kottke.org posts about best of
For finding a good book, there is no substitute for going into your local independent bookstore and browsing what's on the front tables, the bestsellers shelf, and the staff picks. But bookshop.org is an amalgam of online sales some of the best indie bookstores in the country (and websites like kottke.org), so the list of their bestselling nonfiction books for 2025 is pretty darned good. Here are a few from the list that I've featured (or should have featured) here this year:
Bit too late to order in time for the holidays, but there are also bookshop.org digital gift cards.
Nature magazine has chosen its favorite science images of the year. I've featured a few of these on the site already — Skydiving the Sun, red sprites in the New Zealand sky — so I picked a couple of other favorites to share:
The first was taken by Francisco Negroni of the Villarrica volcano in Chile (check out his site for more amazing photos of volcanos & lightning). The second is by 13-year-old Grayson Bell of two green frogs fighting; Bell named his photo "Baptism of the Unwilling Convert".
One of my favorite end-of-year lists is Tom Whitwell's annual record of 52 things he's learned in the past year. Some favorites of mine from the 2025 installment:
4. You can unlock the wheels on a shopping cart by playing sounds on your phone. [Joseph Gabay]
5. In the UK, water companies and offshore rigs communicate by bouncing radio waves off trails created by millions of small meteorites as they burn up in the atmosphere. [Meteor Communications Ltd]
14. Nearly 0.7% of US exports, by value, are human blood or blood products. [dynomight]
16. The Ceremonial Bugle is a small plastic device that slides into a real bugle and allows a non-musician to perform at a funeral. It has a discreet switch to select 'Taps', 'Last Post' or one of ten other calls. [Simon Britton via Nicolas Collins]
27. Researchers at MIT have developed a fibre computer that is stretchable and machine washable with 6 hours of battery life, weighing about as much as a sheet of A4 paper. [Nikhil Gupta & co]
49. Marchetti's Constant is the idea that throughout human history, from cave dwellers to ancient Greeks to 21st century Londoners, people tend to commute for about an hour a day — 30 minutes out, 30 minutes home. So faster travel leads to longer distances, not less time. [Cesare Marchetti, plus a 2025 update]
The organizers of the Bird Photographer of the Year competition received more than 33,000 images for 2025's contest; here are the winners and runners-up. Photos above by Franco Banfi, Francesco Guffanti, Tibor Litauszki, and Andreas Hemb.
If you have no idea what you're seeing in that third photo by Tibor Litauszki, you're not alone — even after reading the photographer's description (courtesy of In Focus), I can't figure it out:
It was January and nature had created some very interesting shapes in the saline lakes near Akasztó in Hungary. I sent up my drone and was looking for the right composition when a dozen geese suddenly flew into view. I immediately started taking photos and luckily everything fell into place — the composition as well as the geese.
And eagles? Huge monsters. Dinosaurs never went extinct. (via in focus)
Watch as Paul Davids plays 80 of rock's most iconic guitar intros, including ones from Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry, The Kinks, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, ZZ Top, Joan Jett, AC/DC, Blur, and The White Stripes.
Here are some of the winners, finalists, and nominees from the 2025 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition and their People's Choice Awards. Photos by (from top to bottom): Simon Biddie, Kat Zhou, Zhou Donglin, Jonas Beyer, and Hitomi Tsuchiya.
A Ghost goby (Pleurosicya mossambica) conspicuously camouflages against coral. While small and unassuming, these cryptic fish are abundant and protein-rich, making them a critical part of reef food chains. But naturally, they've evolved to evade predators, the Ghost Goby in particular being partially translucent—allowing him to blend in perfectly with surrounding coral.
Photographer Kat Zhou was diving off the coast of Florida when friends alerted her to this female octopus and her eggs tucked into a pipe of some sort, perhaps a remnant of a shipwreck. Zhou returned four times, trying to capture the mother's determination to protect her young when they're most vulnerable. She hopes her work inspires empathy for marine life, including an animal whose behaviors differ wildly from our own but whose maternal instincts are entirely familiar.
The Caribbean reef octopus (Octopus briareus) pictured here broods just a few hundred large eggs. Once she lays her eggs, the female stops eating and guards her growing offspring day and night. Her babies will emerge as fully developed, miniature versions of their parents, ready to change color, squirt ink, hunt for food, and live as small but full-fledged octopuses in the shallow seas around the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Their mother, in contrast, having exhausted herself to ensure her offspring's survival, will die shortly after they hatch.
