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Today I learned that the opening theme song for the original Iron Chef TV program was adapted from a song composed by Hans Zimmer, who has done scores for films like Interstellar, Dune, Blade Runner: 2049, Inception, and Dunkirk. Perhaps even weirder, the name of the theme song is “Show Me Your Firetruck”. (The song is from Zimmer’s score for the movie Backdraft.)
The team at Tuk South visited one of the tallest sand dunes in Chile and did the obvious: threw a tire down it and followed it with a drone to see how long it would roll. The answer: almost three minutes. Take a break from whatever shit you might be dealing with at the moment, set your troubles aside, and watch this simple story of tenacity and gravity.
And yes, they went to retrieve the tire after it stopped: “Fear not. We collected the tyre. Leave only tuk tuk tyre tracks, take only memories.”
(I would like to see a Nolan cut of this, where it’s ambiguous if the tire stops at the end or not, like Cobb’s totem at the end of Inception.)
Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these but I’m gonna skip the apologies and get right into it. Here’s a list of what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing over the past several months. Let us know what movies, books, art, TV, music, etc. you’ve been enjoying in the comments below!
Dinosaur. It’s a huge pigeon on the High Line — what else do you need to know? (A-)
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. Entertaining and engaging. It’ll make a good TV series. (B+)
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I hadn’t seen this in several years but I still knew all the words. (A-)
My Brilliant Friend (season four). If there’s one thing I’ve watched in the past several years that I wish had gotten more attention from viewers, critics, and awards panels, it’s this wonderful show. (A+)
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow might be the most perfectly cast role in the history of cinema. Great story too. This movie surprised me when I saw it in the theater in 2003 and it’s still in the top tier of action/adventure movies. (A)
Andor (season one). A rewatch to prep for season two. I didn’t understand what the fuss was about this show the first time around, but this second viewing was a revelation. Andor is easily the best Star Wars thing since Empire. (A+)
Galleria Borghese. As previously discussed, the Bernini sculptures were a highlight of the summer. (A+)
Caravaggio 2025. Fantastic exhibition. (A)
The vivid blue color of the Mediterranean. (A+)
La Vita è Un Mozzico. We waited for an hour for sandwiches and it was probably worth it? (A)
Black Doves. British spy thriller? Keira Knightley? Ben Whishaw? Twist my arm. (B+)
Captain America: Brave New World. I’m sorry Sam Wilson / Anthony Mackie, there’s a “we have the Avengers at home” vibe here that’s hard to shake. (B)
Music to Refine To: A Remix Companion to Severance. I love this album; one of my favorite things of the past several months. (A+)
Mickey 17. It was fine? I was distracted while watching it in the theater, which is never a good sign. My favorite Bong Joon Ho film is still Snowpiercer. (B)
Amy Sherald: American Sublime. Absolutely fantastic. (A+)
The French Dispatch. This has quietly become a favorite of mine among Anderson’s films. (A)
The Royal Tenenbaums. However, this is still my favorite. (A+)
Paris Is Burning. Classic documentary of a bygone NYC era & a subculture that is now both flourishing and threatened. (A-)
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season two). I love these characters, always the sign of a good Trek. The crossover episode with Lower Decks was delightful even though I’ve not watched any of the animated series yet. The musical episode I liked less (not a showtunes guy) but I appreciated the experimentation. Bring on the Muppet episode. (A)
Severance (season two). Perhaps not as good as the first season — there was a lot in the mid-season episodes that didn’t land for me. Still, I always watched when a new episode dropped. (A-)
Army of Shadows. Part of the unplanned resistance film festival I’ve been screening for myself recently. Not quite as good as I remembered it, but it’s nice to watch something that doesn’t just lay everything out on a platter for you so you can emote properly. (A-)
Best in Show. So many lines from this that I use in my daily life. (A-)
The 99% Invisible Breakdown: The Power Broker. This is such a good series with fantastic guests about a legendary book. Who knew that Roman Mars was such a gigglepuss though? (A)
Johnny English. I didn’t find this quite as delightful as my family does. I prefer Mr. Bean. (B+)
Paddington in Peru. Not quite the magic of the first two, but entertaining. (B)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I have likely said this before, but while Raiders is likely the best Indy movie, Last Crusade is my favorite (probably due to Tom Stoppard’s heavy rewrite of the script). (A+)
Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi. It’s interesting to watch the original trilogy having seen so many subsequent movies & TV series.
