Ten most memorable film edits
From CineFix, a collection of ten of the most iconic and memorable editing moments in cinematic history.
(via @brillhart)
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The 50 greatest summer blockbusters
The staff and contributors of Dissolve recently listed the 50 greatest summer blockbusters ever. Here’s #50-31, #30-11, and the top 10.
Blockbusters have become such an integral part of the way we talk about films that it’s hard to believe they haven’t always been with us. But while there have always been big movies-lavish productions designed to draw crowds and command repeat business-the blockbuster as we know it has a definite start date: June 20, 1975. That’s when Jaws first hit screens in the middle of what was once, in the words of The Financial Times, a “low season” when the “only steady summer dollars came, in the U.S., from drive-in theaters.” It’s summer, after all; why go to the movies when you could be outside? Jaws changed that. Star Wars cemented that change. And now, the summer-movie season is dominated by the biggest films Hollywood has to offer.
Jaws is the no-surprise #1 but Who Framed Roger Rabbit at #8? Hmm, dunno about that. And leaving Star Wars just off the top 10 is a bold move. My personal top ten would also have included Ghostbusters — I remember vividly waiting in line in the sweltering heat outside the El Lago theater to see Ghostbusters and just being completely and utterly blown away by it — and Terminator 2. Oh and Batman. I think I saw that movie half-a-dozen times in the theater and it was just everywhere that summer…the logo, that song by Prince, everything. (via @khoi)
The 2014 iPhone Photography Awards
The IPPAWARDS has been judging an iPhone photography competition since 2007 and they recently announced the winners of their 2014 competition.
Impressive stuff. I’ve been saying recently that the iPhone 5s is the best camera in the world. Looking back on the 2008 winners, it becomes apparent how much more comfortable photographers have become wielding this increasingly powerful device. (via the verge)
Apple Design Awards 2014
Apple recently announced their annual design awards for 2014. Some nice work there.
The best commencement speeches ever
From NPR, a searchable sortable archive of the best commencement speeches, from 1774 to the present. What a resource. Two of my favorites, by David Foster Wallace and Steve Jobs, are represented.
Each speech is tagged by “theme or take-home message”, basically a taxonomy of commencement speech messaging. The most popular themes are:
12. Be kind
11. Yolo
10. Make art
9. Balance
8. Dream
7. Remember history
6. Embrace failure
5. Work hard
4. Don’t give up
3. Inner voice
2. Tips
1. Change the world
Trite stuff perhaps, but delivered in the right way and by the right person, it makes people wanna run through walls. Let’s go! (via @tcarmody)
Best longform journalism of 2013
Conor Friedersdorf has published his picks for the best journalism of 2013. This is always a great list. And you’re smart enough not to pooh-pooh it just because everyone else’s best of 2013 list came out in late November, right? Because the stuff on this list is evergreen? Good.
The ten best sentences
From the editors of The American Scholar, the ten best sentences. Presumably in all of literature? Here’s one of them, from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
Why are these the ten best sentences?
A software canon
Paul Ford set himself the task of picking five great works of software and he came up with Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Pac-Man, Unix, and Emacs.
I propose a different kind of software canon: Not about specific moments in time, or about a specific product, but rather about works of technology that transcend the upgrade cycle, adapting to changing rhythms and new ideas, often over decades.
As with everything Paul writes, it’s worth clicking through to read the rest.
The top 100 animated movies
Time Out polled more than 100 experts to find the 100 best animated movies. Here’s the top 10 (minus the top pick…you’ll have to click through for that):
10. Fantastic Mr. Fox
9. The Nightmare Before Christmas
8. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
7. The Iron Giant
6. Dumbo
5. The Incredibles
4. Toy Story
3. My Neighbor Totoro
2. Spirited Away
I’m delighted to see Fantastic Mr Fox on the list…it’s an underrated effort by Wes Anderson that will continue to grow in esteem as the years pass. No Wall-E in the top 10 though? I don’t know about that. It clocks in at #36, behind Chicken Run (the least of Aardman’s efforts in my mind) and Up, which is maybe my least favorite Pixar film. (via @garymross)
Best typefaces of 2013
From Typographica, a list of their favorite typefaces from 2013. As you’ll see, good type design is happening all over the globe.