Lemurs are remarkably lithe creatures. With long tails providing balance and powerful, slender limbs outfitted with opposable thumbs and toes, they move with ease through the craggy limestone spires of western Madagascar's Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park. Still, leaping over a 30-meter (100-foot) ravine with a baby clinging to your back seems like a daring choice.
To capture this scene, photographer Zhou Donglin had to do some mountaineering of her own. Setting out before sunrise, Donglin spent an hour scrambling to the top of a rocky peak, praying that the elusive brown lemurs (Eulemur fulvus) would show. After a day of disappointingly distant sightings, Donglin finally found some luck as a small troop descended through a forest of stone, glowing gold in the late evening light.
A pod of Beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas) gracefully glides through the frigid waters of a broken fjord, their white forms contrasting against the deep, icy blue. As they move in unison, threading their way through the maze of shifting ice, they embody the resilience and adaptability needed to survive in the ever-changing Arctic.
At the southern tip of Kyushu, Japan, a Green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) swims in a surreal scene just offshore of the volcanic island of Satsuma-iojima. The photographer attributes the fantastical colors to an "underwater aurora" composed of volcanic material, likely influenced by wind direction, water temperature, sunlight, and the tides. She notes that no single moment in the water during an aurora is the same thanks to these fluctuations, meaning this image is as dreamy as it is utterly unique.
(via my modern met)
In looking over the shortlist for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 competition, I thought about how I've seen thousands or even tens of thousands of incredible astronomical images and yet there are always new, mind-blowing things to see. Like this 500,000-km Solar Prominence Eruption by PengFei Chou:
Or Close-up of a Comet by Gerald Rhemann and Michael Jäger:
Or Electric Threads of the Lightning Spaghetti Nebula by Shaoyu Zhang (Lightning Spaghetti Nebula!!!):
Or Dragon Tree Trails by Benjamin Barakat:
Teasingly, the official site only has a selection of the shortlisted entries but if you poke through the posts at Colossal, PetaPixel, and DIY Photography, you can find some more of them. (via colossal)
Online bookseller bookshop.org recently released a list of their bestselling books of the year (so far). The list is quite a bit different than what you might see from larger booksellers and looks more like what your local bookstore has on their bestseller list. The top five:
- On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder. "Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience."
- Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. "An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them."
- Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins. "As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes. Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances."
- Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. "In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Octavia Butler's 'Parable' books may be unmatched."
- We Can Do Hard Things by Abby Wambach, Amanda Doyle, and Glennon Doyle. "When you travel through a new country, you need a guidebook. When you travel through love, heartbreak, joy, parenting, friendship, uncertainty, aging, grief, new beginnings — life — you need a guidebook, too. We Can Do Hard Things is the guidebook for being alive."
Others on the list that caught my eye:
- One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. "From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values."
- James by Percival Everett. "A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view." (So, so good.)
- Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba. "What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe." (Buy direct from the publisher.)
- The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. "A revolutionary program for personal renewal, The Artist's Way will help get you back on track, rediscover your passions, and take the steps you need to change your life." (I think I saw, via Insta, Doechii reading this recently.)
- Bad Company by Megan Greenwell. "A timely work of singular reportage and a damning indictment of the private equity industry told through the stories of four American workers whose lives and communities were upended by the ruinous effects of private equity takeovers."
I did not think I was going to watch this whole video when I started but I totally did. Some absolutely incredible shots & rallies in here. (thx, dunstan)
In deciding the Oscar Best Picture winners from 1927-2023, let's say you relied on the contemporary ratings of films on Letterboxd instead of the Academy vote totals of the time. Sometimes, you'd get the same answers but rarely. You'd get lots more foreign films from directors like Ozu, Kurosawa, Truffaut, Leone, Bergman, and Tarkovsky. You'd get Best Picture wins for The Empire Strikes Back (over Ordinary People), Do the Right Thing (over Driving Miss Daisy), and Brokeback Mountain (over Crash). And Paddington 2!
Looking at just one year, 1999 was a good one for movies but the Oscar nominees were on the safer side:
American Beauty
The Cider House Rules
The Green Mile
The Insider
The Sixth Sense
Here's the Letterboxd list from 1999, ranked by rating (more than 1K ratings):
Fight Club
The Iron Giant
The Green Mile
Magnolia
All About My Mother
The Matrix
The Straight Story
Beau Travail
The Insider
Being John Malkovich
American Beauty and The Sixth Sense are further down the list and The Cider House Rules is nowhere to be found. Anyway, interesting to compare!
