I love these photographic collages by Alex Hyner centered around images of power lines — the intersections of the lines form geometric shapes that each get their own different shade and texture of sky. Such a simple idea done really well. You can see more of Hyner’s work on Insta … | Continue reading
After leaving a job at The New Yorker in the wake of his older brother’s death, Patrick Bringley spent 10 years working as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. He wrote a book about his experience at the museum, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of … | Continue reading
A group of astronomers say they have evidence that links supermassive black holes at galactic centers with dark energy, the mysterious force that accounts for roughly 68% of the energy in the universe. Here’s the news release and the paper. From the Guardian: Instead of dark ener … | Continue reading
Retro Report looks back on the story of the boy in the plastic bubble. The epitaph on David Phillip Vetter’s gravestone observes correctly that “he never touched the world.” How could he have? From a few seconds after his birth until two weeks before his death at age 12, David li … | Continue reading
The winners of the 2023 Underwater Photographer of the Year competition have been announced — you can check out all of the winners here. The photos above are by Gregory Sherman, Kat Zhou, and Shane Gross. Sherman’s photo of stingrays swimming near the Cayman Islands is just spect … | Continue reading
In the midst of the zaniness of Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the funniest things I have seen in a movie theater in years: Raccacoonie. (If you know, you know.) Inverse talked to a bunch of people involved with the film about how Raccacoonie came about and what the … | Continue reading
DNA and RNA get all of the headlines, but it’s not difficult to argue that much of the glorious complexity and possibility of life is due to proteins. In the latest episode of Kurzgesagt, they explain the role of cellular proteins in creating life. You are cells. Your muscles, or … | Continue reading
This is a nice little interview with designer Jessica Hische on how she steps in to help companies refresh their logos. There are a number of reasons why companies decide that a refresh — rather than a rebrand — is the right move. Many of the companies I work with simply want a l … | Continue reading
Riffing on a recent piece by Izzie Ramirez, Vo’x Kim Mas educates us on why the quality of consumer goods has dropped over the past several years. Maybe you’ve noticed: In the past 10 years everything we buy from clothes to technology has gotten just a little bit worse. Sweaters … | Continue reading
So, here’s how they make vinyl records at Third Man Records in Detroit. As you might expect, the process is a bit less automated than what you’d imagine for digital music media — those records are human-handled dozens of times before they are finally placed into their jackets. Vi … | Continue reading
This will probably get taken down soon, but in the meantime… This is the ASL performance of Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show by Justina Miles. So good — I love how her long fingers and fingernails accentuate and amplify her signing. CNBC ran a short profile of Miles and other S … | Continue reading
I have never seen this before so maybe you haven’t either: a full-length video recording of Prince and the Revolution playing at First Avenue in 1983. This show marked the first time Prince played Purple Rain in public; it’s this recording of the song (lightly edited and reworked … | Continue reading
Yesterday, Fox aired a very short, very good Rihanna concert, preceded and succeeded by a football game — you can watch it in its entirety above (possibly US-only). I caught this live and loved every second of it. The set design, choreography, costumes, the baby bump, and, of cou … | Continue reading
Photographer Jessica Hilltout has documented the game of soccer/football/futbol around the world, from the secondhand footwear to the improvised goals to the makeshift balls: Tags:Jessica Hilltout photography soccer sports | Continue reading
Whenever I watch videos of how things are made, I marvel at the cleverness of the manufacturing machines. Retired engineer Duc Thang Nguyen has created over 1700 3D animations showing how all sorts of different mechanisms work…gears, linkages, drives, clutches, and couplings. Her … | Continue reading
When I saw a link to Lisa Whiteman’s photo essay on “muleskinning”, I was like oh dear god what am I getting myself into here. But it turns out that a muleskinner is a mule driver, particularly one who travels by mule in groups. I met Ronald in 2009, when I attempted to make a sh … | Continue reading
