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Christopher Nolan tells Stephen Colbert he has “no guilt about being a fan of the Fast & Furious franchise. A tremendous action franchise. I watch those movies all the time. I love them.”

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  Recently Active Comment Threads

Waffle House's Magic Marker System
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Movie Posters Perfected . "A live, cloud-based library of over 3,500...
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On TV: 'Free to Be... You and Me'
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The 15 Greatest Documentaries
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Christopher Nolan tells Stephen Colbert he has " no guilt about being a fan...
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From The Pudding, a visual essay about how Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest...
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Drawing Media, an Interview With Jason Kottke
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The Metaphysically Science-ish Drawings of Daniel Martin Diaz
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Charlie Jane Anders on why she stopped loving Captain Kirk . "Kirk is...
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Kate Wagner (from McMansion Hell) was sent to an F1 race by Road & Track and...
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It's really become a thing for bands to go on tour to play their classic...
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Yesterday the Atlantic published a list of great American novels -- 136 of...
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Waffle House’s Magic Marker System

I thought for sure that I’d previously written about the secret jelly packet & pickle-based system that chefs at the Waffle House use to “store” all of the orders that come in for food during service, but I can’t find it in the archive. But no matter — the Waffle House training video above runs us through their whole system, including a detailed explanation of their Magic Marker System, which involves zero actual Magic Markers and instead is about arranging condiment packets and other items on plates in a code:

Now let’s talk about our breakfast sandwiches. Just like omelettes, these sandwiches have the same four positions: ham, sausage, bacon, and plain. To mark a sandwich, place two pickle slices in the appropriate position. Here you can see I put two pickle slices in the number three position, which tells me this is a bacon sandwich. If I add a slice of cheese to the plate, I know this is a bacon cheese sandwich. To make this a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, I’ll add this right side up mayo packet to the right side of the plate.

Don’t let this mayo pack confuse you - as long as you see two pickles on the plate you know this is a sandwich. When marking a sandwich, this mayo packet and pickles means a sandwich with eggs. If a customer wanted the eggs on their sandwich to be scrambled instead of the standard over well egg, I’d move this mayo pack down to the bottom of the plate to show that the egg is scrambled.

That sounds pretty complicated and they’ve likely faced pressure to change the system over the years, but I bet it works really well in practice and cuts down on errors. I love stuff like this…seeing how different organizations manage their core processes, especially in non-conventional ways. See also Nightclub Hand Signals and The Quarryman’s Symphony. (thx, erik)

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This is a perfect New Yorker Talk of the Town piece: now-divorced celebs holding a joint thrift sale of their stuff. The sale was advertised on Vogue’s website, was sponsored by an energy drink, and one of the sellers was recording the scene for her podcast.

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Stile Antico, “Byrd: Mass for Four Voices - V. Agnus Dei”

Several years ago, I heard a performance from the group above while driving. I made a note of their name on my phone — Stile Antico — and later bought tickets to a concert they were having near where I lived at the time. I invited my boyfriend (also at the time), who made a point of letting me know in not so many words that he wasn’t into the music and didn’t really want to go. I think we were also fighting about something else, to be fair. Anyway, we went to the concert. But it didn’t have the magic that had captivated me on the radio, and I was too aware that my companion wasn’t enjoying himself, so we left at intermission. The group dropped off my radar until recently, but this performance of music by William Byrd, written more than 400 years ago, just blows me away (full album streaming here). I wish I had stayed for the second half of that show. I should have just been like, “You go home and let me enjoy my Renaissance music in peace!”

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“I was fully in the first time, but the second time, even after getting divorced, it was like, OK, I am all in.” These stories about couples remarrying felt very romantic to me!

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Movie Posters Perfected. “A live, cloud-based library of over 3,500 curated movie posters you can stream to your digital display.” Includes a DIY digital display guide.

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The 15 Greatest Documentaries

A thoughtful video essay from The Cinema Cartography about 15 of film’s greatest documentaries, including The Thin Blue Line, Grizzly Man, The Act of Killing, Shoah, Hoop Dreams, and OJ: Made in America (my personal favorite).

I am not sure I agree with their #1 pick? But it’s been a loooong time since I saw it (in the theater when it came out, if you can believe it), so maybe it’s time for another viewing. (via open culture)

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Charlie Jane Anders on why she stopped loving Captain Kirk. “Kirk is obsessed with maintaining his dominance over his crew, in a way that’s very much of its time but also a product of the men who created him.”

