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I reported last week that signs of activity have been detected from Boards of Canada in the form of mysterious VHS tapes sent out to fans. Yesterday, the group’s record label posted a bunch of photos of posters hung up in cities around the world (NYC, Tokyo, LA) that match BoC’s style. First new album since 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest? Let’s hope so!
If Every Congressman Facing Credible Rape Allegations Resigned, We’d Have No One Left to Govern the Country. “It’s naïve to imagine the government can continue to function without the tireless dedication of our best and brightest rapists.”
You know who else wanted to construct gaudy buildings in his own image? Here’s Timothy Ryback on Adolf Hitler’s obsession “with adding an expensive new wing to the Reich chancellery”.
The new annex, connected to the chancellery by a marble corridor hung with crystal chandeliers, was part of Hitler’s ambitious plans to align the Berlin cityscape with his vision for the future of the country. Hitler wanted a Triumphbogen, a triumphal arch, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He wanted an “Avenue of Splendor” for military parades. “The Champs-Élysées is a hundred meters wide,” Hitler told Speer. “We will make our avenue twenty meters wider.” A planned Volkshalle was to accommodate 180,000. The Eiffel Tower could fit beneath its cupola. This “Hall of the People” was to be topped by the largest swastika on Earth. Berlin itself was to be rechristened as Weltstadt Germania, “Capital of the World.”
Ryback is the author of several books on Hitler and the Nazis, including his forthcoming 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy, which sounds like a must-read to me.
I’ve been enjoying the series of articles he’s been doing at The Atlantic about the parallels between Hitler and the dangers of Trump’s authoritarianism without ever explicitly mentioning Trump. In addition to the above piece about architecture, he’s written about Hitler’s Greenland Obsession, What Happened When Hitler Took On Germany’s Central Banker, Hitler Used a Bogus Crisis of ‘Public Order’ to Make Himself Dictator, Hitler’s Terrible Tariffs, and The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler. If it looks like a duck…
“The internet known within China is a very different internet to the one known by the world at large. It is censored, regulated and structured quite differently. It is controlled and managed, rather than organic and sprawling.”
For decades, a guy named Aadam Jacobs has been recording live music shows. His collection of over 10,000 shows since 1984 feature the likes of Nirvana, R.E.M., The Pixies, Björk, Depeche Mode, Liz Phair, Sonic Youth, The Cure, Phish, Fugazi, and so many more. With the help of archivists, the entire collection is making its way onto The Internet Archive.
The growing Aadam Jacobs Collection is an internet treasure trove for music lovers, especially for fans of indie and punk rock during the 1980s through the early 2000s, when the scene blossomed and became mainstream. The collection features early-in-their-career performances from alternative and experimental artists like R.E.M., The Cure, The Pixies, The Replacements, Depeche Mode, Stereolab, Sonic Youth and Björk.
There’s also a smattering of hip-hop, including a 1988 concert by rap pioneers Boogie Down Productions. Devotees of Phish were thrilled to discover that a previously uncirculated 1990 show by the jam band is included. And there are hundreds of sets by smaller artists who are unlikely to be known to even fans with the most obscure tastes.
All of it is slowly becoming available for streaming and free download at the nonprofit online repository Internet Archive, including that nascent Nirvana show recording, with the audio from Jacobs’ cassette recorder cleaned up.
Some of the shows, like this pre-Dave Grohl one from Nirvana, were recorded before the bands hit it big. It’s wild to hear their performance of About a Girl get about three claps from the audience.
On the network effect of the weekend: “The essential characteristic of the weekend is not just the having of a day off, but rather that other people have the day off.”
A brand designer’s “compendium of transit tickets” from around the world. Many of these are from the 90s and 00s. Design inspiration for daaaaays.
(via meanwhile)
The Death of the Basic American Car. “Today, there are so many wealthy people who can afford luxury cars that it simply isn’t that profitable for companies to produce cars for the bottom 40 percent of Americans by income.”
An AI bot created by Andon Labs is running its own retail store in San Francisco. The bot has hired a pair of human employees and “has a corporate card, a phone number, email, internet access and eyes through security cameras”.
“Gerontocracy has always thrived in undemocratic places — Communist people’s republics, Gulf monarchies — where only death could pry power from the ruling elders. American gerontocracy is exceptional for being freely elected.”
An interactive explainer on the physics of GPS. “The answer is in some ways simpler than you’d expect, and in other ways more complex. GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance.”
Media companies are increasingly blocking the Internet Archive from archiving their material (but at the same time using the site to gather data for their stories).
