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Entries for December 2023
Smithsonian magazine shares Thirteen Discoveries Made About Human Evolution in 2023, like “Homo sapiens were in southeast Asia thousands of years earlier than expected.”
It’s time to ban ‘right-on-red’. “Right turns on red lights are dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists, and yet they’re still widely allowed across the U.S.”
A stone circle in Spain called the Dolmen of Guadalperal that dates back to 5000 BCE was flooded by a reservoir built by the Franco government in 1963 and has only been visible 4 times since. 🤦♂️
Do syllables exist? “Although nearly everyone can identify syllables, almost nobody can define them.”
How We Turned the Tide in the Roach Wars. “Forty years ago, scientists did the impossible. Why doesn’t anyone remember? […] The people who invented Combat are American heroes.” (Read/listen to the end…fascinating!)
A single serving site that answers the question “Was the Civil War about slavery?” YES — and the site includes receipts.
My Recent Media Diet, the End of 2023 Edition
Over the past few months, I’ve had some time away from the computer and have taken several very long plane trips and some shorter car rides, which means a bit more reading, TV & movie watching, and podcast listening than usual. Oh, and holiday movies.
But the main story is how many things I’m currently in the midst of but haven’t finished: the latest season of the Great British Bake Off, season 3 of The Great, season 4 of For All Mankind, season 2 of Reservation Dogs, season 2 of The Gilded Age, the Big Dig podcast, On the Shortness of Life by Seneca, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly, and I’ve just dipped a toe into Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things. That’s five TV shows, one podcast, and three books. I’m looking forward to tackling some of that (and maybe a new Star Trek series) over the upcoming holiday weekend.
Anyway, here’s my recent media diet — a roundup of what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing over the past few months.
The Killer. The excellent Michael Fassbender portrays a solitary, bored, and comfortable killer for hire who has a bit of a midlife crisis in fast forward when a job goes wrong. (A-)
Fortnite OG. I started playing Fortnite in earnest during Chapter 3, so it was fun to go back to Chapter 1 to see how the game worked back then. (B+)
Northern Thailand Walk and Talk. I’m going to write more soon but this was one of the best things I’ve ever done. (A+)
Edge of Tomorrow. Speaking of video games… Still love this under-appreciated film, despite a third act that falls a tiny bit flat. (A)
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff. I did not enjoy this quite as much as Matrix — especially the last third — but Groff is one hell of a writer. (B+)
New Blue Sun. Good on André 3000 for not doing the expected thing and instead releasing an instrumental album on which he plays the flute. (A-)
Songs of Silence. I can’t remember who clued me into this lovely instrumental album by Vince Clarke (Erasure, Depeche Mode), but it’s been heavily in the rotation lately. (B+)
Trifecta. A.L.I.S.O.N.’s Deep Space Archives is a favorite chill work album for me and this one is nearly as good. (B+)
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Entertaining but lacks the zip and coherence of the first film. (B)
Shoulda Been Dead. I had no idea that Kevin Kelly appeared on an early episode of This American Life until someone mentioned it offhand on our Thailand walk. What a story…listen all the way to the end. (A)
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. Oh the writing here is exquisite. (A)
Avengers: Infinity War & Avengers: Endgame. These are endlessly rewatchable for me. (A)
Elemental. Good but not great Pixar. (B)
The Wrong Trousers. I watched this with my 16-year-old son, who hadn’t seen it in like 9 or 10 years. We both loved it — it still has one of the best action movie sequences ever. (A+)
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. Are AGI robots intelligent? Are octopuses? Are humans? This novel plays entertainingly with these ideas. (A-)