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Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a long piece about how conservative groups have “co-opted both the rhetoric of colorblindness and the legal legacy of Black activism not to advance racial progress, but to stall it. Or worse, reverse it.”

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Drawing Media, an Interview With Jason Kottke

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Hi, Edith here. This is the first in an interview series in which I talk to people about their media diets and habits. Jason seemed like a good person to start with as we figure out the format, although honestly his actual Media Diet series is more thorough. Look for the next installment in a few weeks!

So, have you seen or read anything good recently?
I saw Dune Two on opening weekend. And I went by myself, which I like to do. There are no IMAX screens in Vermont, but there’s a theater about 45 minutes from me with a screen called the T-Rex. It’s not quite IMAX, but it’s not bad either.

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How was it?
Great. Better than the first one.

And it was definitely a movie that you want to see on the big screen. Like you could feel the bass, and at one particular moment it felt like the whole theater was vibrating.

I’m sure you’ve read Dune. Have you read it many times?
I have not read Dune, ever.

Really?!
I’m not sure the movie necessarily makes me want to read Dune, either, which is surprising, because usually when I see a movie based on a book, I’ll be like, “Oh I need to read that.” Like when I saw Oppenheimer, later I read the book it’s based on, which is this 600-page biography of Robert Oppenheimer. And it was good, but I think the movie was better.

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You mentioned the other day that you haven’t been enjoying, or even reading, many books recently. Is that true?
Pretty much? For the last couple months, I’ve been working a lot, and that means spending a lot of time on a device – my computer, my phone. And generally I don’t want to read after I’ve been working a lot. TV is much more something I turn to. Also video games. Like I play Fortnite, which is something I started doing with my kids, but now I play more than they do, which is weird.

And so you’re playing against other strangers on the Internet?
Exactly.

Are you good?
I don’t think so. But I’ve gotten a lot better.

And I know you play some of the NY Times games too.
I do the crossword almost exclusively with a friend over FaceTime. She shares her screen, and we solve them together.

I wasn’t a crossword puzzle person beforehand – and I kind of hate Scrabble because at a certain level it’s all about strategy and memorization, which is boring to me. I felt similarly about crossword puzzles, but then she and I started doing them, and I was like, “Oh this is actually pretty fun,” and now we do maybe two or three a week.

And I don’t do Wordle, but I do play the Spelling Bee and Connections. And I’ll do the little mini crosswords on my phone. But a lot of that is just procrastinating about getting out of bed in the morning.

So they’re mostly morning experiences for you?
Yes. I will go back to Spelling Bee, though, if I didn’t do well in the morning.

What’s doing well?
I don’t get Genius every day, but I would like to. But sometimes I just don’t have the patience for the particular puzzle, and I’m like, I’m sorry, I don’t want to grind.

And I’m not judging others, but for me, if I’m spending too long on the Spelling Bee, it means I probably need to get up and move my body, or, you know, engage my brain in a different way.

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You mentioned that you read Middlemarch last year. How did you squeeze that in? Because that’s a commitment.
Middlemarch was wonderful. I loved it. When you take seven months off work, you can have time to relax, and my reading went crazy. I couldn’t get enough books, because I wasn’t reading anything online. I stopped cold turkey, basically. People would send me links, like, “Here’s an interesting New Yorker article,” and I’m like, nope. Not even news. Not gonna read it. I’m gonna read about Dorothea and Casaubon.

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What were other highlights, book-wise, from that time?
Middlemarch was definitely the highlight. I don’t know if I’ll ever have another sabbatical like that. It was probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

Right now I’m listening to a good audiobook, though: Blood in the Machine, by Brian Merchant. It’s about the Luddites.

jkbloodcopy.jpg

It was painted as an anti-technology movement in the early 19th century, but the book recontextualizes it as a labor movement. Rich factory owners were introducing new technologies, and people were getting laid off. Workers were angry and would go into the factories to smash machines, but they would only smash the ones that were, like, driving people out of work. The machines that actually helped the laborers do their jobs, those were kept.

And he relates it to what’s going on these days with AI and the current anti-tech movement. I’m enjoying it.

How did you hear about it?
I’d seen it on some “best of” lists at the end of 2023, and then Casey Johnston recommended it on Blue Sky. She was like “this book is great,” and so I was like, Okay, that’s good enough for me.