Film critic David Ehrlich has dropped his annual visual love letter to cinema in the form of an expertly cut & crafted video countdown of his top 25 movies of 2024. You can also watch on Vimeo. Please note before you watch though:
This video includes a significant amount of footage from the endings of several films, most notably "Challengers," "The Substance," and "I Saw the TV Glow."
The musical choice for Nosferatu had me cackling — an absolute perfect selection. Here's the full list of his selections:
25. The Outrun
24. The Breaking Ice
23. Megalopolis
22. Hard Truths
21. The End
20. Babygirl
19. Juror #2
18. The First Omen
17. Between the Temples
16. The Brutalist
15. Flow
14. All We Imagine as Light
13. Evil Does Not Exist
12. The Substance
11. Close Your Eyes
10. I Saw the TV Glow
9. Nosferatu
8. The Beast
7. Challengers
6. A Different Man
5. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
4. Anora
3. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
2. No Other Land
1. Nickel Boys
On a personal note, I've seen only two of these films — three out of the six movie theaters I usually go to within an hour's drive of my house permanently closed in 2024. There's a lot less diversity in offerings now...everyone has to show the same blockbuster stuff because that's what most people want to see and I don't really care for the experience offered by the one remaining theater that shows more arthouse stuff. As usual, Ehrlich has got me fired up to fill in the gaps in my film watching, though it's going to be impossible for me to see Nickel Boys until it comes out on streaming in like April or May.
From The Atlantic Science Desk, 77 Facts That Blew Our Minds in 2024. Some that caught my eye:
5. Your body carries literal pieces of your mom — and maybe your grandmother, siblings, aunts, and uncles.
15. The weight of giant pumpkins increased 20-fold in half a century.
19. In the Middle Ages, people took their pet squirrels for walks and decked them out in flashy accessories.
31. One breadfruit tree can feed a family of four for at least 50 years.
38. Classical composers used dice to randomly compose songs.
52. Dogs may be entering a new wave of domestication.
71. The 10,000-steps-a-day goal doesn't originate from clinical science. Instead, it comes from a 1965 marketing campaign by a Japanese company that was selling pedometers.
I just spent my lunch hour watching the 22 nominated goals for the 2024 Puskas & Marta Awards, given to the most spectacular goals scored by men's & women's footballers last season.
The Marta Award is new this year; here's a playlist of the 11 nominees. Fun fact: one of the nominees is Brazilian legend Marta, after whom the award is named. She was 37 when she fizzed this goal in against Jamaica.
Here's a playlist of the nominees for the Puskas Award. Generally, I prefer goals with a bit of buildup to bicycle kicks or rockets from outside the 18-yard box, but these were all fun to watch.
Tom Whitwell just sent along his annual list of the 52 things he's learned in the past year. As usual, there's lots of fascinating things in there...here are some of my favorites:
3. There are just 16 trademarked scents in the US, including Crayola crayons, Playdoh, an ocean-scented soft play in Indiana and a type of gun cleaner that smells of ammonium and kerosene. [Via Gabrielle E. Brill]
9. Medellin in Colombia has cut urban temperatures by 2°C in three years by planting trees. [Peter Yeung]
14. In early 1980s San Francisco, several seat-slashing gangs operated on the BART transit system, deliberately generating extra fees and overtime payments for repairs. They'd use specific cutting patterns so the repair teams would know who to pay for the favour. [Dianne de Guzman, via Russell Davies]
24. If you drop a normal hair dryer into a fish tank full of tap water, it will carry on working, gently warming up the water. (NB Please do not try this.) [JD Stillwater]
38. Between 1926 and 1934, the average life-span of a light bulb fell from 1,800 hours to 1,200 hours, because a global cartel of lightbulb manufacturers fined anyone who made a longer-lasting bulb. [Markus Krajewski]
49. To avoid radio jamming, some Russian drones in Ukraine now trail a 10km long spool of super fine fibre optic cable behind them for steering and communication. [David Hambling]
The results of the 15th annual Epson International Pano Awards have been announced — you can check out all the winners & runners-up on the competition website. Here are a few of my favorites:
From top to bottom, the photos are by Tuan Nguyen Tan, Kelvin Yuen, Elliot McGucken, and Ignacio Palacios. (via in focus)
Royal Museums Greenwich has announced the winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024 competition. You can also check out some of the shortlist entries and runners-up in each category (Moon, Sun, etc.)
Photos above by (from top to bottom): Tom Williams, Peter Ward, Ryan Imperio, and Tom Rae.
