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Koyannistocksi is a shot-by-shot remake of the trailer for Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi using only stock footage.
A testament to Reggio’s influence on contemporary motion photography, and the appropriation of his aesthetic by others for commercial means.
(via @waxpancake)
Stop Making New Oreos. Not sure what the best part of this video is — maybe the Bluetooth Oreos? (My friend the other day: “Look, PB&J Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.” Clerk: “They taste awful.”)
Copaganda and Me. “The police are the good guys, or so I thought as a kid growing up in the suburbs in the 1980s and 1990s when just about everything I knew about policing came from what I watched on television.”
Like many others, I became a little obsessed with Andor over the past few months. I was lukewarm on the first season when it came out, but a pre-s02 rewatch completely changed my tune — I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen on television. Season 2 was almost as good and the whole thing together was really affecting, thought-provoking, and just marvelously well-done.
In this interview with conservative NY Times’ columnist Ross Douthat, series creator Tony Gilroy nails why the show was so interesting:
The five years that I have been given are extremely potent. You have the Empire really closing down, really choking, really ramping up. The emperor is building the Death Star.
They are closing out corporate planets and absorbing them into the state. They are imperialistically acquiring planets and taking what they want. The noose is tightening dramatically.
There still is a Senate. There are senators that are speaking out impotently.
The Senate has been all but completely emasculated by the time this five-year tranche is over.
And there are revolutionary groups, rebellious groups, and people who are acting rebelliously, who wouldn’t even know how to describe themselves as part of any movement. There is a completely wide spectrum of unaffiliated cells and activists that are rising independently across the galaxy.
At the same time, you have a group of more restrained politicians who are trying to make an organized coalition of a rebellion on a place called Yavin, which will end up being the true end of the true victory of the Rebel Alliance.
I wanted to do a show all about the forgotten people who make a revolution like this happen — on both sides — and I want to take equal interest and spend as much time understanding the bureaucrats and the enforcers of the rebellion. I think one of the fascinating things about fascism is that, when it’s done coming after the people whose land it wants and who it wants to oppress and whoever it wants to control, by the time it gets rid of the courts and the justice and consolidates all its power in the center, it ultimately eats its young. It ultimately consumes its own proponents.
The rest of the interview is very much worth a read as well, particularly the bits where, for example, Douthat presses Gilroy on Andor being a “left-wing show”, Gilroy says no, Douthat scoffs, and, sensing Douthat is telling on himself, Gilroy fires back, “Do you identify with the Empire? Do you identify with the Empire?” And Gilroy continues later:
You could say: Why has Hollywood for the last 100 years been progressive or been liberal? I think it’s much larger. I’ll go further and say: Why does almost all literature, why does almost all art that involves humans trend progressive?
Let’s stick with Hollywood. Making a living as an actor or as a writer or a director — without the higher degree of empathy that you have, the more aware you are of behavior and all kinds of behavior, the better you’re going to be at your job. We feed our families by being in an empathy business. It’s just baked in. You’re trying to pretend to be other people. The whole job is to pretend to be other, and what is it like to look from this? People may be less successful over time at portraying Nazis as humans, and that may be good writing or bad writing, and there may be people that have an ax to grind. But in general, empathy is how I feed my family. And the more finely tuned that is, the better I am at my job.
That is what actors do: I’m going on Broadway, I’m playing a villain for six months. I got to live in that. I’m playing the slave, I’m playing the fisherman, I’m playing the nurse, I’m the murderer — you have to get in there. You have to live lives through other people. I think that the simple act of that transformation and that process automatically gives you what I would describe as a more generous and progressive point of view. It just has to.
Like I said, well worth a read/listen. (via sippey)
The Public Domain Cinematic Universe. Beloved characters like Mickey Mouse, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Popeye have entered the public domain. So far, the adaptations have been awful.
On not being an asshole. “There’s real societal value to self censorship. Watching your words and how they might affect people around you is a pro-social exercise that should be encouraged in every facet of modern life.”
Super Mario Clouds for 10 Minutes. Marc Weidenbaum got Cory Arcangel’s just-the-clouds version of Super Mario Bros. (featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial) to run on a modern portable gaming device. Looks great!
Diego Luna is guest-hosting Jimmy Kimmel Live this week and for his first monologue, the Mexico native spoke about immigration and what he’s experienced and observed in the US and LA during his time here.
Diego steps in as our first guest host of the summer and talks about how much Los Angeles means to him, the very important immigration issues happening here and across the United States right now, the authoritarian policies of Donald Trump, his son being born in LA, finding community here, the importance of immigrants and the amazing things they bring to America, how unfair it is that they are living in fear, the violence and separating of families being unacceptable, and he encourages everyone to call their representatives and let them know how they feel about it, and support organizations like Public Counsel and Kids in Need of Defense.
A provocative piece about using AI coding agents: My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts. “Something real is happening. My smartest friends are blowing it off.”
From Heather Cox Richardson, a video series called Ten Steps to Revolution, which “explains how the king’s American subjects came to oppose monarchy and, over the course of only thirteen years, to embrace the right to govern themselves.”