I’m so glad Steven Soderbergh unretired from filmmaking. His newest film, The Christophers, looks amazing. It stars Ian McKellen as a famous artist and Michaela Coel as his assistant — but of course there’s more to it. Reviewer David Sims calls it both a heist movie and “a meditation on the relationship between art and commerce”. I hope this one actually comes to Vermont so I can see it in the theater.
Coel and McKellen both have such great faces, don’t you think?
We love a slime mold around here. “From mottled gray bulbs that look like snow-covered trees to pink, coral-like tendrils, Webb chronicles a huge array of colors and shapes.”
This is incredible: Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here’s How to Use It. I knew some of these but not all, e.g. verbatim mode “returns results for exactly what you typed, stripped of personalization and synonym-swapping.”
David Altmejd’s 2017 sculpture entitled “God” is one of the most disturbing artworks I’ve seen recently, so naturally I had to show all of you. If you need further wigging out, here you go. Lots more on his website and Instagram.
Great new Patrick Radden Keefe piece on a New Orleans insurance fraud scheme involving big rigs. “After all, who would agree to be cut open on an operating table if it weren’t necessary? Quite a lot of people, it turns out.”
Almost three years ago exactly, Fred Again rolled into the NPR studios and did a Tiny Desk Concert.
When Fred again.. first proposed a Tiny Desk concert, it wasn’t immediately clear how he was going to make it work — not because he lacked creativity, but because translating purely electronic music at the Desk is a daunting task for anyone. How would an artist, whose performances take the form of DJ sets in front of massive audiences, curate an intimate and unique experience? But what the British songwriter and producer came up with is a reminder of what a Tiny Desk is at its best: an opportunity for artists to challenge themselves in such a way that it almost feels like they’re making new music, all while sticking to what feels true to them. For Fred again.. that meant re-learning the marimba, playing the vibraphone, singing at the piano and looping sounds and beats — all at the same time.
Why Japan Has Such Good Railways. “Their system excels because of good public policy: business structure, land use rules, driving rules, superior models for privatization, and sound regulation.” Other countries can follow their lead.
Rebecca Solnit: “The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled.”
Hungarian Opposition Ousts Viktor Orbán After 16 Years in Power. “Magyar…pledged to repair Hungary’s strained relationship with the EU, crack down on corruption and funnel funds towards long-neglected public services.”
Interviews with five novelists (Jesmyn Ward, Joyce Carol Oates, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ottessa Moshfegh, Margaret Atwood) on writing something true with fiction. Oates: “If you could read Toni Morrison, why would you read AI?”
The trailer for Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World. The film is showing in select locations around the country and will air on PBS this summer.
Ultimate Online Phreak Box. “This is a free online blue box, red box, and silver box.” (With this and a time machine, you could make free phone calls in the 1970s.)
A tour of the mannequin storage room at FIT. Each era’s mannequins are designed to mimic the “fashionable body” of that time period.
An interview with Ronald Wayne, Apple’s forgotten third founder. (He was with the company all of 2 weeks.)
From a livestream recorded many years ago, this is Radiohead covering Joy Division’s Ceremony. The song was originally written by Joy Division but the version most people know is New Order’s — it was their first single. From Wikipedia:
“Ceremony” was one of the last Joy Division songs to be composed, with lyrics written by Ian Curtis. According to guitarist Bernard Sumner, the group wrote the song a few weeks before Ian Curtis died “to try and heal him through music” and keep him “involved in the band and involved in music and remind him of what … a great future he had”. Sumner concluded, “Unfortunately, it didn’t work”.
Just three versions of Joy Division performing the song exist, including one on the group’s compilation album Still.
Oh wow, this is a trippy game inspired by MC Escher. My brain may be permanently broken by this.
A short analysis of what makes Mark Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen…” speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar so good and effective.
Using wiki software, old photos, family stories, bank transactions, social media posts, and an LLM to sift through everything to build a personal encyclopedia.
“Stalin’s task in building what Senior calls his ‘Red Empire’ was made so much easier, and so much more brutal, by the intelligence the Cambridge spies passed to Moscow.”
Charcuterie is a visual Unicode symbol explorer. Click around, search, or use the pencil in the upper left to draw the shape you’re looking for. This is very cool.
This is wonderful: a Redditor uploaded some of their grandmother’s comics that she made in the 1940s, documenting her marriage to the deployment of her husband for World War II.
I never got to meet my grandma, she passed away young in 1977 but finding her 1940s sketches felt like she was finally introducing herself to me. She was so talented, and as you can see, she had absolutely zero filter (I finally understand where my mother and I get it from).
