abound.] The Bear is an intense show about a group of intense people doing an intense job. It can be tough to watch sometimes because people often communicate by screamin … | Continue reading
I have said previously that "even on my busiest day, I will drop everything to watch a video of pencils being made". Still true! This video from Process X of a Tokyo pencil factory really hits the spot. My favorite part of watching pencils get made is always the sharpening of the … | Continue reading
This video shows a fourth grader trying a bigger ski jump for the first time. If you're a parent, I defy you to not tear up at least once while viewing. Oh, and the audio is essential. [This was originally posted on March 16, 2012.] Tags:crying at work skiing sports v … | Continue reading
I've gotta say that I was a little skeptical when Phil Edwards started out this video saying that he wasn't going to talk about Pac-Man's gameplay as a vital component of why it was such a huge success when in came out in 1980. He allows that, of course, the gameplay was very com … | Continue reading
The roots of hip-hop and rap are various and stretch back in time to the antebellum South and from there to Africa. But by some accounts, a song called Noah by gospel group The Jubalaires was the first instance of recorded music that sounded like rap. Listen for yourself...the re … | Continue reading
Designed by Olson Kundig Architects, the Maxon House features a studio that's attached to the main house but can be rolled away on railroad tracks to be closer to the trees. From Dezeen: The two-storey structure was based on the design of the "traditional caboose". A workspace si … | Continue reading
In 2006, photographer Mark Preuschl recreated Georges Seurat's famous impressionist painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte in Beloit, WI with a group of volunteers. Here's the original for reference: From My Modern Met: In conceiving this tableau vivant, the organizers wanted to k … | Continue reading
Rebecca Solnit, writing for The Guardian on the climate crisis: Many things that were once true — that we didn't have adequate solutions, that the general public wasn't aware or engaged — no longer are. Outdated information is misinformation, and the climate situation has changed … | Continue reading
This is pretty cool: in collaboration with the British Museum, a team led by woodblock printmaker David Bull (who I first wrote about back in 20051) is carving woodblocks and creating prints from a series of previously unpublished drawings by legendary Japanese artist Katsushika … | Continue reading
In 1910, a group of inexperienced climbers claimed to have summited Denali, the highest peak in what is now the United States. Their story was greeted with skepticism. So when I found out that the first people to reach the highest point in North America (Denali, the mountain form … | Continue reading
In 1842, a French artist and scholar named Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey set out on a tour of the eastern Mediterranean to document sights and architecture via the brand new medium of photography. He started off in what is now Italy and continued on to Greece, Egypt, Turkey … | Continue reading
Vox talked to four television writers about how streaming and prestige TV have changed the financial picture for writers over the past 15 years, contributing to the writers strike that's been going on since early May. Companies like Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV+, and more have given c … | Continue reading
I'm taken with the style of Jun Kumaori's illustrations — they look like drawings of (stay with me here) small JPEGs converted to GIFs and then clumsily enlarged, complete with all of the resultant digital artifacts. This makes me nostalgic for the late 90s web and Photoshop 3.0. … | Continue reading
I just really love the hell out of these iterative Lego build videos from Brick Experiment Channel and Brick Technology. In this one, a car is repeatedly modified to roll perfectly on an increasingly inclined treadmill. I started watching and in 10 seconds I was 100% invested. Th … | Continue reading
This video visualization of 15 different sorting algorithms is mesmerizing. (Don't forget the sound.) An explanation of the process. You can play with several different kinds of sorts here. [This was originally posted on November 13, 2013.] Tags:infoviz mesmerizing progr … | Continue reading
Traditionally, the subjects depicted in Western art were either religious or rich — wealthy patrons paid for paintings of themselves or of their religions. As Evan Puschak explains in this brief video essay, that began to change in the 16th century as revolution, reformation, and … | Continue reading
Hey folks. I'm trying to get into the habit of doing these media diet posts more frequently than every six months so they're actually, you know, somewhat relevant. Here's what I've been watching, reading, listening to, and experiencing over the last two months. Spider-Man: Acros … | Continue reading
Stephanie Shih is a Brooklyn-based ceramic artist who makes painted sculptures of ordinary objects like food, shoes, hats, and signs. A recent exhibition focused on the overlap of immigrant communities of Asians and Jews on NYC's Lower East Side and Chinatown. A few yards from wh … | Continue reading
