Jaws turns 50 years old this summer. Here’s an interview with marine biologist & shark conservationist David Schiffman about the huge impact Jaws had on society’s perception of sharks. People were scared to go to swimming pools!
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Entries for June 2025
An excellent profile of design legend Michael Bierut, who recently “retired” as a Pentagram partner. There wisdom throughout this piece about retaining & flexing your humanity in the dehumanizing world of business.
From The Onion: Congress, Now More Than Ever, Our Nation Needs Your Cowardice. “Now is not the time for bravery or valor! This is the time for protecting your own hide and lining your pocket.” (They sent a copy of this to every member of Congress.)
To The People I Know Who Voted for Him. “you had a chance…to condemn his criminality, to prevent his lawlessness, to denounce his bigotry — and you flat-out refused. More than that, you celebrated it. That’s not something I can quietly abide.”
Happening all day today: a Reading Rainbow marathon on PBS Retro. PBS Retro is available on Plex, Roku, and Prime Video.
For fans of Edith Zimmerman, a new Etsy offering: “A 4x6” made-to-order printing of any single comics frame of your choosing, from my newsletter.”
Play Along With This Gestural Verbing Interactive Video
I love this interactive video at Design Ah! Exhibition Neo at Tokyo Node. The display introduces the audience to a series of simple hand gestures, followed by some outcomes of their performance, e.g. a squeezing motion leading to soapy spray on a window or toothpaste on a toothbrush. This looks like it would be super fun in person.
The exhibition is a real-life version of Design Ah!, a Japanese show about design for kids.
Set to catchy music, Japanese Hiragana characters danced across the screen for a few minutes. Then came a line animation wordlessly designing and redesigning a parking lot. Next was stop motion. Electronic devices came apart. As the camera zoomed out, the individual parts lined up into a grid.
We didn’t know what we were watching, but we were transfixed. Everyone from the adults to the one-year-old had their eyes glued to the TV.
Formula One Cars Are Fast. Like Super Fast.
Speaking of what fast looks like, here’s a pair of synced videos that show just how fast F1 cars are. On the left are drivers participating in a track day, that is, normal folks who want to drive their cars fast on a real race course. A couple of them look like actual GT cars and are moving pretty quick. On the right, you’ve got F1 cars on the same track. It’s not even close:
Here’s an overlaid version and you can also see how much faster F1 cars are than just 25 years ago…the 2011 F1 car beats the 1986 F1 car by an amazing 22 seconds over a total time of a minute and a half. (via @coreyh)
Update: In a speed test, an F1 car starts 40 seconds after a Mercedes sports car and 25 seconds after a V8 Supercar (essentially an Australian NASCAR) and still catches them by the end of the first lap.
A group of researchers tracked down the original photo used in the final scene of The Shining. “It was a real photo from the 1920s, and Nicholson’s face had been superimposed over someone. But whose face was it?”
Yawns
If you’re like most people, you probably started yawning as soon as you read the title of this post and saw the video’s thumbnail. And then yawned like two or three times watching it. That’s because a) yawning is contagious, and b) that video is chock-a-block with clips of people and animals yawning.
Yawning is so weird. It’s even a strange word. Yaaaaawwwwwnnnn. And like I mentioned, it’s contagious. In fact, it’s so contagious that even reading or overhearing someone talking about yawning can cause you to yawn. Why the hell do we do this weird thing? Perhaps to cool our brains.
(via the kid should see this)
You Sure You’re In The Mood For Another Wes Anderson Film With Everything That’s Going On? “Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston rattling off my signature droll dialogue — enticing or not?”
Decisions and opportunity in America are no longer cheap. “Life is an open world game. It rewards you for exploring. And capitalism cannot fucking stand that. It wants you on rails.”
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
In 1996, Harper’s published a long piece by David Foster Wallace called Shipping Out, in which Wallace, a decidedly non-luxury cruise person, goes on a week-long luxury cruise in the Caribbean.
I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as “Mon” in three different nations. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced. I have (very briefly) joined a conga line.
I have seen a lot of really big white ships. I have seen schools of little fish with fins that glow. I have seen and smelled all 145 cats inside the Ernest Hemingway residence in Key West, Florida. I now know the difference between straight bingo and Prize-O. I have seen fluorescent luggage and fluorescent sunglasses and fluorescent pince-nez and over twenty different makes of rubber thong. I have heard steel drums and eaten conch fritters and watched a woman in silver lamé projectile-vomit inside a glass elevator. I have pointed rhythmically at the ceiling to the two-four beat of the same disco music I hated pointing at the ceiling to in 1977.