Do you listen to things most of the time while you’re driving?
Maybe half the time. I also use driving time to think. Like if there’s some work thing I need to think over, I’ll put on music without words, and just, you know, spin the wheels.

But when I don’t feel like doing that, I’ll listen to an audiobook or podcast.

What kinds of music do you listen to?
The music thing is embarrassing because I don’t listen to a lot of, like, new music. André 3000’s flute album is maybe the newest thing I’ve listened to recently.

I can’t write when the music has lyrics, so when I’m working I play a lot of classical and soundtracks. Also videos on YouTube. One of my favorites is just basically an ice breaker idling in the Arctic during a storm.

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I also listen to a lot of electronic music, at varying levels of, uh, what would be considered good? And when I’m programming or designing, I listen to a lot of upbeat house, club, and techno.

Anything you’ve seen recently that just wasn’t for you?
Rebel Moon on Netflix was bad. Not even “not for me.” Just objectively terrible.

And something you loved?
The Zone of Interest. I saw it a few weeks ago and have thinking about it ever since, especially the sound design.

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Should there be an Oscar for title design? Or movie poster design? An interview with several designers about how the materials they produce increasingly shape moviegoers’ perceptions of films.

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Yesterday the Atlantic published a list of great American novels — 136 of them. I’ve read them all! Just kidding.

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A forthcoming book from urbanist Carlos Moreno: The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet. “…everyday destinations like schools, stores, and offices should only be a short walk or bike ride away from home.”

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From The Pudding, a visual essay about how Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” lists changed from 2003 to 2020. Who the voters were and how we listen to music both affected the rankings.

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The Metaphysically Science-ish Drawings of Daniel Martin Diaz

art by Daniel Martin Diaz

art by Daniel Martin Diaz

art by Daniel Martin Diaz

I have to admit that the illustration style of Daniel Martin Diaz is not completely my cup of tea, but I do like a few of his pieces (like those pictured above). They have an infographic quality that’s quite compelling — and also remind me a bit of Chris Ware, by way of Hilma af Klint and, uh, Edward Gorey maybe?

Anyway, lot of prints of his work are available and you can check out his latest stuff on Instagram.

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Short interview with a seismologist who has debunked a Harvard astrophysicist’s claim that an alien artifact was found on Earth. “One, if you want to do seismic analysis, it’s ideal if you check with a seismologist first. The other is, it’s not aliens.”

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It’s really become a thing for bands to go on tour to play their classic albums from start to finish (e.g. Death Cab, Postal Service). When did this start? I found this 10-year-old Reddit thread which mentioned Weezer, Green Day, and The Pixies. Anyone?

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“Sometimes it’s desperate because I can’t touch someone, my hands don’t move, and no one touches me except in rare occasions, which I cherish.” Extraordinary obituary for lawyer and author Paul Alexander.

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26 Years Ago…

On this day in 1998, 26 freaking years ago, I started writing this blog. I’ve talked at you a lot about the site recently, so I’ll be brief. Last year on this anniversary, I wrote:

My love for the web has ebbed and flowed in the years since, but mainly it’s persisted — so much so that as of today, I’ve been writing kottke.org for 25 years. A little context for just how long that is: kottke.org is older than Google. 25 years is more than half of my life, spanning four decades (the 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s) and around 40,000 posts — almost cartoonishly long for a medium optimized for impermanence.

And still having fun. Perhaps more fun than ever. Thanks to all of you for being a part of it.

P.S. I hope you’ll forgive me taking advantage of any 26-years!-I-love-this-place! feelings you might have today to ask that if you find value in what I do here, I’d appreciate if you’d support the site by purchasing a membership. And to everyone who has supported the site over the years, thank you so much!

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The deepest points in each of the Earth’s oceans are called The Five Deeps. I didn’t know the deepest spot in the Atlantic Ocean is a trench off the coast of Puerto Rico.

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On TV: ‘Free to Be… You and Me’

I didn’t know (or had somehow forgotten) that Marlo Thomas’s seminal children’s album Free to Be… You and Me (Spotify, Apple Music) was turned into a TV special that aired in 1974.

The basic concept was to encourage post-1960s gender neutrality, saluting values such as individuality, tolerance, and comfort with one’s identity. A major thematic message is that anyone — whether a boy or a girl — can achieve anything.

