The Four Notes of Death

When something dark and ominous happens onscreen, there's a good chance that the action is accompanied by a four-note snippet fr | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Get Ready for the Global Climate Strike on September 20

Just a reminder that the Global Climate Strike begins this Friday, September 20. A coalition of young activists led by Greta Thu | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

A Visit to the Most Solitary Place on Earth, the Deep Sea

For their latest video, Kurzgesagt takes a typically informative journey from the surface of the ocean all the way down to the d | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Milton’s Annotated Copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio Discovered

Based on handwriting analysis, Jason Scott-Warren, the Director of the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts, has discovered that | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Euphemisms for Death Collected from Obituaries

Writer Rachel Monroe recently shared a bunch of "odd synonyms for 'died'" that her mother collects from obituaries. Here | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Capital and Ideology

French economist Thomas Piketty has come out with a new book. The 1200-page Capital and Ideology is a followup to Capital in the 2 | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Nirvana’s Underwater Baby

Kirk Weddle took the iconic photograph of the underwater baby for the cover of Nirvana's breakthrough album Nevermind. On his webs | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

The 2019 Fall Foliage Prediction Map

SmokyMountains.com is back this year with their best-of-web foliage prediction map. Here in Vermont, things are starting to look | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Graffiti That Helps You See Through Walls

For some of his latest street art, Portuguese graffiti artist Vile has been creating optical illusions of his name "cut" | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

The Server Bone Is Connected to the DNS Bone…

Some of you may have noticed that kottke.org was unavailable for more than 36 hours on Thursday and Friday last week. That's the | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Yosemite’s Rainbow Waterfall

The light and the wind happened to be just right for Greg Harlow to catch this rainbow emanating from upper portion of Yosemite | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

First Look: 2019 Wildlife Photographer of the Year

The Natural History Museum has released a sneak preview of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition for 2019, sharing | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Motivated Reasoning and Tribal Loyalty in Politics

For years, researchers have identified a link between a person's "moral foundations" and their political views. In a pie | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

An Octopus that “Billows Like a Circus Tent”

A team of researchers exploring about a mile beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean ran across this graceful octopus that put | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

A Forest Grows on an Austrian Soccer Pitch

For Forest -- The Unending Attraction of Nature is an art installation from Klaus Littmann that features a forest made up of 300 | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Treasures in the Trash

Treasures in the Trash is a short film by Nicolas Heller about former NYC sanitation worker Nelson Molina, who started (and stil | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

The History of Europe, Every Year from 400 BCE to the Present

This video is an animated history of the shifting borders of Europe from 400 BCE to the present. This is a very nation-centric v | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

How to Be an Antiracist

Historian Ibram X. Kendi first crossed my radar as a frequent contributor on the podcast series Seeing White (which I loved and ur | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

The Surprising Grace & Power of a Slow Motion Pigeon Take-off

In this slow motion video clip from a BBC program called Secrets of Bones, you can see how a pigeon takes off so quickly. Pigeon | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Woven Photo Collages

For her O.P.P. series, Heather Oelklaus weaves together strips of cut-up prints to form new scenes.In the series O.P.P. (Oth | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

The Comet

Director Christian Stangl and composer Wolfgang Stangl used millions of photos (that's right, millions!) taken by the ESA's Rose | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Happy 150th Birthday, Periodic Table!

Bloomberg Businessweek dedicated their entire Sept 2, 2019 issue to the periodic table (it's 150 years old this year) and the elem | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Pixar’s AI Spiders

As I mentioned in a post about my west coast roadtrip, one of the things I heard about during my visit to Pixar was their AI spide | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Nine Things a Woman Couldn’t Do in 1971 in America

Twitter user @WPCelebration recently compiled a list of nine activities and rights denied to women in America in 1971, just 48 yea | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

The 25 Most Important Characters of the Past 25 Years

I love cross-disciplinary lists like this: The 25 Most Important Characters of the Past 25 Years.We polled critics and other cul | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

How Much Better Does an Expensive Piano Sound Than a Cheap One?

YouTuber Lord Vinheteiro recently played the same pair of tunes on six different pianos, ranging from a $499 used upright to a $ | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

How a 30-Minute Commute Has Shaped Centuries of Cities

Twenty-five years ago, physicist Cesare Marchetti argued that people, on average, tend to keep their commutes to about an hour a d | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Why Is Picasso’s Guernica So Shocking?

Guernica is one of Pablo Picasso's greatest masterpieces, and, like a lot of his other work, can be difficult to decipher. The p | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Glitched Still Lifes

Holy moly I love these glitched still lifes by Olan Ventura. (via colossal) | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

The Egg by Andy Weir

Kurzgesagt are known for their animated explainers about science and society. For their latest video, they've applied their sign | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

How to Mail a Package (From Space)

Randall Munroe's new book, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems, just came out and Wired has a lengthy | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Air Conditioning is Warming the Earth

Modern society has an air conditioning problem. One of the most popular responses by the world's population to global warming is t | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Bolas de Fuego, the Annual Fireball Street Fight in El Salvador

Every year on Aug 31, the residents of Nejapa, El Salvador throw flaming kerosene-soaked balls at each other in the streets surrou | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

How Does Waffle House Stay Open During Disasters?

Waffle House is prepared to make you breakfast at all hours of the day in any kind of weather. The restaurant chain is so widely r | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Errol Morris & Bob Odenkirk Team Up for Climate Change Spots

In partnership with the Institute for the Future, Errol Morris has produced a series of 30-second spots about climate change that | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Tycho’s 2019 Burning Man DJ Set

For the past 6 years, Tycho has done a 2-hour DJ set at Burning Man to coincide with the sunrise. He's just posted 2019's installm | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

The Making of Prince’s Memoir

The Beautiful Ones, a memoir/autobiography/scrapbook by the artist forever after known as Prince, comes out next month. Prince wan | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

The Opposite of Superman

The late 1930s were a time of explosive creativity in the comics industry, with the creation of Superman, Batman, and Marvel Com | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

The Mind of a Forger

The Atavist's "Masterpiece Theater," by Anna Altman, traces the works of an art forger, Geert Jan Jansen (aka, among o | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Supercuts of the Stylistic Cues of Master Filmmakers

Video essayist Jacob T. Swinney makes makes these great little supercuts of the stylistic habits of filmmakers. His two latest one | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Why Do Chinese People Like Their Government?

From Kaiser Kuo, a long piece attempting to answer the question: "Why do so many people feel that the Chinese can't possibly | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Margaret Bourke-White, Fearless Photographer

Yesterday I linked to a thread discussing old school bloggers who are still active. One of the best of the old guard is very much | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

No Surprise: Anti-Abortion Advocates Care Little About Women’s Equality

A recent poll of almost 2000 likely 2020 voters suggests that the anti-abortion movement is not really about protecting life but m | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

The Symbiotic & Toxic Relationship Between Houses and Cars in America

Since reading Gregory Shill's writing about how heavily subsidized cars are in the United States, I've been on the lookout for dif | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

Endlings and the Death of Species

An endling is the last known member of a species and once it dies, the species becomes extinct. George was a tree snail that died | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

SpaceX Starhopper Rocket Test

SpaceX took its Starhopper rocket out for a little test run in Texas the other day, taking off and then landing about 300 feet a | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

My 2019 Roadtrip Along the Pacific Coast of the US

In late July after visiting my kids at camp, I flew into LA, rented a car, and spent two weeks driving up the coast from there t | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago

The Hubble’s New Portrait of Jupiter

A photo of Jupiter taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in late June was recently released by NASA. Among other things, it shows | Continue reading


@kottke.org | 4 years ago