My favorite part is seeing her personality jump off the page. She goes from joking about Pre-Marital Chaos and Pancake Gravy to the gut-punch of my grandpa getting his deployment orders in ‘44. She wrote “Damn the Army and Hitler!”
(thx, andy)
Well, this blows: FSG has shuttered their MCD imprint & Sean McDonald is leaving the company. MCD published so many good titles/authors: Questlove, Enshittification, Robin Sloan, Jeff VanderMeer, Sloane Crosley, Dilla Time, Tamara Shopsin…
I’m charmed by this fragment of Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting of Mary Magdalene that’s up for auction later this month.
For many years it was in a private collection in Germany where it lay rolled up in a cellar. The head of the saint had been cut out of the canvas, under circumstances that remain unclear, in an incident most probably linked to the chaos and looting of postwar Berlin.
Like the empty picture frames at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the rectangular hole in the painting invites the viewer to imagine what became of its former contents. Where is Magdalene’s head & shoulders now? Did it get framed as its own painting? Is it still hanging in someone’s house or tucked away in someone’s attic? Will it be reunited with the rest of the painting someday?
Btw, this painting is a copy of another of Gentileschi’s previous works, which hangs in the Pitti Palace in Florence. There are some differences between the two paintings, but at least we know what the area inside that hole looks like, mostly.
Between the Impossible and the Inevitable: The Case for Defiance (aka Never F**king Surrender). “We make the future in the present, when we show up. Don’t surrender it to those who would destroy it.”
Hostile Volume is a simple and maddening game where you need to hold the audio volume at 25%, which gets increasingly difficult with each level.
International Chess Federation Adds Race Car Piece. “The race car piece gets to go twice in one turn because it’s so fast.” Smart to capitalize on F1’s popularity; they should do my fave Monopoly piece next (the iron).
Bill Hammack, aka The Engineer Guy, is an amazing engineering educator and in this video he explains how duct tape is designed to simultaneously do three things well: “a) adhere with light pressure, b) stay in place, yet c) be removable”.
Controlling the stickiness of tape is of utmost importance. In fact, a key element of engineering tape is controlling its stickiness — and only by doing that can tape be wound into a useful roll. If the tape sticks too tightly to itself, we could not use it.
Gotta be honest: I was not expecting Silly Putty to make a relevant guest appearance during his explanation. And I love the ramp & ball test for tape stickiness near the end…a very elegant and simple bit of engineering:
Pressure sensitive tape predates much of the most elementary molecular understanding of adhesion; tape has been mass produced since the early twentieth century. That engineers developed and refined tape without this knowledge is no surprise — recall that the purpose of the engineering method is to solve problems before we have full scientific knowledge.
Someone ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii. “Since its launch in 2007, the Wii has seen several operating systems ported to it: Linux, NetBSD, and most-recently, Windows NT. Today, Mac OS X joins that list.”
How to Guess If Your Job Will Exist in Five Years. “There’s a better question for white-collar workers to ask themselves: Am I coal, or am I a horse?”
I really love these collages by Anton Elfilter (Instagram, Threads). They are digital-ish? But also not? And does anyone else see the influence of Hilma af Klint in these? (via moss & fog)
Farmers won their right-to-repair fight against John Deere. The settlement includes a 10-year “agreement by Deere to provide ‘the digital tools required for the maintenance, diagnosis, and repair’ of tractors, combines, and other machinery”.
This sounds like an interesting podcast series from M. Gessen: The Idiot. “Compassion has its limits when it comes to your own cousin.”
Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service. “…the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the agency’s 121-year history. Not a budget cut. Not a policy shift. Not a ‘reorganization.’ An execution.”
From the Norwegian Consumer Council, a funny video that warns against the dangers of enshittification. It’s part of their Breaking Free initiative:
Digital products and services are steadily becoming worse. Software
becomes increasingly difficult and frustrating to use, websites and apps
are littered with ads and spam content, and useful features are removed,
degraded, or made subscription-only. This is part of a process called
enshittification.Enshittification happens in stages: First a company attracts users by
providing a valuable service, often seemingly for free or at an artificially
low price. The company then exploits those users to draw in business
customers, and finally abuses its business customers and claws back all
the value for itself and its shareholders.Enshittification is the result of a dysfunctional market, where companies
have been able to get away with mistreating and exploiting consumers.
Consumers are trapped in digital services, potential competitors are
shut out, and policymakers and regulators are unable or reluctant to
clamp down on anticompetitive, illegal and otherwise abusive behavior.
In practice, a handful of tech companies have become so powerful that
they do not have reason to fear any consequences.
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