From the staff at Rolling Stone, a list of the all-time best 100 episodes of TV. The rules: 1 episode per show, no reality (or talk shows or news or sketch comedy), and it's mostly American shows (but, come on, no episodes of Fawlty Towers?)
I cannot help it, I love lists like these; here are a few of my favorites from the larger collection:
86. Black Mirror, "San Junipero" (Season 3, Episode 4)
83. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, "Papa's Got a Brand New Excuse" (Season 4, Episode 24)
73. The Good Place, "Michael's Gambit" (Season 1, Episode 13)
53. Six Feet Under, "Everyone's Waiting" (Season 5, Episode 12)
50. The Last of Us, "Long Long Time" (Season 1, Episode 3)
38. The Bear, "Forks" (Season 2, Episode 7)
31. Deadwood, "Sold Under Sin" (Season 1, Episode 12)
25. Homicide: Life on the Street, "Three Men and Adena" (Season 1, Episode 6)
24. Fleabag, "Episode 1" (Season 2, Episode 1)
20. The Americans, "The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears" (Season 4, Episode 8)
14. Succession, "Connor's Wedding" (Season 4, Episode 3)
12. The Wire, "Middle Ground" (Season 3, Episode 11)
6. Mad Men, "The Suitcase" (Season 4, Episode 7)
5. Seinfeld, "The Contest" (Season 4, Episode 10)
2. The Simpsons, "Last Exit to Springfield" (Season 4, Episode 17)
So much to agree and disagree with here. Thoughts? Also: television!
Since 1982, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has celebrated the opening lines of imagined horrible novels. The winners of the 2024 competition have been announced and there are some real doozies in there, starting with the overall winner:
She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck.
Here are a few of my other favorites:
Mrs. Higgins' body was found in the pantry, bludgeoned with a potato ricer and lying atop a fifty-pound sack of Yukon golds, her favorite for making gnocchi, though some people consider them too moist for this purpose.
That sweltering Friday evening she not so much walked but slithered into my shabby strip mall P.I. office, showing off all her curves, and I knew then I was in for a weekend of trouble because Dave's Reptile Emporium next door, from which the ball python had escaped, was closed until Monday.
Sir Arthur Pendragon, High King of the Britons, son of King Uther Pendragon, nephew of King Aurelius Ambrosius, who was in turn the son of a long list of people who weren't kings and thus don't matter, only slept with his sister once, but boy did it come back to bite him in the ass.
His burnt flesh sizzling like a burger on the grill, blood pouring from his wounds like an overshaken cola, and sweat as salty as French fries pouring down his face, John knew that after this mission was over, he was getting McDonald's for dinner.
"I do enjoy turning a prophet," said Torquemada, as he roasted the heretic seer on a spit.
You can check out the whole wretched bunch here.
In this video, pianist David Bennett plays 80 of the best piano intros from the past 120 years, back-to-back and all from memory. This was lovely to listen to while I was eating my lunch.
Some of the intros I particularly enjoyed were Scott Joplin's The Entertainer, Nina Simone's My Baby Just Cares For Me, Let It Be by The Beatles, Don't Stop Believin' by Journey, Children by Robert Miles, Clocks by Coldplay, A Thousand Miles by Vanessa Carlton, and Breathe Me by Sia. a song I still cannot listen to without tearing up because of the series finale of Six Feet Under.
Pete Wells wonders if the immersive experiences, theatrical spectacles, and endurance tests on The World's 50 Best Restaurants list are even restaurants.
Gaggan, in Bangkok, was named not just the ninth-best restaurant in the world but the single best restaurant in Asia. The chef, Gaggan Anand, greets diners at his 14-seat table facing the kitchen with "Welcome to my ..." completing the sentence with a term, meaning a chaotic situation, that will not be appearing in The New York Times. [The word is shitshow. Or clusterfuck. Or shitstorm. Any of which should be printed in The New York Times because it's a fact relevant to a story. This writing around swearing has gotten as ridiculous as these restaurants. -ed]
What follows are about two dozen dishes organized in two acts (with intermission). The menu is written in emojis. Each bite is accompanied by a long story from Mr. Anand that may or may not be true. The furrowed white orb splotched with what appears to be blood, he claims, is the brain of a rat raised in a basement feedlot.
Brains are big in other restaurants on the list. Rasmus Munk, chef of the eighth-best restaurant in the world, Alchemist, in Copenhagen, pipes a mousse of lamb brains and foie gras into a bleached lamb skull, then garnishes it with ants and roasted mealworms. Another of the 50 or so courses — the restaurant calls them "impressions" — lurks inside the cavity of a realistic, life-size model of a man's head with the top of the cranium removed.