As evidence of that diversity, the 53 typefaces selected from 2013 were created by designers from at least 20 countries. […] This new phase of globalization and democratization of the font market began in earnest about a decade ago, propelled by newly accessible digital tools, online commerce, and post-graduate education in type design. It is a sea change. For centuries, places like Argentina, Brazil, Croatia, Lebanon, and New Zealand were vastly underrepresented in a type design community that was dominated by western Europe and North America. (And this only goes for Latin-based type. The burgeoning production of fonts in other scripts tells another fascinating story.) We will have much more detail about these changes in an upcoming report by Ruxandra Duru on the current state of typefounding around the world.
One that caught my eye is Clear Sans.
The best nachos in NYC
I was just wondering this the other day…where can you get good nachos in NYC? Serious Eats investigates.
Not only are they delicious (when made right, and we’ll get to that), but they practically create their own conversation. Everybody has an opinion on how chunky the guacamole should be. We all have feelings about whether chili or beans make a better topping. Who hasn’t considered whether or not they’d ever prefer a fresh jalape~no to a pickled one, and who hasn’t considered de-friending a friend who dares to express a preference for fresh over pickled? And then there’s the ever-raging debate of cheese sauce vs. melted cheese, a subject you might actually consider not broaching in mixed company.
The best and worst media errors and corrections in 2013
I know we’re past the point of saying “happy new year” and lingering on last year, but this is my favorite annual best of list: Regret the Error’s The best and worst media errors and corrections in 2013. This correction from Marie Claire is pretty good:
In our July issue we wrongly described Tina Cutler as a journalist. In fact she is a practitioner of vibrational energy medicine.
And some quality historical truthiness from The Huffington Post:
An earlier version of this story indicated that the Berlin Wall was built by Nazi Germany. In fact, it was built by the Communists during the Cold War.
And Slate, get your Girls on some more in 2014 please:
This review misspelled basically everyone’s name. It’s Hannah Horvath, not Hannah Hovrath; Marnie is played by Allison Williams, not Alison Williams; and Ray is played by Alex Karpovsky, not Zosia Mamet.
The best Quora answers of 2013
Quora user Murali Krishnan sifted through Q&A site Quora for the best answers and found 270 of them. Among the topics covered are technology, gender, the meaning of life, mathematics, travel, and looks like almost everything else, including some fascinating examples of ancient technology. Looks like one of my favorites didn’t make the cut: Domhnall O’Huigin’s answer to What is the political situation in the Mario universe?
The best book covers, movie posters, and magazine covers of 2013
Magazine covers, movie posters, and book covers all have the same basic job, so it seemed proper to group these lists together: 50 [Book] Covers for 2013, The 20 best magazine covers of 2013, The 50 Best Posters Of 2013, Top [Magazine] Covers 2013, The Best Book Covers of 2013, The 30 Best Movie Posters of 2013, Best Book Covers of 2013. Lots of great work here. I still can’t figure out whether I love or hate this cover of W with George Clooney on it:
Snowden and not Pope is Person of the Year
This morning, Time magazine named Pope Francis their Person of the Year.
He took the name of a humble saint and then called for a church of healing. The first non-European pope in 1,200 years is poised to transform a place that measures change by the century.
On Monday, The New Yorker’s John Cassidy argued that Edward Snowden deserved the honor.
According to Time, its award, which will be bestowed on Wednesday, goes to the person who, in the opinion of the magazine’s editors, had the most influence on the news. By this metric, it’s no contest. In downloading thousands of files from the computers of the electronic spying agency and handing them over to journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gellman, Snowden unleashed a torrent of news stories that began in May, when the Guardian and the Washington Post published a series of articles about the N.S.A.’s surveillance activities. Seven months later, the gusher is still open. Just last week, we learned that the agency is tracking the whereabouts of hundreds of millions of cell phones, gathering nearly five billion records a day.
Agreed.
Godard’s list of best American films
In the early 1960s, French director Jean-Luc Godard put together a list of the Ten Best American Sound Films. The list included:
The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
Singin’ in the Rain (Kelly-Donen)
The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles)
The list appeared as one of a series in Cahiers du Cinema, the influential French film magazine. (via @DavidGrann)
Top 25 album covers of 2013
From Pitchfork, a list of the best album covers from 2013. My favorite is this one from Tyler, The Creator, which looks more or less like the opposite of a rap album.