Myeongdong Kyoja. I stumbled upon this place, extremely cold and hungry, and after a brief wait in line, I was conducted to an open seat by the no-nonsense hostess running the dining room. The menu only has four items, conveniently pictured on the wall — I got the kalguksu and mandu. The hostess took my order and then, glancing at my frozen hands, reached down and briefly gave one of them a squeeze, accompanied by a concerned look that lasted barely half a second before she returned to bustling around the room. A delicious meal and a welcome moment of humanity in an unfamiliar land. (A)
Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts. This made me want to give notice to my landlord and take off for somewhere else. (A-)
Barbie. Second viewing. Entertaining and funny, but this is a movie that has Something To Say and I still can’t figure out what that is. (B+)
Emily the Criminal. There were a few hiccups here and there, but I largely enjoyed this Aubrey Plaza vehicle. (A-)
Midnight in Paris. Not going to recommend a Woody Allen movie these days, but this is one of my comfort movies — I watch it every few months and love every second of it. (A)
Gran Turismo. Extremely predictable; they could have done more with this. (B)
The Rey/Ren Star Wars trilogy. I have lost any ability to determine if any of these movies are actually good — I just like them. 🤷♂️ (B+)
Loki (season two). This was kind of all over the place for me but finished pretty strong. Glorious purpose indeed. (B)
Die Hard. Still great. (A)
Home Alone. First time rewatching this in at least a decade? This movie would have worked just as well if Kevin were 15% less annoying. (B+)
The Grinch. My original review stands: “I wasn’t expecting to sympathize so much with The Grinch here. The social safety net constructed by the upper middle class Whos totally failed the most vulnerable member of their society in a particularly heartless way. Those Whos kinda had it coming.” (B+)
Past installments of my media diet are available here. What good things have you watched, read, or listened to lately?
Great list from Kent Hendricks of 52 things he learned this year, including “mice don’t like cheese”, “most of the pasta made in Italy is from wheat grown in Yuma, Arizona”, and “human fingers can detect objects as small as 13 nanometers”.
“Hawking stars” are theoretical stellar objects with small black holes inside them. “Our sun could even have a black hole as massive as the planet Mercury at its center without us noticing.”
Barilla has a bunch of playlists on Spotify for timing how long to cook your pasta for, like 11 minutes of rap/hip hop for fusilli.
Wes Anderson and his production company have launched a digital film club called Galerie. They call it “your guided journey through the world of film” and it’ll offer a “new curator every month, in-depth essays, original videos and exclusive live events”.
From the science, tech, and health editors of The Atlantic: 81 Things That Blew Our Minds in 2023. Like: “You have two noses, and you can control them separately via your armpits.”
Whoa, Eddie Murphy is coming back for a 4th Beverly Hills Cop movie?! And Judge Reinhold too. (Sorry, I’m catching up on some trailers I missed while I was away last month.)
“January 1, 2024 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1928 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1923!” Includes Steamboat Willie and works by D.H. Lawrence, J.M. Barrie, Virginia Woolf, Robert Frost, and Cole Porter.
The Best Movie Posters of 2023
I am not in the habit of buying movie posters, but I bought one this year — for a movie that doesn’t even exist. A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to snag one of Sean Longmore’s Barbenheimer posters. It’s still in the shipping canister, but I’m gonna get it framed and find a spot for it on my wall soon.
As for the rest of my favorite movie posters of 2023, I’ve included a few above that caught my eye. For more excellent picks, check out Daniel Benneworth-Gray’s Movie posters of the year 2023, Mubi’s The Best Movie Posters of 2023, First Showing’s 10 Favorite Movie Posters from 2023, The Playlist’s The 20 Best Film Posters Of 2023, and IndieWire’s The Best Film and TV Posters of 2023.
From the coiner of Godwin’s Law: Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you. “Comparisons to Hitler or to Nazis need to take place when people are beginning to act like Hitler or like Nazis.”
I need some Star Trek advice. I’m a moderate ST nerd: I’ve seen TNG 7x+, DS9 2x+, Voyager 2x+, Picard, all the movies 2x+ times (Khan + First Contact + 1st JJ film are my faves). What should I watch next? Lower Decks? Discovery? SNW? Prodigy? Convince me!
