I posted this earlier today to the newsletter and thought I’d publish it here too. -jason Hey folks. I’ve been back at work on kottke.org for a couple of weeks now and just wanted to give you a little update on where I’m at. In a brief reentry post, I promised a “massive forthcom … | Continue reading
Canada’s Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world, with a difference between low and high tides reaching more than 50 feet in some areas. That’s a lot of water in motion: In a single tidal cycle of just over 12 hours, about 110 billion tons of water flows in and out of the … | Continue reading
Bill Tavis designed this lovely vintage-style map of the familiar fractal shape, the Mandelbrot set. He is selling a poster version of the map, starting at the very reasonable price of $24. I don’t usually highlight the price on this sort of thing, but an unauthorized seller on A … | Continue reading
Vox recently invited two people with differing views on the decriminalization and commercialization of cannabis to have an on-camera debate. The topic is interesting and relevant, but I’m mostly highlighting this for the format. Instead of just doing a traditional debate, the pro … | Continue reading
I was skeptical but if you listen carefully, there are some really solid ideas in this video on why designing cities around lots of cars makes sense. Brb, currently buying some cars and moving to cities. Tags: Adam Kovacs architecture cars cities video | Continue reading
Helen Warrell’s piece in the Financial Times about women who work for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (aka MI6) is fascinating throughout. Warrell talked to three women who occupy three of the four directors-general positions in the agency, as well as women who used to work … | Continue reading
After restricting the visibility of the account that tracks the location of Elon Musk’s private jet, Twitter has now completely suspended it. Using publicly available data, @elonjet would tweet where and when the $70 million Gulfstream G650 ER was taking off and landing. (It’s st … | Continue reading
Merete Mueller’s short film Blue Room is about as meditative and peaceful a look at life in prison as you’ll ever see. It’s also quietly disturbing. In the US, our prison system is designed to punish incarcerated people by separating them from the outside world. Perhaps most sign … | Continue reading
They just nailed the tone and aesthetic with these Spider-Verse movies. Really looking forward to seeing this one. As a refresher, here’s how the team at Sony Pictures Animation created the distinctive look and feel of the first Spider-Verse movie. Tags: Spider-Man movies tr … | Continue reading
Over the weekend, NASA’s Artemis I mission returned from a 25-day trip to the Moon. The mission was a test-run of the rockets, systems, and spacecraft that will return humans to the surface of the Moon. Visual imaging has been an integral part of even the earliest space missions … | Continue reading
Some 26 years after the release of the group’s groundbreaking music video for Virtual Insanity, Jamiroquai’s Jay Kay explains how the band and director Jonathan Glazer achieved such a convincing moving floor effect. The trick to getting the video made on a budget was to channel E … | Continue reading
I’m not going to actually look, but I’ve probably featured Ulric Collette’s series Genetic Portraits here before. Collette photographed family members in the same pose and then digitally stitched them together. The resemblances and differences between family members are fascinati … | Continue reading
Oh man, I read so many books during my time away from the site this summer — but barely made a dent in the towering pile of books I desired to read.1 Even so, I am excited to dig into the various end-of-year book lists to see what everyone else has been reading — and what I might … | Continue reading
In this installment of Every Frame a Painting, Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos examine how the Coen brothers shoot characters in their films close up with wide lenses to created empathy and comedy. Tags:Coen brothers film school movies Tony Zhou video | Continue reading
In the early 2000s, Rick Meyerowitz and Maira Kalman made a version of the NYC subway map where names of all the stations and landmarks were replaced with food. Here’s a detailed view of lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn: See also Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear and the City … | Continue reading
Gina Pell on the Perennials, the growing group of people who aren’t bound by age in the way most people in society used to be. We are ever-blooming, relevant people of all ages who live in the present time, know what’s happening in the world, stay current with technology, and hav … | Continue reading