I also liked Michael Cina’s cover for Fort Romeau (which he adapted from his very fetching art) and of course Yeezus, which is this year’s unignorable album in every way. (via @pieratt)
Jay Z’s albums ranked by Jay Z
In celebration of his 44th birthday, Jay Z ranked his solo albums:
Here’s the annotated list:
1. Reasonable Doubt (Classic)
2. The Blueprint (Classic)
3. The Black Album (Classic)
4. Vol. 2 (Classic)
5. American Gangster (4 1/2, cohesive)
6. Magna Carta (Fuckwit, Tom Ford, Oceans, Beach, On the Run, Grail)
7. Vol. 1 (Sunshine kills this album… fuck… Streets, Where I’m from, You Must Love Me…)
8. BP3 (Sorry critics, it’s good. Empire (Gave Frank a run for his money))
9. Dynasty (Intro alone…)
10. Vol. 3 (Pimp C verse alone… oh, So Ghetto)
11. BP2 (Too many songs. Fucking Guru and Hip Hop, ha)
12. Kingdom Come (First game back, don’t shoot me)
(via @anildash)
The best photos of 2013
As I said last year, the photos are always my favorite end-of-the-year media to check out. It’s only early December, but a few media outlets are out of the gate already with their year-end lists.
Best photos of the year 2013 from Reuters.
The Top 10 Photos of 2013 from Time.
2013 Pictures of the Year from Agence France Presse.
The 80 Most Powerful Photos of 2013 from The Roosevelts.
Las mejores fotos del 2013 from Yahoo En Español.
The 45 Most Powerful Photos Of 2013 from BuzzFeed.
2013: The Year in Photos from In Focus. Here are parts two and three.
2013 Year in Pictures from Big Picture. Here are parts two and three.
Year in Focus 2013 from Getty Images.
Year in Photos 2013 from The Wall Street Journal.
The Year in Pictures from The New York Times.
Do you have a list for this list? Send it along!
David Ehrlich’s top 25 films of 2013
In a masterfully edited video, David Ehrlich presents his 25 favorite films of 2013.
Fantastic. This video makes me want to stop what I’m doing and watch movies for a week. It’s a good year for it apparently…both Tyler Cowen and Bruce Handy argue that 2013 is an exceptional year for movies. I’m still fond of 1999… (via @brillhart)
List from 1898 of the 100 best novels
In 1898, an editor named Clement K. Shorter made a list of the 100 best novels (with an additional limit of one/author).
1. Don Quixote - 1604 - Miguel de Cervantes
2. The Holy War - 1682 - John Bunyan
3. Gil Blas - 1715 - Alain René le Sage
4. Robinson Crusoe - 1719 - Daniel Defoe
5. Gulliver’s Travels - 1726 - Jonathan Swift
6. Roderick Random - 1748 - Tobias Smollett
7. Clarissa - 1749 - Samuel Richardson
8. Tom Jones - 1749 - Henry Fielding
9. Candide - 1756 - Françoise de Voltaire
10. Rasselas - 1759 - Samuel Johnson
So much on there I’ve never even heard of. Compare this list with that of the best novels of the 20th century…how many of those novels and authors will readers be scratching their heads over in 2113? See also a contemporary list of the best books from before 1900. (via mr)
Winners of the Small World micro-photography contest
In Focus has a selection of winning photos from Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography Competition. The award for most terrifying goes to Dimitri Seeboruth for his shot of a worker ant:
I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.
50 greatest innovations since the wheel
The Atlantic asked a group of historians, scientists, and engineers to rank the 50 greatest innovations since the invention of the wheel. Here they are.
21. Nuclear fission, 1939
Gave humans new power for destruction, and creation22. The green revolution, mid-20th century
Combining technologies like synthetic fertilizers (No. 11) and scientific plant breeding (No. 38) hugely increased the world’s food output. Norman Borlaug, the agricultural economist who devised this approach, has been credited with saving more than 1 billion people from starvation.23. The sextant, 1757
It made maps out of stars.
The Best American Infographics 2013
Sadly, most infographics these days look like this, functioning as a cheap and easy way to gussy up numbers. But when done properly, infographics are very effective in communicating a lot of information in a short period of time and can help you see data in new ways. In The Best American Infographics 2013, Gareth Cook collects some of the best ones from over the past year. Wired has a look at some of the selections.
Best Chess Sacrifices
Another excellent link from Quora’s weekly newsletter: What is the best sacrifice in the history of chess? A game played in 1934 featured the sacrifice of the queen & both rooks and was over so quickly (14 moves) that it’s referred to as The Peruvian Immortal. I found it easier to follow the game by watching it:
Greatest Vine videos of 2013
This compilation of videos shot with Vine is surprisingly good and a nice illustration of what Mat Honan is getting at in Why Vine Just Won’t Die.