The TV show starred Thomas, Mel Brooks, Harry Belefonte, Dionne Warwick, Carol Channing, Michael Jackson, Dustin Hoffman, and many others. You can watch the whole thing (commercials included) on YouTube:

Times TV critic James Poniewozik wrote about the show for its 50th anniversary.

The opening sketch features Thomas and Mel Brooks as cue-ball-headed puppet babies in a hospital nursery, daffily trying to work out which of them is a boy and which is a girl — the Brooks baby declares himself a girl because he wants to be “a cocktail waitress” — and setting up the bigger themes of the special: What is a boy and what is a girl?

As newborns, they’re indistinguishable, just base line people - eyes, ears, hands, mouth. They haven’t yet been programmed with all the lessons about boy things and girl things, boy colors and girl colors, boy games and girl games. The rest of the special gives its young viewers a decoder ring for those messages, and permission to disregard them.

Take “Parents Are People,” a duet with Thomas and Harry Belafonte, which remains one of the most innocently radical things I’ve ever seen on TV. The lyrics explain that your mom and dad are just “people with children,” who have their own lives and a wide range of careers open to both of them.

Back in 2012, Dan Kois wrote a three-part series on the album.

Mel Brooks’ session was more eventful. Thomas had written to him that the album “would benefit the Ms. Foundation,” and when he came in the morning of his recording, he told her that he thought the material Reiner and Stone had written was funny but that he didn’t know what it had to do with multiple sclerosis. Once set straight about the MS in question, Brooks joined Thomas in the recording booth, where they would both play babies for the album’s first sketch, “Boy Meets Girl.”

“When I directed,” Alda recalls, “I would be meticulous and relentless. I would do a lot of takes. But Mel is not a guy who’s used to doing a lot of takes. He’s not used to taking direction from anybody — you know, he gives direction.” Alda didn’t love the first few takes of “Boy Meets Girl”; in the end it took, Alda remembers, 10 or 15 tries, with Brooks improvising madly all along the way. Rodgers was there that day to record “Ladies First,” and she still remembers standing in the control room laughing harder with each take. “Mel was generous,” Alda allows, “and he let me egg him on.”

We listened to Free to Be… quite a bit in the car when the kids were younger. Nice to see it pop up again.

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Dew Point I is a mesmerizing water sculpture piece by Lily Clark — water droplets seem to appear from nowhere and bead up on a surface made of superhydrophobic ceramic.

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The Most Populous Cities in the World, From 3000 BCE to Today

I’ve always been a little fascinated by the list of the largest cities throughout history, so this animated version from Ollie Bye is right up my alley. While watching, it’s interesting to think about what makes cities grow large at specific times: a mixture of economics, demography, social movements, empire/colonialism, technology, and the like.

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Dawn Baillie: The Art of the Movie Poster

the movie poster for Silence of the Lambs

I love a good movie poster and Dawn Baillie designed one of the best ones ever: the iconic poster for The Silence of the Lambs. Her other work includes posters for Dirty Dancing, Little Miss Sunshine, Zoolander, The Truman Show, and The Royal Tenenbaums. A show of her work opens soon at Poster House in NYC. Some of Baillie’s original posters are for sale at Posteritati.

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From Taschen, The Book of Colour Concepts. Man, I am just a total sucker for palettes and spectrums.

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Chiroptera is a dance performance from artist & photographer JR, choreographer Damien Jalet, Thomas Bangalter (Daft Punk), dancer Amandine Albisson, and 153 “pixel” dancers (you’ll see what I mean).

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Stephen D’Onofrio’s Fruit Art

donofriopileoffruitcopy.jpg

I recently discovered the “pile of fruit”-themed art of Stephen D’Onofrio. I love it! The strawberries are a preliminary sketch, but they’re what drew me in, and the rest are paintings. He’s represented by Dallas’s Galleri Urbane. I also like his “trees fitting exactly in the canvas” paintings.

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The winners of the Underwater Photographer of the Year competition for 2024. “Whale Bones was photographed in the toughest conditions, as a breath-hold diver descends below the Greenland ice sheet to bear witness to the carcasses.”

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On trimming the silence from our lives. “One of the more distressing qualities of humanity, in my mind, is the emphasis we collectively put on efficiency.”

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Museum-Worthy?

This is a fun ad for the 2024 AICP Awards about the pitfalls of focus-grouping & corporatizing art, featuring an annoyed van Gogh (“How can a painting fail?”) and an even more annoyed Frida Kahlo. (via noah kalina)

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Warped & Bendy Pen Plots

a black and white box containing a simple night landscape

a black and white sphere that's being pulled apart on one side

I like these small scale pen plotted artworks from Adam Fuhrer. You can see his larger scale work, buy work from his shop, and more of his generative art projects.