In this video from Vox (produced by none other than Estelle Caswell, who does the excellent Earworm series), scholar and musician Jake Blount runs us through a quick history of early Black folk music, using the banjo as a rough through-line. If you’d like to read more about Black … | Continue reading
The flamingo’s vibrant color makes it a particularly striking bird to take photographs of, especially from the air — the pink really pops against the dark background of the water. Photographer Raj Mohan showcases this in his beautiful photos of flamingos at Pulicat Lake in India. … | Continue reading
As I said in my recent media diet post, I really enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick. It’s a movie that’s made to be seen on a big screen with a loud sound system — I ended up seeing it in the theater twice. The movie just felt…good. Like a really well-crafted pop tune. In this video, Evan … | Continue reading
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) is a relatively new technique that generates well-lit, complex 3D views from 2D images. If you’ve seen behind-the-scenes looks at how image/motion capture is traditionally done, you know how time-consuming and resource intensive it can be. As this v … | Continue reading
Steven Hawking came up with a simple and clever way of seeing if time travel is possible. On June 28, 2009, he threw a party for time travellers from the future…but didn’t advertise it until after the party was already over. In an effort to improve the chances of the party invit … | Continue reading
Activist Greta Thunberg is coming out with a new book about the climate crisis called The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions (kindle). In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts — geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists … | Continue reading
The New York Public Library maintains a collection of literary paraphernalia (which they call “realia”) that has gathered almost by accident and includes items like a lock of Walt Whitman’s hair, the death mask of E.E. Cummings, and Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly drawings. The coll … | Continue reading
Science fiction and fantasy artists could labor for a thousand years and never come up with something as beautiful and unbelievable as the aurora borealis. Nature: still undefeated. Those two shots are from the 2022 Northern Lights Photographer of the Year awards — the top one wa … | Continue reading
There are plenty of problematic things about this year’s World Cup, starting with the human rights situation in the host country, but for US viewers, Fox Sports’ coverage is really stinking up the joint. Aaron Timms burns them down in The Guardian: In these circumstances you migh … | Continue reading
Creative coder Neal Agarwal has launched his newest project: Asteroid Launcher. You can choose the asteroid’s composition (iron, stone, comet, etc.), size, speed, angle of incidence, and place of impact. Then you click “launch” and see the havoc you’ve wrought upon the world, wit … | Continue reading
Trials rider and mountain biker Danny MacAskill is one of my long-running obsessions here — I first posted about him all the way back in 2009 and if there’s ever a kottke.org konference, you’d better believe MacAskill will be performing at it. Anyway, MacAskill recently visited S … | Continue reading
Based on an illustration she did for a tech blog in 2014, Hallie Bateman is selling the NOW clock, a timepiece that reminds you whatever time it happens to be, it’s also always the present moment. Tags: Hallie Bateman time | Continue reading
Dang, look at these new mosaics by Kiki Smith and Yayoi Kusama for Grand Central Madison, the MTA’s newest LIRR station. As a former (and future?) New Yorker, I know a lot of the city’s dwellers appreciate the MTA’s commitment to public art and to mosaics in particular. Like t … | Continue reading
Gabrielle Schwarz at The Guardian has gathered 20 of the most iconic and meaningful photographs of the effects of the climate crisis. Metaphors abound. I think often of Kristi McCluer’s photograph of the golfers casually playing a round in proximity to 2017 Eagle Creek fire in th … | Continue reading
As you’ll soon read in a comically long “what I did on my summer break” post I’m writing, almost everything I do on a day-to-day basis when I’m working on the site came to a complete halt when I went on sabbatical back in May - I stopped reading online, unsubscribed from all news … | Continue reading
Since 1952, Sight and Sound has been asking critics and other folks in the film world what the greatest films of all time are. For decades, Citizen Kane was in the top slot and therefore occupied this seemingly unassailable position in western culture as the greatest film ever ma … | Continue reading