Death of a Fantastic Machine (aka the camera) is a short documentary on “what happens when humanity’s infatuation with itself and an untethered free market meet 45 billion cameras”…and now AI. It’s about how — since nearly the invention of the camera — photos, films, and videos have been used to lie & mislead, a trend that AI is poised to turbo-charge. Not gonna sugar-coat it: this video made me want to throw my phone in the ocean, destroy my TV, and log off the internet never to return. Oof.
The short is adapted from a feature-length documentary directed by Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson called And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine (trailer). Van Aertryck & Danielson made one of my all-time favorite short films ever, Ten Meter Tower (seriously, you should watch this, it’s fantastic…then you can throw your phone in the ocean).
P.S. I hate the title the NY Times gave this video: “Can You Believe Your Own Eyes? Not With A.I.” That is not even what 99% of the video is about and captures none of what’s interesting or thought-provoking about it. However, it is a great illustration of one of the filmmakers’ main points: how the media uses simplifying fear (in this case, the AI bogeyman 🤖👻) to capture eyeballs instead of trying to engage with complexities. “Death of a Fantastic Machine” arouses curiosity just fine by itself. (via craig mod)
“The web platform makes no demands because it offers nothing beyond the opportunity to do good work. Certainly it offers no attention — that, you have to find on your own. Here is your printing press.”
Premiering this Friday June 27 on the PBS, an episode of the series American Masters on Hannah Arendt, historian, philosopher, and one of the 20th century’s most influential political thinkers.
Hannah Arendt came of age in Germany as Hitler rose to power, before escaping to the United States as a Jewish refugee. Through her unflinching capacity to demand attention to facts and reality, Arendt’s time as a political prisoner, refugee and survivor in Europe informed her groundbreaking insights into the human condition, the refugee crisis and totalitarianism.
Her major works, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), On Revolution (1963) and Crises of the Republic (1972) remain among the most important and most-read treatises on the development and impact of totalitarianism and the fault lines in American democracy.
The PBS site has a few clips from the documentary to whet your appetite.
“Between 2015 and 2020, ICE deported at least 70 people who were U.S. citizens” and detained or arrested many more. “ICE has not implemented a reliable system to track and correct its mistakes.” (Or: the purpose of a system is what it does.)
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is operational and will soon embark on its primary mission: to take a detailed image of the sky every night for the next ten years.
A powerful new observatory has unveiled its first images to the public, showing off what it can do as it gets ready to start its main mission: making a vivid time-lapse video of the night sky that will let astronomers study all the cosmic events that occur over ten years.
“As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But a snapshot doesn’t tell the whole story. And what astronomy has given us mostly so far are just snapshots,” says Yusra AlSayyad, a Princeton University researcher who oversees image processing for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
“The sky and the world aren’t static,” she points out. “There’s asteroids zipping by, supernovae exploding.”
And the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, conceived nearly 30 years ago, is designed to capture all of it.
These images will revolutionize how astronomy is done:
Astronomy is following in the path of scientific fields like biology, which today is awash in DNA sequences, and particle physics, in which scientists must sift through torrents of debris from particle collisions to tease out hints of something new.
“We produce lots of data for everyone,” said William O’Mullane, the associate director for data management at the observatory. “So this idea of coming to the telescope and making your observation doesn’t exist, right? Your observation was made already. You just have to find it.”
“Your observation was made already. You just have to find it.” I love that.
The Rubin team has released some images from the telescope’s initial run, to inform the public of what the project is capable of. In less than a half-day’s operation, the Rubin discovered 2,104 new asteroids in our solar system.
In about 10 hours of observations, NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory discovered 2104 never-before-seen asteroids in our Solar System, including seven near-Earth asteroids (which pose no danger). Annually, about 20,000 asteroids are discovered in total by all other ground and space-based observatories. Rubin Observatory alone will discover millions of new asteroids within the first two years of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Rubin will also be the most effective observatory at spotting interstellar objects passing through the Solar System.
Not bad, rook. The team has set up a dedicated image viewer for their massive images.
You can read more about the Rubin at The Atlantic, The Rubin Observatory Is a Cosmic Cathedral, written by Michael Jones McKean, the observatory’s artist in residence:
Rubin is also a rare scientific megaproject that feels excitingly relatable. Instruments such as particle accelerators, neutrino detectors, and even radio telescopes might command our awe, but they roam in realms far outside sensorial experience. At its core, Rubin is an optical telescope. This links it to a long continuum of prosthetic tools that help our bodies better do what they already do naturally — see and process light.
And a trio of videos on how the observatory works from BBC News, New Scientist, and astrophysicist Becky Smethurst.
Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver on AI slop. “Do you hear us, cabbage Hulk? Stay the hell away from John’s cabbage wife.” ??!?
The Classic Web account on Bluesky is currently going through kottke.org’s blogroll list from 2004 and displaying screenshots of those sites as they appeared then. Look at all those varied designs!
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!
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.”
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.
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.
As an aid to his travel planning, Kevin Kelly has compiled a meta-calendar of Asian festivals.
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?”
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)
Today’s weather report styled like The Weather Channel in the 90s: WeatherStar 4000+.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Teaser trailer for Wake Up Dead Man, the third in the Knives Out series by Rian Johnson.
David Lynch’s estate auction, including cameras, clothes, books, memorabilia, megaphones, scripts, vinyl, furniture, coffee makers & grinders, art supplies, musical instruments, etc.
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