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Starting with Jaws, his first big blockbuster movie that defined the genre, Steven Spielberg has filled the audiences of his films with a sense of wonder, that alchemical mix of fear and astonishment of the unknown. No other director does it better and this video essay explores how he does it.
Forthcoming book from my pal Russell Davies — Do Interesting: Notice. Collect. Share. “Interesting isn’t a personality, it’s a decision. Don’t hunt for diamonds. Get fascinated by pebbles.”
Spotify playlist of songs from the vinyl records found in James Baldwin’s house after his death in 1987. Over 24 hours of music, incl. Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and Diana Ross.
The music for Sinéad O’Connor’s 1990 smash hit Nothing Compares 2 U is already pretty stripped down to emphasize the vocals, but in this video, the vocals are almost fully isolated so you can really hear the clarity and emotion in that wonderful voice of hers.
The song was apparently recorded in one take:
“I actually think the intensity of Sinéad’s performance came from the breakup of her latest relationship,” opines Chris Birkett, who co-produced and engineered the track as well as the accompanying, Grammy Award-winning album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, which topped the Billboard 200 for six weeks and sold seven million copies worldwide. “She had been dating her manager, Fachtna O’Ceallaigh, who’s a really good guy and had been instrumental in getting her deal with Ensign Records. However, their relationship had gone pear-shaped and they were in the process of breaking up when we recorded ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, so that’s probably why she did such a good vocal. She came into the studio, did it in one take, double-tracked it straight away and it was perfect because she was totally into the song. It mirrored her situation.”
(via openculture)
If you’re in a reading slump, maybe try a graphic novel. If you’re have trouble getting into the reading flow, it can be “immensely satisfying to pick up a graphic novel and read it cover to cover in one sitting”.
For hip-hop’s 50th anniversary, 50 artists reflect on it in their own words: Kool Moe Dee, Cardi B, Lil Wayne, Big Boi, Eve, Vanilla Ice, RZA, and LL Cool J.
A NYC DJ named Dwells released this mashup of Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place and Kendrick Lamar’s N95 back in March and I love it:
You can also find it on Soundcloud and Bandcamp. I ran across it when Radiohead shared a snippet of it on TikTok.
FWIW, Dwells seems to be the same DJ Dwells that won the NYC regional of the prestigious DMC DJ competition when he was just 13 years old. (via @jessicabrillhart)
Arizona is now so hot that it’s killing off saguaro cacti. “These plants are adapted to this heat, but at some point the heat needs to cool down and the water needs to come.”
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have figured out how to make AI models like ChatGPT serve up prohibited material by sending it nonsensical text strings…sort of like a buffer overflow or SQL injection attack.
California’s free prison calls are repairing estranged relationships and aiding rehabilitation. “Rather than rushed conversations [during formerly expensive calls], there’s time for laughter and sharing memories.”
Yesterday, a Washington DC grand jury indicted Donald Trump for “for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding”, aka trying to steal the 2020 presidential election. Heather Cox Richardson lays it out in plain English:
The Trump team used lies about the election to justify organizing fraudulent slates of electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Allegedly with the help of Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, they attempted to have the legitimate electors that accurately reflected the voters’ choice of Biden replaced with fraudulent ones that claimed Trump had won in their states, first by convincing state legislators they had the power to make the switch, and then by convincing Vice President Mike Pence he could choose the Trump electors.
When Pence would not fraudulently alter the election results, Trump whipped up the crowd he had gathered in Washington, D.C., against Pence and then, according to the indictment, “attempted to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” to overturn the election results. “As violence ensued,” the indictment reads, Trump and his co-conspirators “explained the disruption by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince Members of Congress to further delay the certification based on those claims.” On the evening of January 6, 2021, the indictment alleges, Trump and Co-Conspirator 1 called seven senators and one representative and asked them to delay the certification of Biden’s election.
Here also is the full 45-page indictment, annotated by the NY Times (gift link). The gist of the indictment is, yes, the attempts that we all saw Trump making in broad daylight to stay in power despite his clear election loss were real, serious, and harmful.
One important aspect of the indictment that neither of them picked up on was pointed out by Adam Serwer on Bluesky:
The indictment makes clear that Donald Trump and his accomplices planned to seize power by force and then maintain that power through the mass murder of American citizens by their own military.
