Finding a Way Back

For the New Yorker, the novelist Donald Antrim wrote about wanting to die by suicide and being saved by electroconvulsive therapy: | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Evergreen Architecture

I've been a bit obsessed recently with urban architecture that incorporates nature & greenery into the mix, especially | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Miniature Life

Since 2011, Tatsuya Tanaka has been creating daily images of miniature people in the midst of everyday items that resemb | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Animated Embroidery

I love these little stop motion videos by Huw Messie (using Processing, I think) that use embroidery for the animation.You | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

99 Portraits of Americans in Debt

Americans are collectively almost $15 trillion in debt, most of it related to housing (i.e. mortgage debt). For the New York | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Robots Doing Parkour

Well. The robots sure are getting good at moving around -- running, jumping, doing flips, casually vaulting over railings like a | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

The Potato Photographer of the Year 2021

I am a little embarrassed (and surprised!) at how up my alley this is, but behold: the winners of the Potato Photographer | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

The Story of Jumbo the Elephant

Jumbo the Elephant was one of the most famous animals in the world. Bought as a calf in Sudan by a European animal dealer in 186 | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

The Otherworldly Images of Mikko Lagerstedt

Finnish photographer Mikko Lagerstedt creates striking, ethereal, and atmospheric photographs -- check out his work on his web | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Everyday Paparazzi

Johnny Cirillo photographs people on the streets of New York in the style of paparazzi (half a block away with a long lens) | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

How Iceland Draws Geothermal Energy from the Earth

In this short video from TED-Ed, we learn how Iceland extracts nearly emissions-free geothermal energy from the Earth (hint: vol | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

A Tribute to American Landscape Photographer Bob Wick

Over at In Focus, Alan Taylor is highlighting the work of Bob Wick, a photographer for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management wh | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

The Taliban’s Return Is Catastrophic for Women in Afghanistan

Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario has covered Afghanistan for the past 20 years. In the Atlantic, she writes | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

The Music of Subway Train Door Chimes

In The Hidden Melodies of Subways Around the World, the NY Times takes a look at an often overlooked aspect of transit design: the | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

What’s the Proper Metaphor for the Covid Vaccine?

For The Atlantic, Katherine Wu writes about the difficulty of communicating how vaccines work and how they protect individuals and | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

41 Questions We Should Ask Ourselves About the Technology We Use

In an issue of his newsletter, The Convivial Society, L.M. Sacasas posed 41 questions that we should ask ourselves about technolog | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Animals Are Getting Smaller as the Planet Warms

One of the many effects of human-driven climate change is that, on average, the bodies of animals are getting smaller -- birds, | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Floating Micro-Origami that Magically Unfolds in Water

Watch as these tiny folded structures slowly unfold while floating on the water. It's all about surface tension and capillary ac | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Mesmerizing Matchstick Stop Motion Video

Usually when I post these sorts of non-narrative videos -- in this case, a series of creative stop motion vignettes featuring ma | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

How One Family Grieves Their Son, 20 Years After 9/11

This is an extraordinary story by Jennifer Senior about the various ways in which members of a family grieved the death of a belov | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Getting into the Delta Variant Mindset

I'm just going to go ahead and say it right up front here: if you had certain expectations in May/June about how the pandemic was | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

One Woman’s Mission to Get Vaccines to Her Rural Alabama Town

The Panola Project is a short film by Rachael DeCruz and Jeremy Levine that follows the efforts of local convenience store owner | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

The Five Dimensions of Curiosity and the Four Types of Curious People

In a paper published in 2017, Todd Kashdan and his colleagues identified five distinct dimensions of curiosity. Here are the first | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

How Directors Shoot Films at Three Different Budget Levels

The YouTube channel In Depth Cine has been looking at how directors like Spike Lee, Alfonso Cuarón, Martin Scorsese, an | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Voice Above Water

90-year-old Wayan Nyo has been fishing in Indonesian waters for 80 years but now pulls mostly plastic and trash out of the water | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Caffeine, the World’s Most Popular Psychoactive Drug

In an excerpt from his new book This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan writes about caffeine, a performance enhancing drug th | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Ideas Behind Their Time

For the FT, Tim Harford writes about things that could have been invented far sooner than they actually were.Consider the bicycl | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

How the Human Immune System Works

In the first part of a multi-video series on how the human immune system works, Kurzgesagt describes how the system's first line | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Global Warming Over a Lifetime

From XKCD's Randall Munroe, a chart of the global average temperature over his lifetime. If you're curious, you can check how mu | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Meet Lizzie Armanto, Olympic Skateboarder

The 2020 Summer Olympics are over, but it's never too late to find inspiration in the athletes who competed. For the New Yorker, | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

The Pink Salt Ponds of Camargue, France

Check out Italian photographer Paolo Pettigiani's photos of the evaporation ponds of Camargue, France. While these ponds are | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

The Era of Rapid Climate Change

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released their summary report on the climate emergency, which warns that | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Reconstructed Portraits

These images are drawn from Argentinian-born artist Karen Navarro's projects El Pertenecer en Tiempos Modernos (Belonging | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Bike Riding the Rails

File this under Things I Definitely Want to Do Sometime: riding electric-assist railbikes through a California redwood forest. Che | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Weezer Covers Metallica’s Enter Sandman

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of their 16x platinum Black Album, Metallica is releasing an album on Sept 10th called The Met | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Track Star Races the NYC Subway

BuzzFeed enlisted NYU track athlete Jon Diaz to help answer a burning question: Can a fast runner beat an NYC subway train from | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Time Lapse of the Changing Seasons of Denmark

In a series of four short time lapse films, Casper Rolsted captures the changing of the seasons in Denmark, from summer (t | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Size Comparison: The Largest Black Hole in the Universe

Black holes are the largest single objects in the universe, many times larger than even the biggest stars, and have no upper lim | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

The Walking Dead: American Pedestrian Fatalities on the Rise

In the last decade, the number of pedestrians hit by cars in the United States has increased by almost 50%, even as that rate has | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

This App Identifies Birds by Their Songs

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology recently added the ability to identify birds from hearing their birdsong to their Merlin Bird ID | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Then & Now Portraits of Centenarians

For his Faces of Century project, photographer Jan Langer made portraits of Czech people who are 100+ years old that mimic t | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

The Mistake that Toppled the Berlin Wall

I was 16 years old on the day the Berlin Wall fell. I remember coming home from school that day and watching the events unfold o | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Venice’s Massive Flood Defense System

In this video, Tomorrow's Build takes a look at the $7 billion flood defense system that was built to protect Venice, Italy from | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

American Freestyle Canoeing Is Like Dancing on Water

Here's the thing about humans: they will danceify every possible activity -- and canoeing is no exception.American Freestyle c | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

How Cast Iron Pans Are Made

For his video series for Eater, Daniel Geneen took a tour of the Lodge Cast Iron factory in South Pittsburg, Tennessee to see ho | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Among Giants

Among Giants is a short documentary about a group of activists who lived in the trees of a Humboldt County redwood forest for fo | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

Lusia Harris, the Only Woman Drafted by an NBA Team

Before this morning, I had never heard of Lusia Harris and now she's one of my favorite basketball players. Playing in the 1970s | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago

The 2021 Astronomy Photographer of the Year Shortlist

The Royal Museums Greenwich has announced the shortlist for the 2021 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. I've in | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 2 years ago