The trailer for Civil War. Ok yes: A24, Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Devs), Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Nick Offerman. But! A movie about a new US civil war just cuts too close to the truth for me — watching that trailer was uncomfortable.
Astonishing: A Wartime Zine Made in 1943-45 by a Jewish Man Hiding From the Nazis
Kurt Bloch, a German Jew hiding in the crawl space of a Dutch attic, published 95 editions of a zine from 1943 to 1945.
Each issue included original art, poetry and songs that often took aim at the Nazis and their Dutch collaborators. Bloch, writing in both German and Dutch, mocked Nazi propaganda, responded to war news and offered personal perspectives on wartime deprivations.
Each edition consisted of a single copy that was passed around to trusted readers and, incredibly, all 95 copies have survived to the present day.
Each edition of Bloch’s magazine consisted of just a single copy. But it may have been read by as many as 20 to 30 people, Groeneveld estimated.
“There was huge organization behind him, which included couriers, who brought food, but who could also bring the magazine out, to share with other people in the group who could be trusted,” Groeneveld said. “The magazines are very small, you can easily put one in your pocket or hide it in a book. He got them all back. They must have also returned them in some way.”
(via open culture)
Bloomberg Businessweek’s Jealousy List for 2023 of the stories they wish they’d written/published. Unsurprisingly, some great stuff in here.
The 25 Best Podcasts of 2023. “These shows premiered fresh frameworks, experimented with sound design, and elevated underrepresented voices and stories.” A useful list for me — I’ve heard of almost none of these.
Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign. “The key point: your reputation as a private site is what you allow. If you allow garbage, you’re a garbage site. If you allow Nazis, you’re a Nazi site.”
The Best Book Cover Designs of 2023
I love a good book cover design. As I wrote last year:
The book cover is one of my all-time favorite design objects and a big part of the reason I love going to bookstores is to visually feast on new covers. I don’t keep an explicit list of my favorites from those trips, but there are definitely those that stick in my mind, covers that I’ll instantly recognize from across the room on subsequent trips.
I used those bookshop trips and several year-end lists to compile my list of favorites, pictured above and listed here, along with their designers:
Fire Rush (French edition) by Jacqueline Crooks, designed by Jodi Hunt.
The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar, designed by Linda Huang.
Yellowface by R. F Kuang (couldn’t find the designer’s name).
Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, designed by Jaya Miceli.
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, designed by John Gall.
The Employees by Olga Ravn, designed by Paul Sahre.
Good Men by Arnon Grunberg, designed by Anna Jordan.
Do you have a particular favorite cover? Let me know in the comments!
The lists I consulted are Literary Hub’s The 139 Best Book Covers of 2023 (don’t be dissuaded by that big number…this is the best list bc they consult actual cover designers), The Casual Optimist’s Notable Book Covers of 2023 (always a great list from an indie site), the NY Times’ The Best Book Covers of 2023, The Book Designer’s 2023 Coolest Book Covers (that bucked the year’s trends), Print’s 50 of the Best Book Covers of 2023, Book covers designs of the year 2023 from Creative Review, and Spine’s 2023 Book Covers We Loved.
It’s fun to see how cover design changes throughout the years — here are my lists from 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2015, 2014, and 2013.
Note: When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
20 Things That Happened for the First Time in 2023, including “scientists successfully extract rocks from Earth’s mantle”, “a man with paralysis walks again using his thoughts”, and “microplastics are found in the clouds”.
Remembering Civil Rights Activist Fred Shuttlesworth
Sixty-seven years ago yesterday, on Dec 25, 1956, pioneering civil rights activist Fred Shuttlesworth survived a Ku Klux Klan bombing.
Fred Shuttlesworth somehow survived the KKK bombing that took out his home next to the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
An arriving policeman advised him to leave town fast. In the “Eyes on the Prize” documentary, Shuttlesworth quoted himself as replying, “Officer, you’re not me. You go back and tell your Klan brethren if God could keep me through this, then I’m here for the duration.’”