I love going to restaurants and putting myself in their talented hands1 but just reading about some of these high-wire acts dressed up as restaurants leaves me cold. (thx, yen)
The nominees for the 2024 Drone Photos Awards have been announced; here are a few that caught my eye:
Photos by (from top to bottom) Sheng Jiang, Roberto Hernandez, Silke Hullmann, and Hüseyin Karahan.
A group of photographers, editors, and curators recently convened to choose a list of "the 25 most significant photographs since 1955". Choosing just 25 photos to represent 70 years of the richest visual era in human history is just an impossible task, so there's bound to be some grousing about individual choices. (I love Beyoncé but really?) But the selection is fascinating, includes a few images I'd never seen before, and the accompanying discussion is worth reading.
I would love to see a process that asks for nominations across a
larger & broader range of folks and then whittle it down through ranked choice voting or pairwise ranking. Paging The Pudding...
Chosen by members of the Apple Music teams and a panel of experts (including Pharrell & Charli XCX), this is their list of the 100 Best Albums of all time (see also a text listing on Wikipedia). It's an interesting list, worthy of argument and comparison to Rolling Stone's list. Here's the top 10:
1. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Lauryn Hill
2. Thriller by Michael Jackson
3. Abbey Road by The Beatles
4. Purple Rain by Prince & The Revolution
5. Blonde by Frank Ocean
6. Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder
7. Good Kid, M.A.A.D City by Kendrick Lamar
8. Back to Black by Amy Winehouse
9. Nevermind by Nirvana
10. Lemonade by Beyoncé
You can stream all 100 albums on Apple Music and (unofficially, cheekily) on Spotify.
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)
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.
From a YouTube channel called The Solomon Society, a pair of videos that some of the most beautiful shots in the history of film. When Denis Villeneuve emphasizes the important of image in film, these are the kinds of shots that he's talking about.
Oh and in case you want to waste the rest of your day watching beautiful scenes from movies (no judgment here if you did): The Most Beautiful Shots in Film of the 21st Century, The Best Movie Shots of All Time, Some Amazing Shots from the Last Decade of Movies, The Most Beautiful Shots in Animation History, and The Most Beautiful Black and White Shots in Movie History. (via open culture)
I haven't watched this yet, but it's definitely in my queue: a recording of a livestreamed panel of all the visual effects nominees from this year's Oscars, talking about their work on those films. I got this from Todd Vaziri, a visual effects artist at ILM, who says:
If you're at all interested in visual effects, you gotta watch this Academy presentation that took place last weekend. It goes in-depth with all five nominees, and shows before/after material that hasn't been seen publicly.
The meat of the program begins at around 24 minutes when they start showing visual effects reels from the nominated films (The Creator, Godzilla Minus One, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Napoleon), followed by a discussion with the members of the effects teams.
The Academy has several other nominee programs available on YouTube (including animated feature films & documentary feature films) and more to come in the next few days (including best picture and international feature films). What a trove of material for film lovers.
What a treat: the winning entries in the 59th annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest, organized by London's Natural History Museum. I've selected a few of my favorites above.
Amit Eshel took the photo of the ibex:
After hiking to a clifftop vantage point, Amit slowly crept closer. Using a wide-angle lens, he set the action of two clashing Nubian ibex against the dramatic backdrop. The battle lasted for about 15 minutes before one male surrendered and the pair parted without serious injury.
Sriram Murali captured the jungle lit up by fireflies:
Sriram combined 50 individual 19-second exposures to show the firefly flashes produced over 16 minutes in the forests of the Anamalai Tiger Reserve near his hometown. He watched as pinpoint flashes appeared in the treetops increasing in number as they spread down along the branches until something remarkable happened. Synchronising, they pulsated through the canopy like a wave — the pattern punctuated with sequences of abrupt on-off bursts in unison.
The happy turtle photo is by Tzahi Finkelstein:
This dragonfly unexpectedly landed on the turtle's nose but instead of the turtle snapping up the insect, it appeared to be experiencing pleasure from the interaction as they shared a moment of peaceful coexistence amid a swamp's murky waters.
(via colossal & in focus)
The winners of the 2023 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest have been announced and what a reminder of how cartoonishly colorful and weird it is under the sea. The alien creatures we've been looking for in outer space? They're already right here, just take a swim.
Photos above by Giancarlo Mazarese, Alessandro Raho, Steven Kovacs, and Byron Conroy. (via in focus)
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