That sounds pretty serious — here’s what the indictment says:
On the afternoon of January 3, Co-Conspirator 4 spoke with a Deputy White House Counsel. The previous month, the Deputy White House Counsel had informed the Defendant that “there is no world, there is no option in which you do not leave the White House [o]n January 20th.” Now, the same Deputy White House Counsel tried to dissuade Co-Conspirator 4 from assuming the role of Acting Attorney General. The Deputy White House Counsel reiterated to Co-Conspirator 4 that there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that if the Defendant remained in office nonetheless, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.” Co-Conspirator 4 responded, “Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
And this:
Also on January 4, when Co-Conspirator 2 acknowledged to the Defendant’s Senior Advisor that no court would support his proposal, the Senior Advisor told Co-Conspirator 2, “[Y]ou’re going to cause riots in the streets.” Co-Conspirator 2 responded that there had previously been points in the nation’s history where violence was necessary to protect the republic. After that conversation, the Senior Advisor notified the Defendant that Co-Conspirator 2 had conceded that his plan was not going to work.
HuffPost explains who Co-Conspirator 4 is (top Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark) and what the Insurrection Act is all about. Co-Conspirator 2 is John Eastman, one of Trump’s lawyers.
Trump and his team were going to unlawfully (and immorally, I would argue) seize power and quell protests with military force by claiming there was a rebellion against the government or that public safety was at stake. Whether the military would have gone along with it (if Pence had chosen to play his part) is unknown, but it’s pretty incredible how close we came to the United States very quickly devolving into a dictatorship. This fucking traitor must be held accountable for his crimes and must not ever be allowed anywhere near any public office in the United States ever again.
Update: Updated the post to add a second passage from the indictment about the use of state violence to quell protest.
The trailer for season two of Loki. The MCU has been struggling lately, but I will cautiously say that it looks promising?
The Barbie Breakup: After seeing Barbie, some women are “deeply reconsidering” their relationships. “AITA for breaking up with my boyfriend over the Barbie movie?”
Habsburg AI: “a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AIs that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features”.
The new energy efficiency rules that go into effect in the US today mean that stores can no longer sell incandescent light bulbs. They had a good run.
Cruise ships are a relatively new human invention that look quite different from other ships. Oh, and they are absolutely massive. How did they get that way?
The predecessor of today’s cruise ships was the ocean liner: big, beautiful ships that sailed across the Atlantic. But ocean liners had a totally different purpose from cruise ships: They were for transportation. Everything about them was designed to facilitate an ocean voyage from one continent to another.
But air travel changed that. Planes eliminated the main reason to take a ship somewhere, and ocean liner business plummeted. So the industry pivoted and began selling a ship as the destination itself. The cruise ship was born. But the ocean liners, built for a voyage, weren’t ideal for the purposes of a cruise, and over the next few decades, the cruise ship began its evolution. And it has culminated in the behemoths we see today.
Cruise ships always make me think of David Foster Wallace’s classic piece, Shipping Out (which you might know as A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again).
[Note: If you’re reading/watching this, I assume you’ve watched season two or don’t care about spoilers; they abound.] The Bear is an intense show about a group of intense people doing an intense job. It can be tough to watch sometimes because people often communicate by screaming and yelling at each other. As Evan Puschak observes in this perceptive video essay, the second season delves into where some of those behaviors came from (surprise: childhood trauma) and offers a counterbalancing force: tenderness, listening, and paying attention.
Hmm, it seems like the “attenzione pickpocket” lady featured in the NY Times is associated with a conservative anti-Roma party and her pickpocket monitoring might just be “a campaign of racist harassment against the Roma community”.
A French comic from 1967 called Valérian et Laureline is an unacknowledged influence on the Star Wars films.
Venice’s Cittadini Non Distratti (the undistracted citizens) patrol the streets to LOUDLY call attention to pickpockets: “Attenzione, borseggiatrici! Attenzione, pickpocket!”
I have said previously that “even on my busiest day, I will drop everything to watch a video of pencils being made”. Still true! This video from Process X of a Tokyo pencil factory really hits the spot. My favorite part of watching pencils get made is always the sharpening of the finished pencils by belt sander.
See also How Pencils Are Made, A Visit to an American Factory That’s Been Producing Pencils Since 1889, and A History of Pencil Lead and How Pencils Are Made. (via the kid should see this)
Miyazaki’s Magical Food: An Ode to Anime’s Best Cooking Scenes. “Food and eating is so closely associated with family and emotion. It’s a really important part of the actual storytelling and scenesetting.”
Bonkers story about a newspaper that sniffed out corruption and wrongdoing in a small-town sheriff’s department in Oklahoma. One of their headlines flatly declared “Sheriff Regularly Breaking Law Now”.
Words from Hell: Unearthing the Darkest Secrets of English Etymology. “Dirty-minded word nerds and lewd linguistics lovers will derive unadulterated pleasure in leering at the origins of swear words, sexual lingo, inappropriate idioms…”
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