Kottke.org Posts and Links for Oct 4, 2024
Hi, Jason here. This newsletter is a digest of posts and links from kottke.org, published every Tuesday and Friday. It's not absolutely everything from the site, but it's durn close. Unsubscribing is easy if you'd like to get off this ride. As always, you can read kottke.org on the web, via RSS, on Bluesky, on Mastodon, and in several other ways. Ok, onto the links!
Relax With George Clooney at the End of a Movie. "He has perfected the art of just chillin' out silently for an extended period of time during the last shot of a movie while the credits roll..." [kottke.org]
Matthew Ingram takes a look at the moral panic over social media and teen depression. "Despite all of the studies, there is still an almost complete lack of any evidence that social media use causes anxiety or depression in young adults." [torment-nexus.mathewingram.com]
Sports Celebrate Physical Variation — Until It Challenges Social Norms. "A powerful triple axel on the ice is perfectly feminine when done in a skirt. But a powerful punch? A cheetah-fast sprint? Variation is suddenly of deep concern." [scientificamerican.com]
You've heard about the Earth's new mini-moon, yes? "It will be temporarily trapped by our planet's gravity and orbit the globe - but only for about two months." [apnews.com]
Ran across this book in the bookstore recently and it looked great: The Art of Aardman. "This collection features original character sketches and never-before-seen concept art, offering a unique look inside the studio that created...Wallace & Gromit." [amazon.com]
Music By John Williams, a documentary on the legendary composer for Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, etc. "People say, 'How do you do so much work?' I was filled with the love of music and the pleasure of doing it with great musicians." [kottke.org]
Ta-Nehisi Coates & Jon Stewart: Understanding the Humiliation of Oppression [kottke.org]
What Does Our Far Future Look Like? From the Timeline of the Far Future: "In 400 million years, Saturn will have lost its rings. Earth will have replenished its fossil fuels." [kottke.org]
This AI-generated video is a) completely bonkers (seriously, watch all the way to the end) and b) illustrative of how visual LLMs work: it so obviously doesn't know anything...it's just mindlessly following image similarity. [threads.net]
If you play Spelling Bee, the Times has a Spelling Bee Buddy that offers statistics and personalized hints that update as you play. (There's also a Connections Bot.) [nytimes.com]
10-Minute Art Challenge: Hiroshige's 'Sudden Rain'. "We'd like you to look at one piece of art for 10 minutes, uninterrupted." [kottke.org]
Profile of Aisha Nyandoro (founder of a guaranteed-income project) for the Time Next 100 list. "Money — the type that can be spent on anything — has been out of favor as a method of helping impoverished Americans." [time.com]
Some of the most prized public spaces in Europe were once used for parking lots (and some still are). "Why are we so comfortable filling our most iconic public spaces with a bunch of metal boxes?" [politico.eu]
Two Sally Rooney Things I Didn't Know About: a 2016 short story featuring a post-college Marianne & Connell from Normal People and a 2019 novella called Mr Salary. [kottke.org]
Opinion: We Need More Consequences for Reckless Driving. "'Punishment' and 'consequences' aren't synonyms — and when we confuse the two, we lose lives on our roads." [usa.streetsblog.org]
A site called Chromeography collects chrome logos and typography from vintage cars & electric appliances. [kottke.org]
When I tell folks (like during my XOXO talk) that I'm leaving a lot of money on the table by not paywalling my stuff on Substack, this is what I'm talking about: "You probably can't make more than $1 million a year on Substack. But Matthew Yglesias does." [businessinsider.com]
Two college students paired Meta's Ray Ban smart glasses with facial recognition tech and were able to pull up info on strangers (name, home address, phone number, and family members) in seconds just by looking at them. [404media.co]
What's the Labor Share of National Income? The share of income that US workers get paid for their labor has fallen from 64.1% in Q1 2001 to 55.8% in Q1 2024. That's trillions of dollars that went to the 1% and not to the workers in the bottom 90%. [kottke.org]
The podcasts generated by Google's NotebookLM service are "surprisingly effective". (Whether this says more about the current state of podcasts or AI is an open question...) [simonwillison.net]
Lighthouse Parents Have More Confident Kids. "Sometimes, the best thing a parent can do is nothing at all." This has largely been my parenting strategy, although it's sometimes been challenging to stick to. [theatlantic.com 🎁]
Great Art Explained: Van Gogh's Last Painting. "The mystery of what [his final painting] was and where it was painted would take over a century to solve, and that was only thanks to a worldwide epidemic." [kottke.org]
Over 33,000 sounds are available for free download from the BBC's sound effects library. "Among the plethora of sounds covered are reindeer grunts, common frog calls and crowds at the 1989 FA Cup Final." [djmag.com]
Beautiful HD video of a murmuration of starlings wheeling in unison through the air. [kottke.org]
Great interview by Jia Tolentino of Dr. Warren Hern, one of the few doctors who openly perform late abortions in the US. "Abortion is a clear therapeutic treatment of the condition of pregnancy where the woman is not going to have a healthy baby." [newyorker.com]
What's the Fastest Way to Alphabetize Your Bookshelf? Perhaps some sorting techniques visualized through Eastern European folk dancing would help? [kottke.org]
The Absolute Best Butter For Every Occasion, After Taste-Testing, Cooking And Baking With 32 Kinds. Definitely need to get my hands of some Le Beurre Bordier at some point. But I'm really happy with Ploughgate's salted butter. 🤤 [forbes.com]
How Matisse Revolutionized Color In Art. The painter's Fauvist work was decried as "monstrous", "a violent mess", and "the work of a madman". Now, of course, it's a foundational pillar of modern art. [kottke.org]
The most common adjectives ending in "-y" used in the NYT Cooking section include jammy, silky, buttery, cheesy, and lemony. [reddit.com]
Examples of a book cover design trend: multi-panel illustrations or "bento books". Think the covers for Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. [ineedabookcover.com]
The humble hyperlink, the backbone of the entire internet, is increasingly endangered. "If you degrade hyperlinks...you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things." [halifaxexaminer.ca]
Evidence of 'Negative Time' Found in Quantum Physics Experiment. "Another oddball quantum outcome: photons, wave-particles of light, can spend a negative amount of time zipping through a cloud of chilled atoms." [scientificamerican.com]
Status Update. Still recovering from my biking mishap — thanks for your patience as I get back into the groove here. [kottke.org]
Thom Yorke is reworking Radiohead's Hail to the Thief for a production of Hamlet. "PLEASE NOTE: RADIOHEAD WILL NOT BE PERFORMING IN HAMLET HAIL TO THE THIEF." [rsc.org.uk]
👀 👋 🎉
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