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Jim Martini, a short story by Michael Bible. “He wasn’t one of us. He didn’t understand team culture. He didn’t have our warrior mindset.”

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Time Travel Movies, Ranked

For Ars Technica, science writer Jennifer Ouellette and theoretical physicist Sean Carroll review time travel used in 20 popular movies, ranging from The Terminator to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure to Interstellar. Each movie is rated on scientific accuracy and how entertaining the use of time travel is. Here’s part of their review of Superman (1978).

Our standards are admittedly lax when it comes to the physical mechanism by which cinematic heroes journey through time, but “flying really fast around the Earth so that it reverses the direction of its rotation and sends it back to a previous moment” is such thoroughgoing lunacy that one must almost pause in admiration. Then we return to our senses and ask, “Why does Superman’s flight have any effect on the rotation of the Earth? And what does that rotation have to do with the direction of time? Do I get younger if I start twirling counterclockwise?” No, dear reader, you do not. Indeed, by the rules handed down by Einstein, Superman’s near-speed-of-light journey would actually send him into the future, not into the past.

To its dubious credit, Superman pioneers two different flaws that will frequently recur in movies to come. First, time travel is portrayed as a miraculous cure-all, which is then never used again. Superman essentially goes back in time to save his girlfriend. This is admirable, but aren’t there other, more historically significant global disasters that could be averted by the same strategy? This is a narrative problem, not a scientific or logical one, but it rankles.

Then, of course, there is the flaw that almost always accompanies stories in which the past gets changed by time-travelers: Where did those time-travelers come from? We, the viewers, see a sequence of events that seems to make sense if we don’t think too hard. Lois Lane dies, Superman gets upset, he travels back in time, stops the events that led to Lois dying, and we live happily ever after. But at the end of this sequence, Superman still has the memory of Lois dying the first time around. Yet because he changed history, that event he remembers never happened. Lois certainly doesn’t remember it. How does he?

See also The Various Approaches to Time Travel in Movies & Books.

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A look at the cool new toilets out there.

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Zach Seward on appropriate and inappropriate uses of AI and machine learning in journalism. AI/ML can be powerful tools for journalists do more with vast quantities of data. But shady employers see shoddy AI-written copy as a way to replace humans.

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How Photos Were Transmitted by Wire in the 1930s

I didn’t know what to expect from this 1937 video explanation of how wire photos were transmitted to newspapers, but a double stunt sequence featuring an airplane and a death-defying photographer was not anywhere on my bingo card. This starts kinda slow but it picks up once they get into the completely fascinating explanation of how they sent photographs across the country using ordinary telephone lines. The whole setup was portable and they just hacked into a wire on a telephone pole, asked the operator to clear the line, and sent a photo scan via an analog modem. Ingenious!

The Wikipedia page about wire photos is worth a read — French designers argued that the technology was responsible for an early form of fast fashion.

After World War II at haute couture shows in Paris, Frederick L. Milton would sketch runway designs and transmit his sketches via Bélinographe to his subscribers, who could then copy Parisian fashions. In 1955, four major French couturiers (Lanvin, Dior, Patou, and Jacques Fath) sued Milton for piracy, and the case went to the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court. Wirephoto enabled a speed of transmission that the French designers argued damaged their businesses.

(via the kid should see this)

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A list of rejected Icelandic female names. (“Edith” is okay, “Judith” is not.) Elsewhere: The Mystery of the Icelandic Naming Committee.

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The Neo-Luddite Movement

For the last few weeks, I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Brian Merchant’s history of the Luddite movement, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. In it, Merchant argues the Luddites were at their core a labor movement against capitalism and compares them to contemporary movements against big tech and media companies. Merchant writes in the Atlantic:

The first Luddites were artisans and cloth workers in England who, at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, protested the way factory owners used machinery to undercut their status and wages. Contrary to popular belief, they did not dislike technology; most were skilled technicians.

At the time, some entrepreneurs had started to deploy automated machines that unskilled workers — many of them children — could use to churn out cheap, low-quality goods. And while the price of garments fell and the industrial economy boomed, hundreds of thousands of working people fell into poverty. When petitioning Parliament and appealing to the industrialists for minimum wages and basic protections failed, many organized under the banner of a Robin Hood-like figure, Ned Ludd, and took up hammers to smash the industrialists’ machines. They became the Luddites.