From natural rubber to hundreds of bands in a box, here's how a Japanese manufacturing firm makes rubber bands. Fun fact about me: I always have a rubber band or two on my wrist...I've been wearing them for no particular reason since I was 17. So this video is right up my alley. … | Continue reading
When you apply power with higher-than-normal voltage to electric kids toys, they tend to move faster. When you apply 30V instead of the usual 2.5V or 5V, they move really fast: This reminds me of when I was in grade school. Does anyone remember Stompers? They were battery-operat … | Continue reading
For the past 13 years, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has taught a class called Wealth & Poverty at UC Berkeley. He retired from teaching this year and has uploaded his lectures from the course to YouTube. Welcome to my final UC Berkeley course on Wealth and Poverty. Dra … | Continue reading
This is fun: Aqua's pop hit Barbie Girl, redone in the style of six classical composers: Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, Chopin, and Ravel. (via @Erikmitk) Tags: Aqua · Barbie · music · remix · video | Continue reading
To help celebrate 50 years of hip-hop, Cypress Hill visited NPR's studios to perform a Tiny Desk Concert. While the term "pioneer" is used loosely in pop culture today, few terms describe Cypress Hill's impact over the past three decades more adequately. They are the first Latino … | Continue reading
It's always fun to see what the former President is planning on reading over the summer. Here's his full list: Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond. Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane. King: A Life by Jonathan Eig. Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano. All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Co … | Continue reading
Long-time readers will recall that I used to link to Flash games pretty regularly. They were typically easy to play and hard to put down — I collected them under the addictive Flash games tag. The collective time and energy spent by kottke.org readers playing these games over the … | Continue reading
54 years ago today, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon and went for a little walk. For the 15th year in a row, you can watch the original CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first Moon walk on a small B&W telev … | Continue reading
After my post about Soap Bubble Worlds yesterday, several people sent me this video of the rainbow colors that can be seen on the surface of and in the steam above a swirling cup of hot water. I was expecting a straight-forward visual display accompanied by some relaxing music (a … | Continue reading
Speaking of inexpensive time travel, listen as David and Ben Crystal perform selections from Shakespeare in the original accent, as it would have been heard at the Globe in the early 1600s. (via @KBAndersen) [This was originally posted on September 9, 2013.] Tags:Ben Crystal … | Continue reading
Marveling at these macro images of soap bubbles by photographer Dave Bowman — he calls this series Other Worlds. See also Are These Photographs of Moons or Pancakes? and frying pans that look like a Jovian moon. Tags: Dave Bowman · photography | Continue reading
British land artist Justin Bateman makes these incredible portraits of people and objects using small stones and pebbles he finds in locations around his home in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Each portrait is documented and then left to atrophy, either by rain, wind, or human/animal inte … | Continue reading
This advertisement from Orange, the French telecom company, about the French national football team is one of the best commercials I've seen recently. I don't want to tell you too much about it because the impact of it comes from watching it, so just watch it and you'll see. And … | Continue reading
The timeline of the far future artice is far from the longest page on Wikipedia, but it might take you several hours to get through because it contains so many enticing detours. What's Pangaea Ultima? Oooh, Roche limit! The Degenerate Era, Poincaré recurrence time, the Big Rip sc … | Continue reading
Among the many creative collages by Dutch art director Toon Joosen is this series of images of people interacting with the pages of books in fun ways. You can check them out on his Instagram or purchase some of them as prints on his Etsy shop. Tags: art · remix · Toon Joosen | Continue reading
When you think of directors that have influenced Wes Anderson, you typically think of Truffaut, Godard, Scorcese, and Ashby. But as you'll see in this video of Anderson pulling out some recommended films from this Paris video store, his taste in movies is broad. There's Drunken A … | Continue reading
This, from XKCD, hits my science and design interests right in the sweet spot. If you covered the surface of the Atlantic Ocean with twelve-point printed text, with the lines wrapping at the coasts, the expansion of the ocean basin due to tectonics would increase your word count … | Continue reading
Still one of my favorite internet things: The case of the 500-mile email. I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department. "We're having a problem sending email out of the department." "What's … | Continue reading