Months later, he and his family were beaten after trying to enroll his daughters in an all-white school.
They beat him with fists, chains and brass knuckles. His wife, Ruby, was stabbed in the hip, trying to get her daughters back in the car. His daughter, Ruby Fredericka, had her ankle broken. When the examining physician was amazed the pastor failed to suffer worse injuries, Shuttlesworth said, “Well, doctor, the Lord knew I lived in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called him “the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South”. You can learn more about the bombing at the Equal Justice Initiative and about Shuttlesworth at the King Institute, in this hour-long documentary. and Andrew Manis’s 1999 biography of Shuttlesworth, A Fire You Can’t Put Out.
From a piece on “charismatic megaprotein” prime rib: “Half of all the beef consumed in the US on a given day is eaten by just 12% of the population. And members of that 12% were most likely to be white men between the ages of 50 and 65.”
We’ve Remodeled Our Bathroom, So Now You Have to Take a Dump Behind a Sliding Barn Door. “That five-inch chasm between the door and the wall is not a design flaw.”
52 Interesting Things I Learned in 2023
Inspired by Tom Whitwell’s annual list, I kept track of some things I learned this year, one for each week. Here we go:
- Ciabatta was invented in 1982.
- “If our planet was 50% larger in diameter, we would not be able to venture into space, at least using rockets for transport.”
- Purple Heart medals that were made for the planned (and then cancelled) invasion of Japan in 1945 are still being given out to wounded US military personnel.
- More than 100,000 public school students in NYC were homeless during the 2021-22 school year.
- The San Francisco subway system still runs on 5 1/4-inch floppies.
- NYPL librarians have discovered that “up to 75 percent of books published before 1964 may now be in the public domain”.
- Gangkhar Puensum, a mountain in Bhutan with an elevation of 24,836 feet (7,570 m), is the tallest unclimbed mountain in the world. (Mountaineering has been banned in Bhutan since 2003.)
- The founder of Lululemon picked that name for the company because he thought it would be funny to hear Japanese speakers try to say it. What an asshole.
- Eigengrau is the name of the dark grey color people see in the absence of light.
- Bees can make green honey.
- Baby scorpions are called scorplings.
- Alaskan finishers of the Iditarod can get a custom license plate.
- Any Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 20 moves.
- Hurricanes don’t cross the equator.
- Lake Maracaibo in northwestern Venezuela sees almost 300 thunderstorms a year.
- Premier League referees are forbidden to work games played by their favorite teams (or their close rivals).
- The climate crisis has cost $16 million per hour in extreme weather damage over the past 20 years.
- The word for computer in Iceland translates to “prophetess of numbers”.
- All but two of the moons of Uranus are named after Shakespeare characters — the remaining two are from a poem by Alexander Pope.
- Bottled water has an expiration date — it’s the bottle not the water that expires.
- There are satellites that were launched in the early to mid 60s that are still operational.
- Multicellular life developed on Earth more than 25 separate times.
- US citizens or permanent residents with permanent disabilities can get a free lifetime pass to US National Parks (and other federal lands).
- If you try to pack information on a hard drive more densely than 10^69 bits/m^2, the hard drive will collapse into a black hole.
- Queen Victoria had a dog named “Looty” that was stolen from China by a British soldier while looting a palace in Peking in 1860.
- Colorado is not a rectangle — it actually has 697 sides.
- Horseshoe crabs are older than Saturn’s rings.
- Inmate is the ninth most common household type in America.
- Humans have pumped so much groundwater out of the ground that it’s changed the tilt of the Earth’s axis 31.5 inches to the east.
- “By 1920, the network of interurbans in the US was so dense that a determined commuter could hop interlinked streetcars from Waterville, Maine, to Sheboygan, Wisconsin — a journey of 1,000 miles — exclusively by electric trolley.”
- The Great British Kettle Surge is the simultaneous putting-on of the kettle in British households during commercial breaks of particularly popular TV programs, resulting in electricity surges.