He goes on to compare their actions to tech publication writers’ strikes, the SAG-AFTRA & WGA strikes, the Authors Guild lawsuit against AI companies, and a group of masked activists “coning” self-driving cars. All this reminds me of Ted Chiang’s quote about AI:

I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.

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I grew up near Menomonie, WI in the freezing cold north, but this year was too warm for the lake ice to form to hold their “when will this old junker car fall through” raffle. They stopped a similar tradition a few years ago in my VT town — too warm.

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Out today from Dr. Lisa Mosconi: The Menopause Brain. It’s a reexamination of menopause and perimenopause through the lens of neuroscience. Mosconi calls it “a scientist’s love letter to womanhood”.

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Jonathan Glazer’s ‘The Zone of Interest won’t let us look away — from the present, from ourselves. “It turns the audience’s gaze on the perpetrators, but it also implicitly asks us to examine our own roles.”

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Wild Ice Skating

an ice skater stands on very clear blue lake ice with mountains in the background

Winter is winding down here in the northern hemisphere (though you wouldn’t know it from the foot of new snow outside my window), but for practitioners of wild ice skating, spring can bring favorable conditions.

But the problem with Nordic skating or any kind of wild skating — which is defined as outdoors and on naturally formed ice, regardless of the style of skate used — is finding good ice. Wild-ice seekers extol late fall and sometimes spring for freezing conditions without snowfall, which degrades ice.

Instagram is full of amazing videos of wild skating. When they lower the water level in an icy reservoir, you can even go downhill skating.

Listen to the ice on this one! It reminds me of one of my all-time favorite videos that I’ve posted to the site: The Wonderful Sounds of Skating on Black Ice. (thx, caroline)

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Kris Bowers & Ben Proudfoot won the Best Documentary Short Oscar for The Last Repair Shop. It’s Proudfoot’s second award…he won two years ago for The Queen of Basketball. Proudfoot has been a Kottke favorite since 2011.

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The Public Art of the NYC Transit System

NYC subway mosaic pattern of beautiful pink and white blossoms

NYC subway mosaic pattern by Nick Cave featuring dancing figures

From The Monacelli Press, Contemporary Art Underground: MTA Arts & Design New York is a forthcoming book about the art projects the MTA has completed in the last decade in the NYC transit system.

Of special interest is the discussion of fabricating and transposing the artist’s rendering or model into mosaic, glass, or metal, the materials that can survive in the transit environment.

Nancy Blum’s piece at the 28th Street station (top, above) is my favorite piece in the entire subway system; I love it so much. (via colossal)

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Haha, Hank Green discovers the automobile industry’s wet putty paint job and, dare I say it, gets a little unhinged about it.

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I’m pleased that The Zone of Interest won the Oscar for Best Sound — the sound design was really remarkable. Listen to the film’s sound designer and mixer talk about how they created the soundscape. “You can shut your eyes, but you can’t shut your ears.”

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“Struggling in front of my classmates wasn’t something I looked forward to.” Fitness writer Danielle Friedman on whether the Presidential Fitness Tests might have backfired for some people.

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Princess Catherine on Instagram

“Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing.” Well, I can’t resist the kerfuffle around what’s going on with Princess Catherine. Yesterday she posted a photo of herself with her family that turned out to have been edited, and today she apologized for “any confusion” it might have caused. (Shared presumably in part to dispel rumors about her health and whereabouts, the photo “fans [those rumors] instead,” per the NY Times.)

Last week, Nieman Lab ran a story on how unusual the Palace’s response to gossip surrounding the situation has been. And if you really want to get into the weeds, Nieman Lab’s editor-in-chief Laura Hazard Owen also just linked to a three-minute TikTok video proposing that the original Instagram photo was actually taken last November.

See also Hilary Mantel’s 2013 essay in the London Review of Books: “I wanted to apologise. I wanted to say: it’s nothing personal, it’s monarchy I’m staring at.”

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I love when my friend Matt Haughey does these nerdy product recommendation posts about the stuff he’s super into. This one is about cycling gear: 3-D printed bike seats and cycling apparel that won’t break the bank.

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The artist Laurie Anderson built a AI chatbot of her late husband Lou Reed. “I’m totally 100%, sadly addicted to this. I still am, after all this time.”

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