From Maastricht University in The Netherlands, this is a fantastic animation of the lifecycle of the SARS-CoV-2 virus as it invades and then multiplies in the human lung. A more scientific version is available as well. Great explanation but I love the visual style of this. They u … | Continue reading
I did not mean to watch an entire 75-minute documentary in the middle of my workday, but this sucked me right in and it might do the same to you. Zhao Xiaoyong is one of thousands of painters in Dafen, China who hand-paint replicas of famous paintings by the likes of Matisse, Deg … | Continue reading
Something I look forward to at the end of each year is Tom Whitwell’s list of 52 things I learned in 20221 because I know I’m about to read about a bunch of interesting things. As always, here are a few of my favorite items from the list: 6. Heavenbanning is a hypothetical way to … | Continue reading
In 1973, Martin Scorsese made a film called Goncharov starring Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, and Cybill Shepherd. But no one has actually seen it. Because it doesn’t actually exist…a bunch of scamps on Tumblr made it up. So a few years ago, a Tumblr user … | Continue reading
Cult avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky famously did not make his ambitious adaptation of Dune but what if he had brought his unique brand of surrealist psychedelia to the screen with a version of Tron in the 70s? Using the AI platform Midjourney, Johnny Darrell imagined … | Continue reading
*peeks hesitantly around the corner* Hey everyone. Tomorrow, after almost 7 months of a sabbatical break, I’m resuming regular publication of kottke.org. (Actually, I’ve been posting a bit here and there this week already — underpromise & over-deliver, etc.) I’m going to share mo … | Continue reading
Christopher Robbins recently interviewed Robert Caro (author of The Power Broker, perhaps the best book ever written about New York) for Gothamist. The interview is interesting throughout. (I lightly edited the excerpts for clarity.) Caro: If you’re publishing on the Internet, do … | Continue reading
Every year since she was 15, Billie Eilish has sat down for a video interview with Vanity Fair to take stock of where she’s at in life, how her career is going, and how the present compares to the past. The sixth installment has just been released (and will be the last annual rel … | Continue reading
This photo has been going around the internet the past few days: That’s Peter Freuchen and his wife Dagmar Freuchen-Gale, in a photo taken by Irving Penn. Freuchen is a top candidate for the Most Interesting Man in the World. Standing six feet seven inches, Freuchen was an arcti … | Continue reading
During the German occupation of France, teenager Adolfo Kaminsky forged thousands of documents for Jews about to be deported to concentration camps. He worked at a shop that dyed clothes and a Jewish resistance cell recruited him because he knew how to remove ink stains, a skill … | Continue reading
In June 1985, 17-year-old LL Cool J and his DJ Cut Creator played a gymnasium at Colby College in Waterville, Maine with maybe 120 people in attendance. At this point, his debut album hadn’t even come out yet and rapping/scratching was not widely known, so LL and CC give the unen … | Continue reading
Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove is a 45-minute behind-the-scenes documentary about Stanley Kubrick’s kooky masterpiece (and one of my two favorite movies).1 And speaking of Kubrick, director Marc Forster is making a trilogy of films based on Kubrick’s script for The Downslo … | Continue reading
Actor and singer François Clemmons, who played Officer Clemmons for 30 years on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, talks about how and why Fred Rogers chose a black man to be a police officer on TV. To say that he didn’t know what he was doing, or that he accidentally stumbled into int … | Continue reading
Writing for the New Yorker in 1936, E.B. White pens a farewell to the Model T, a gadget that defined the first quarter of the 20th century. During my association with Model T’s, self-starters were not a prevalent accessory. They were expensive and under suspicion. Your car came e … | Continue reading
Two weeks ago, 99% Invisible broadcast an audio documentary from 1998 about one of the last remaining flophouses on The Bowery in NYC called The Sunshine Hotel. It is an amazing time capsule from a Manhattan that just doesn’t exist anymore. The Sunshine Hotel opened in 1922. Roo … | Continue reading
In order to reproduce, salmon swim from the ocean up rivers until they find the spot they were born. But sometimes people build dams or other “artificial water constructions” that can disrupt salmon travel. A company called Whooshh Innovations has developed a tool to help with th … | Continue reading