- The Parker Solar Probe is the fastest object ever built by humans — at its closest approach to the Sun, it will reach speeds of 430,000 mph (690,000 km/h), or 0.064% the speed of light.
- The top speed of zeppelins was about 80 mph (129 km/h).
- Ernest Hemingway only used 59 exclamation points across his entire collection of works.
- TIL there’s a whole genus of South American spiders whose species are named after people and things in the 1987 movie Predator, e.g. “Predatoroonops schwarzeneggeri”.
- Robert Butler, who died this year aged 95, directed the initial episodes for Batman, Star Trek, Moonlighting, Hill Street Blues, Hogan’s Heroes, and Remington Steele.
- I cannot believe this is the first I’ve heard of this: in the original Super Mario Bros., you can continue where you left off in the last game by holding A down when you press Start. This would have saved me so much time as a kid.
- Thomas Smallwood, an African American shoemaker, coined the term “Underground Railroad” in 1842.
- Swedish criminal gangs are using fake Spotify streams to launder money.
- Human ancestors almost went extinct 900,000 years ago. “A new technique analysing modern genetic data suggests that pre-humans survived in a group of only 1,280 individuals.”
- “People who enroll in genetic studies are genetically predisposed to do so.”
- MLB broadcaster Vin Scully’s career lasted 67 seasons, during which he called a game managed by Connie Mack (born in 1862) and one Julio Urías (born in 1996) played in.
- When the Regimbartia attenuata beetle gets eaten by a frog, rather than accepting its fate to be digested, it crawls through the frog’s bowels and emerges through its butt. “The quickest run from mouth to anus was just six minutes.”
- The rarest single-game event in baseball is not the perfect game but hitting two grand slams in one inning, which has only been done once in more than 235,000 games.
- Crab-like bodies have evolved at least five separate times in the past 250 million years.
- Almost 800,000 Maryland licence plates include a URL that now points to an online casino in the Philippines because someone let the domain registration lapse.
- From 1999 to 2020, there were 1.63 million excess deaths among Black Americans (when compared to the death rates of white Americans).
- Almost 75% of all films from the golden age of silent films (1912-1929) have been lost.
- For years beginning in 2018, every copy of macOS has included a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper.
- This San Francisco barbershop has a “silent mode” for patrons who don’t want to chat with barbers.
- According to America’s Test Kitchen, you can use your SodaStream to double the life of your salad greens.
- Deadline’s chief film critic had never played or even heard of Tetris before seeing the film about the game’s genesis.
How Big is YouTube? The methodology used to answer this question (in lieu of an official API mechanism) is pretty interesting: they “drunk dialed” a bunch of random video URLs and counted how many were valid.
Trailer for Captains of the World, a 6-episode Netflix docuseries about the 2022 Men’s World Cup. It’s sanctioned by FIFA so there’s a limit on how critical it will be (esp of the host country & selection process) but I’ll still watch.
The 10 Best TV Episodes of 2023, including Forks from The Bear, The Last of Us’s Long Long Time, and Escape from Shit Mountain from Poker Face.
An Artist Creates the Family Xmas Card, From Age 3 to 36
Since he was a toddler, artist C.W. Moss has made the artwork for his family’s Christmas card. Here are some early installments from when he was three & seven:
Some from when Moss was 17 and 29:
And the most recent one from age 36 (you can watch how he draws it):
It’s fascinating to see his artistic sense grow and shift over the years, not only increasing in artistic skill as he gets older but also moving from simple depictions of holiday scenes to more conceptual creations.