Thanks to a planet-wide collaboration, scientists have released an image of the Milky Way that contains 3.32 billion individually identifiable objects, most of which are stars. Gathering the data required to cover this much of the night sky was a Herculean task; the DECaPS2 surve … | Continue reading
The Greek government and activists have long been calling for the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum to Greece. But how did the marbles get to Britain in the first place? In the early 19th century, a British lord named Elgin removed a significant portion of t … | Continue reading
From comments made by Knives Out and Glass Onion director Rian Johnson, it doesn’t seem likely that a Benoit Blanc mystery movie with the Muppets or a Muppet movie with Benoit Blanc will ever happen. So, we’ll have to settle for this mashup of Blanc and The Great Muppet Caper mad … | Continue reading
The cover story of the current issue of New York magazine is a collection of tips, rules, and etiquette for how to behave in contemporary society (ok, urban east coast society). It’s a good list for the most part, if unnecessarily provocative in places — gotta sell those magazine … | Continue reading
This is a fantastic piece by writer Ted Chiang about large-language models like ChatGPT. He likens them to lossy compression algorithms: What I’ve described sounds a lot like ChatGPT, or most any other large-language model. Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the … | Continue reading
Leave it to The Kid Should See This for finding this gem of a video, featuring the hatching, early life, and This is the smallest bird I’ve ever hatched. After a little Finch had lost her partner, I was asked if she could stay in my big Aviary. When I returned home after picking … | Continue reading
From Wikipedia contributor Cmglee and Astronomy Picture of the Day, a color-coded periodic table that displays which cosmic events — the Big Bang, exploding stars, merging neutron stars, etc. — was responsible for creating each element, according to our present understanding of t … | Continue reading
Last night, in the third quarter of an eventual loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder (a team name that didn’t even exist when James made his NBA debut), LA Lakers forward LeBron James broke the once-untouchable all-time NBA scoring record, formerly 38,387 points and held by the grea … | Continue reading
James Cameron is not one for half-measures. When making Titanic, he used every image and description of the ship he could lay his hands on to build accurate sets & models and financed 12 dives to the ship’s actual wreckage on the bottom of the ocean floor to gather footage to use … | Continue reading
For much of the nearly 25-year lifespan of kottke.org, the site’s tagline has been “home of fine hypertext products”. I always liked that it felt olde timey and futuristic at the same time, although hypertext itself has become antiquated — no one talks of hypertextual media anymo … | Continue reading
I’d missed that the USPS released a set of stamps commemorating Ezra Jack Keats’ The Snowy Day back in 2017. From the Smithsonian National Postal Museum: It was the first full-color picture book to have an African American protagonist. Keats received the 1963 Caldecott Medal for … | Continue reading
The European Space Agency has released a gobsmacking deep field image of thousands of galaxies taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. A crowded field of galaxies throngs this Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, along with bright stars crowned … | Continue reading
Zeynep Tufekci on the H5N1 strain of the avian influenza, which is showing some recent signs of spreading in mammals. Bird flu — known more formally as avian influenza — has long hovered on the horizons of scientists’ fears. This pathogen, especially the H5N1 strain, hasn’t often … | Continue reading
From YouTuber poakwoods, a pair of criss-cross mashups of Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey, but with their directors switched. When George Lucas takes the helm of 2001, you get a more crowd-pleasing and freewheeling movie while Stanley Kubrick’s Star Wars becomes more balletic … | Continue reading
If you’ve ever wondered what HBO and the producers of The Last of Us might do with some slightly different source material, Pedro Pascal and the cast of Saturday Night Live took a crack at a gritty adaptation of Mario Kart. I mean, I would 100% watch this. Tags: HBO Mario Kart … | Continue reading
Fairy tales are fun to read not least because they violate every rule of what makes “good” literary fiction: Instead of “show don’t tell,” fairy tales prioritize telling over showing. Instead of demanding “round characters,” fairy tales embrace flat ones. Instead of logical “worl … | Continue reading