I have learned that there are actually intensities of blue beyond very bright blue. I have eaten more and classier food than I’ve ever eaten, and done this during a week when I’ve also learned the difference between “rolling” in heavy seas and “pitching” in heavy seas. I have heard a professional cruise-ship comedian tell folks, without irony, “But seriously.” I have seen fuchsia pantsuits and pink sport coats and maroon-and-purple warm-ups and white loafers worn without socks. I have seen professional blackjack dealers so lovely they make you want to clutch your chest. I have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the ship’s Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet, whether the trapshooting will be held outside, whether the crew sleeps on board, and what time the Midnight Buffet is. I now know the precise mixocological difference between a Slippery Nipple and a Fuzzy Navel. I have, in one week, been the object of over 1,500 professional smiles. I have burned and peeled twice. I have met Cruise Staff with the monikers “Mojo Mike,” “Cocopuff,” and “Dave the Bingo Boy.”
I have felt the full clothy weight of a subtropical sky. I have jumped a dozen times at the shattering, flatulence-of-the-gods-like sound of a cruise ship’s horn. I have absorbed the basics of mah-jongg and learned how to secure a life jacket over a tuxedo. I have dickered over trinkets with malnourished children. I have learned what it is to become afraid of one’s own cabin toilet. I have now heard — and am powerless to describe — reggae elevator music.
Wallace later expanded this piece for the titlular essay in his nonfiction collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (a much better title).
Your beginning-of-summer PSA: Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. “There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind.” So here’s what to look for…
Want to use your phone less? Try Forest. “Whenever you want to stay focused, plant a [virtual] tree. Your tree will grow while you focus on your work. Leaving the app halfway will cause your tree to die.”
The Fear of Never Landing is a new album from ambient music band Marconi Union, whose 2011 song Weightless has been described as “the world’s most relaxing song”. Get it on YT, Bandcamp, Spotify, and Apple Music.
New Music Video for Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer (feat. Saoirse Ronan)
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the band, Talking Heads have released a new music video for their iconic 1977 single, Psycho Killer. The video stars Saoirse Ronan and was directed by Mike Mills.
They are doing a Spaceballs 2. (“They” includes Mel Brooks and Rick Moranis, who has not appeared in a live-action film since 1997.) “I am one with the Schwartz and the Schwartz is with me.”
A new study from MIT’s Media Lab (not yet peer-reviewed & small sample size): ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills.
The [NYC] Subway Is Not Scary. “It’s fine and safe. It’s full of women and children. There are tons of old ladies on there.” And: “You sound real corny being scared of the subway.”
What Is Juneteenth and Why Does It Matter?
Historian Heather Cox Richardson is now doing visual versions of her daily newsletter on YouTube. Yesterday’s video explains the origins and significance of Juneteenth.
Black people in Galveston met the news Order No. 3 brought with celebrations in the streets, but emancipation was not a gift from white Americans. Black Americans had fought and died for the United States. They had worked as soldiers, as nurses, and as day laborers in the Union army. Those who could had demonstrated their hatred of enslavement and the Confederacy by leaving their homes for the northern lines, sometimes delivering valuable information or matériel to the Union, while those unable to leave had hidden wounded U.S. soldiers and helped them get back to Union lines.
But white former Confederates in Texas were demoralized and angered by the changes in their circumstances. “It looked like everything worth living for was gone,” Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight later recalled.
Just dropped yesterday: Lane 8’s Summer 2025 Mixtape. Got this on right now trying to coax the ol’ brainpan back into work mode.
When In Rome
Ok, having been all over the western Mediterranean for the past two weeks, I’m back. *sigh* Here, without comment or context (I know, I know), are some of the things I saw:
Not pictured: a bunch of amazing food we ate over the course of the trip.
Bernini’s Ratto di Proserpina
I’m in Rome with my family to celebrate a milestone. We went to the Borghese Gallery this morning and I got to see my favorite sculpture, Bernini’s Ratto di Proserpina. A masterpiece. The photos both do and do not do it justice — so grateful to get to see it in person.
This Is Your Captain Speaking…
Hey, folks. I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to be away from the site for a couple of weeks for a family vacation. No guest editor or anything…just going off the air for a much needed rest. Wishing everyone well and I will see you in mid-June.
The latest issue of Jodi Ettenberg’s The Curious About Everything newsletter is typically great — every link worth your attention. Best to have a few hours free before diving in.
Astronomers discover strange new celestial object in our Milky Way galaxy. “It was the first time X-rays had been seen coming from a so-called long-period radio transient, a rare object that cycles through radio signals over tens of minutes.”
King of the Hill is returning after 15 years. “Hank and Peggy Hill are now retired and return to a changed Arlen after years of working in Saudi Arabia; and Bobby is 21 and living his best life while navigating adulthood as a chef.”
Taylor Swift has bought back the rights to her first six albums. “All of the music I’ve ever made now belongs to me.”
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