Watch the Newly Remastered Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special (1988) on YouTube
The entire episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special (1988) is on YouTube, fully remastered in 1080p HD. Special guests include Annette Funicello, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Whoopi Goldberg, Magic Johnson, Grace Jones, Little Richard, and Joan Rivers. From a Vulture piece on the special:
Christmas at Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the 1988 primetime CBS special from comedian and actor Paul Reubens, is one of the strangest, most glorious, most improbable, most confident pieces of entertainment to appear on television. Thirty-five years after it aired, and in a period of reconsideration after Paul Reubens’s death, the Pee-wee Herman Christmas special still looks like one of the major pinnacles of Reubens as an artist, full of silly delight and winking subversion, all framed inside the relative safety of a big sparkly Christmas extravaganza.
And after declaring “This special is one of the gayest things I’ve ever seen”:
What’s so brilliant about it as a piece of queer art is that it is presented so earnestly, and the iconography they’re playing with is Americana. It plays as camp to our modern view of over-the-top earnestness. But it’s a mix of camp aesthetic and an alternative comedy aesthetic of laughing at bad jokes, like the series of fruitcake jokes, which were at the time a cliché, that fruitcake was bad. Why are we going to make this joke about fruitcake over and over again? Because it’s stupid!
(via austin kleon)
Hey everyone. Just a quick holiday note to let you know that recent guest editor Edith Zimmerman had her baby! Edith wanted me to let you know that mom, dad, and baby are doing well!
Cute food art: butter sleigh rides down foods like pancakes and potatoes.
Piano cover of MIA’s Paper Planes, complete with “live” cash register and video gunfire sounds.
Just How Rich Were the McCallisters in ‘Home Alone’? A: They were in the top 1%. But also: “One fan theory posits that Peter McCallister is involved with organized crime.”
The 50 best TV shows of 2023, including Silo, Deadloch, Reservation Dogs, Jury Duty, Fleishman Is in Trouble, Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, Poker Face, Succession, and The Bear.
After the Jan 6 attack on Congress, a woman went on Bumble to help the FBI identify rioters. “Her strategy…was saying ‘Wow, crazy, tell me more’ to guys on repeat until they gave her enough for her to send their information to the FBI.”
Substack explains why they are paying Nazis to publish on their platform. Friends who publish on Substack, are you ok with this? If not, maybe try Buttondown or Wordpress or Ghost or literally anything fucking else.
The Best Film Scores & Soundtracks of 2023, including those for The Boy and the Heron, Poor Things, Asteroid City, and Oppenheimer. Any favorites?
The Drawings of Virginia Frances Sterrett
I love these drawings by Virginia Frances Sterrett.
At fourteen, unthoughtful of achievement and ambition, friends persuaded her to send her drawings to the Kansas State Fair. To her surprise, she won first prize in three different categories. The originality of her drawings — which, throughout her life, came to her as visions she felt she was merely channeling onto the page with her pen and brush — captivated two successful local artists, who encouraged her to pursue formal study.
Perpetual Stew. Last summer, some folks kept a stew going for 60 days and invited people to come eat and add ingredients. “Internet people seem worried about the flavor. They tweet things like ‘this is how the next covid starts.’”
How the Silk Dress cryptogram was cracked after a decade of effort. A Victorian-era silk dress found at an antique shop contained a pair of cryptic messages in a hidden pocket…
From the Depths of Wikipedia: none of the phrasing from the 2003 “Ship of Theseus” page on Wikipedia remains in the current entry. 😂
The Paris Métro is set to expand in a big way with “a new 200-kilometer (120-mile) system that will add four lines and 68 brand-new stations to the network.” I love the investments Paris is making in its non-car transportation infrastructure.
Prompt-Brush is a non-AI generative model. If you suggest an image prompt, Pablo Delcan will make you a drawing with black ink and send it to you.
The Fruit Shaped Bus Stops in Nagasaki, Japan
The small town of Konagai in Nagasaki Prefecture has a number of whimsical bus stops shaped like fruits.
Today, there are 5 kinds of fruit-shaped bus stops; strawberry, watermelon, cantaloupe, orange and tomato. The area of the highway is now referred to as “Tokimeki Fruits Basutei Dori”, or “Tokimeki Fruit-shaped Bus Stop Avenue”.
(thx, caroline)
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