Two ancient clay tablets discovered in Iraq in the 1980s and possibly smuggled illegally to the United States during the Iran-Iraq War (!) bear cuneiform-like writing. But while one of the scripts is in Akkadian, a kind of Babylonian lingua franca that is well-known to scholars o … | Continue reading
Just about everything on the web is on TikTok, and going viral there too, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that people who’ve been laid off are there too, trying to figure out what it all means. Part of me is cynical about this. You mean that as people, we’re so poorly defined with … | Continue reading
Twitter has announced that it will end free access to its API, likely bringing to an end most of the sites’ popular bot accounts (including @kottke, which powers this site’s QuickLinks feature). At BuzzFeed, Katie Notopoulos and Pranav Dixit interviewed some of the bots’ creators … | Continue reading
Franz Kafka’s Diaries, a combination of a private journal and a sketchbook for stories and essays, have been available in English since 1948, but in a much altered form, prepared by Kafka’s friend and literary executor Max Brod (who famously ignored his friend’s instructions to b … | Continue reading
“Lorem ipsum” is a shorthand for placeholder text, usually beginning with this not-quite-meaningful-Latin phrase. Many folk genealogies date the practice to the Latin-loving Renaissance humanists, and who knows? Maybe Aldus Manutius did have some dummy Latin that he liked to use … | Continue reading
Buckle up, this one is fun: Maciej Cegowski has begun what promises to be a multi-part essay arguing against a crewed mission to Mars. It’s called “Why Not Mars,” it’s 8000 words long, with 66 footnotes, and it sings. I’m not even sure I agree, but I enjoy the hell out of it. The … | Continue reading
I know, I know — recursive humor is tricky, and most of the time, it doesn’t really work. But I was nearly as thrilled as Ned Ryerson bumping into an old friend when I noticed that my guestblogging time was going to coincide with the Thirtieth Anniversary of the classic Bill Murr … | Continue reading
I enjoyed this Nieman Lab interview with Holden Foreman, the first-ever Accessibility Engineer at the Washington Post. I’m particularly pleased to see that Foreman is thinking about accessibility as, well, not solely a problem that can be solved by better engineering: The coding … | Continue reading
In most jails and prisons, cellular phones are considered contraband and can be confiscated if they’re found in a prisoner’s possession. If they’re lucky, that’s the limit of the punishment. But just because something isn’t allowed doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and phones inside … | Continue reading
Google Research has released a new generative AI tool called MusicLM. MusicLM can generate new musical compositions from text prompts, either describing the music to be played (e.g., “The main soundtrack of an arcade game. It is fast-paced and upbeat, with a catchy electric guita … | Continue reading
Since striking ancient cave paintings in southern Europe were first discovered more than a century ago, modern humans have tried to figure out if they have a meaning beyond being staggering works of art. Are they early animations? Examples of a primeval need to tell stories? An a … | Continue reading
On February 7, 1971, the Billings Gazette, a local Montana newspaper, ran a story by Carol Perkins titled “Apollo — As Kids See It.” They interviewed young kids, from 5 to 11, and a range of boys and girls, to get their opinion about NASA’s then-current manned moon missions. Pale … | Continue reading
In the early twentieth century, Henri Bergson had a problem. His philosophy lectures were too popular: On average, 700 people would attempt to squeeze into a room designed for 375. It was suggested that his classes be moved to the Grand Amphithéâtre of the Sorbonne or even to the … | Continue reading
If you’ve watched a high-level basketball game in the last ten or so years (NBA, WNBA, NCAA), you’ve probably seen something a little strange. Instead of throwing the ball inbounds directly to a teammate, the inbounder will slowly roll the ball on the floor in their general direc … | Continue reading
Cistercian numerals were invented by the Cistercian order of monks in the 13th century. Giuseppe Frisella explains how the notation system works: A vertical straight line acts as an axis dividing the plane into four quadrants, each one representing one of the four digits: the upp … | Continue reading
In film and television, a table read is an early part of the rehearsal process where, as the name suggests, all the performers read their scripts together around a table, out of costume. But what do you do when the performers are also operating puppets? The rehearsal process bec … | Continue reading