Vine started from scratch. It built a ground up culture that feels loose, informal, and — frankly — really fucking weird. Moreover, most of what you see there feels very of-the-moment. Sure, there’s plenty of artistry that goes into making six second loops, and there are volumes of videos with high production values. But far more common are Vines that serve as windows into what people are doing right now. Many of the most popular Vines appear to be completely off the cuff. They don’t have to be great or slick or well produced. In some ways, its better that they’re not, because it creates a lower threshold if you just want to, you know, share a video of your cat. They have something that trumps quality, which is authenticity.
That authenticity is driving a distinct emerging culture. One that stars people like Riff Raff and Tyler, the Creator, and an army of kids whose names you’ve never heard of but who can still generate hundreds of thousands of likes and re-Vines, and even large scale in-person meetups. It’s the triumph of the loop, yes, but it’s also the triumph of youth.
Take a moment to stroll through Vine’s “Popular Now” videos, and you’d have to be willfully ignorant to not notice that those on Vine are distinctly younger, distinctly blacker, and distinctly, well, gayer than society in general. In short, it’s cool. It’s hip. It’s a scene. If Instagram is an art museum, Vine is a block party.
I was going to make a joke about this being what TV is going to look like in five years, but I think you could put 30 minutes of this on MTV2 or whatever, with six-second Vine-style ads placed seamlessly in the mix, and you’d have yourself a hit show. (via ★interesting)
List of Stanley Kubrick’s favorite movies
Compiled from a bunch of different sources, here’s an attempt at an exhaustive list of movies that Stanley Kubrick liked. Among them:
Citizen Kane
The Godfather
Metropolis
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Harold and Maude
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
By far the weirdest entry on the list is White Men Can’t Jump. Then again, Terrence Malick loves Zoolander and David Foster Wallace once listed a Tom Clancy novel as a favorite. (via @DavidGrann)
The Dunham Collection
Lena Dunham shares her fifteen favorite Criterion films, saying she’s embarrassed that “so many of these films are in English, but I just love speaking English”.
The worst charities in America
The Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting spent a year investigating bad charities and this is what they found.
The worst charity in America operates from a metal warehouse behind a gas station in Holiday.
Every year, Kids Wish Network raises millions of dollars in donations in the name of dying children and their families.
Every year, it spends less than 3 cents on the dollar helping kids.
Most of the rest gets diverted to enrich the charity’s operators and the for-profit companies Kids Wish hires to drum up donations.
In the past decade alone, Kids Wish has channeled nearly $110 million donated for sick children to its corporate solicitors. An additional $4.8 million has gone to pay the charity’s founder and his own consulting firms.
No charity in the nation has siphoned more money away from the needy over a longer period of time.
But Kids Wish is not an isolated case, a yearlong investigation by the Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.
Using state and federal records, the Times and CIR identified nearly 6,000 charities that have chosen to pay for-profit companies to raise their donations.
Then reporters took an unprecedented look back to zero in on the 50 worst — based on the money they diverted to boiler room operators and other solicitors over a decade.
These nonprofits adopt popular causes or mimic well-known charity names that fool donors. Then they rake in cash, year after year.
The nation’s 50 worst charities have paid their solicitors nearly $1 billion over the past 10 years that could have gone to charitable works.
Despicable. And a reminder that before you give, you should check on a site like Charity Navigator or GiveWell for organizations where a sizable portion of your contribution is going to the actual cause. For instance, the aforementioned Kids Wish charity currently has a “donor advisory” notice on their Charity Navigator page. (via @ptak)
101 best written TV shows
The Writers Guild of America recently selected their list of the 101 best written TV series of all time. Here are the top 20:
1 The Sopranos
2 Seinfeld
3 The Twilight Zone
4 All in the Family
5 M*A*S*H
6 The Mary Tyler Moore Show
7 Mad Men
8 Cheers
9 The Wire
10 The West Wing
11 The Simpsons
12 I Love Lucy
13 Breaking Bad
14 The Dick Van Dyke Show
15 Hill Street Blues
16 Arrested Development
17 The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
18 Six Feet Under
19 Taxi
20 The Larry Sanders Show
The full list is here in PDF form. Lost above Deadwood? And Homicide? And several other more? Maybe they ignored everything after the first couple seasons?
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