Ocean’s Twelve. The dancing lasers scene is completely ridiculous. (A)
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. Well, I wasn’t expecting a critique of AI and the role of technology in society from this animated feature, but maybe I should have? (B+)
A Complete Unknown. Liked this more than I thought I would. (A-)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Just a wonderful book — witty and fun. (A)
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. Fantastic book. Listen to the audiobook version if you can — Scott Brick’s narration elevates the story. (A)
A Quiet Place: Day One. I only watched this because I was on a plane. (B)
Severance (season one). After watching the second season, I rewatched season one. There was apparently much I missed the first time around. (A-)
Black Bag. Soderbergh is always worth watching, especially when he dips into Ocean’s Eleven territory — although this was more serious. (A-)
A Minecraft Movie. The first half was tolerable, enjoyable even. And then not so much. (C+)
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Watched this in the theater for the 20th anniversary. There are some good bits in here, but some of the acting really stinks. Folks in the theater cheered when Anakin slaughtered the younglings, which is probably some sort of meme that I don’t want to know about. (B+)
Sinners. I loved this movie. (A+)
Thunderbolts*. Thought I would like this more than I did. (B)
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The last scene is a masterclass in not having the faintest idea how to end a movie. (B+)
Andor (season two). Only a slight dip from season one. Overall, the series was a brilliant look at radicalization, the messiness of rebellion, and the oppressive flatness of authoritarianism. (A+)
There There by Tommy Orange. Devastating. (A-)
The Fear of Never Landing. Good album to chill out to by Marconi Union, who previously brought you the most relaxing song in the world. (A-)
Novocaine. This was bad. (D+)
Glass Onion. More Benoit Blanc mysteries please — I love watching Daniel Craig and his CSI: KFC accent chewing scenery. (A-)
The Gorge. Half of this was great and the other half was just another pseudo-horror action thing. (B-)
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. Marvelous. (A)
Andor: The Rogue One Arc. This fan edit of Rogue One in the style of a three-episode Andor arc is as Gilroy-esque a cut as you’re ever going to get. (A-)
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. I had been kinda ambivalent about the M:I movies, but Fallout converted me, so now I’m slowly making my way back through the back catalog. (B+)
Via Carota. Best meal I’ve had in a long time. The tagliatelle was better than any pasta dish I had during my trip to Rome — it’s true, don’t @ me! And the roast chicken was perfect. (A+)
V for Vendetta. Underrated. (A-)
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. I’m going to tell you the embarrassing truth: I thought this was about actual samurai and perhaps related to the Tom Cruise movie. It is very much not. I gave it a real shot but ended up abandoning it about halfway through. (C)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Still a marvel of animated creativity. (A)
The Phoenician Scheme. Didn’t vibe with this at all. (B-)
Downhill mountain biking. This is giving me so much life right now. (A+)
Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death. Not my favorite W&G but still. (B+)
F1. Like Top Gun: Maverick crossed with Ford v Ferarri but Cruise and Bale played the aging outsider role much better than Pitt. Is Pitt even a good actor or is he just extremely charismatic? (B+)
Superman. I thought it was fine but didn’t like it as much as others seemed to. Better than anything Zach Snyder did for DC though. (B)
Shōgun. Rewatch with my son. Just an incredible show all the way around. (A+)
The Last of Us (season two). This show was always fighting an uphill battle with me — I don’t like zombie media and I dislike characters (Ellie!) who wouldn’t survive/thrive in the situations that they’re in with their personalities & characteristics. And I finally won. (C+)
The Handmaid’s Tale (season six). *sigh* No idea why I started watching (and then finished) this season; I’m a sucker for closure I guess. (C)
Nintendo Switch 2. I bought this to play Kart with my kids and also for a better Fortnite experience. So far, so good. (B+)
Mario Kart World. I haven’t played a ton of this, but it’s good so far. Free roam mode is pretty fun. I’ve gotta write up my Kart wishlist sometime…Nintendo only checked off one or two items in World. (B+)
Sargent and Paris. Caught this on the very last day of the show and hoo boy was it crowded. (A- for the show, C+ for the crowds)
Let God Sort Em Out. Need to listen to this one a few more times but I’m liking it so far. (B+)
Right now, I’m watching Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season three, listening to Deacon King Kong on audiobook (fantastic, a lock for an A+), rewatching Wandavision, and picking at Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane.
Past installments of my media diet are available here. What good things have you watched, read, or listened to lately?
In this video, Maurice Moves highlights a pair of flashlights that are extremely useful & well-designed but also shockingly affordable.
Most people never think about flashlights, but as someone who uses one daily for work, it’s always top of mind, and the tech, value, and products are proof that modern flashlights are absolutely insane and defy logic and manufacturing economics.
The two flashlights he featured are the WUBEN G5 Rechargeable EDC Flashlight ($20) and the Nitecore EDC37 8000 ($140) — the Wuben in particular would be affordable at twice the price given how nicely designed and engineered it is.
I feel like this about Apple’s M4 Macbook Airs; as I wrote last week, “$800 is an absurdly low price for so much computer”.
See also No One Knows How to Make a Pencil. (thx, dunstan)
Jon Batiste & Randy Newman team up for a song called Lonely Avenue. This is lovely. (via craig mod)
In a review of City of Angels, the 1998 Hollywood remake of Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders, Roger Ebert says:
To compare the two films is really beside the point, since “Wings of Desire” exists on its own level as a visionary and original film, and “City of Angels” exists squarely in the pop mainstream.
In his latest video, Evan Puschak leans into the vast gulf between the two films to “explore the differences in cinematic cultures and styles”. He takes a close look at the same scene in both films and what they reveal about Hollywood on the one hand and European art cinema on the other.
Entertaining YouTuber Benn Jordan built a setup to record and analyze bird sounds, songs, and calls. He used it to record a starling who has mastered mimicking all sorts of manmade and artificial sounds in its environment, including things like the default iPhone camera shutter sound. Jordan drew an image of a bird, played it as a sound, the starling played the sound back, and Jordan was able to see his bird drawing in the decoded sound.1 That is, he uploaded a picture of a bird to a bird and then downloaded the bird picture from the bird. 🤯
That’s the hook of the video, but the whole thing is well-worth watching (perhaps save for the last 10 minutes, which is a nerdy deep-dive into equipment) — the explanation of bird acoustics is both interesting & entertaining.
Thanks to KDO reader Liana for sending me this video three days ago, a full 48 hours before it got linked to from everywhere yesterday. *sigh* Some days I wish there were four or five of me to handle all of the cool things I run across and that people send me.
P.S. The comments on the YouTube post are worth a read:
So for a few weeks I thought I was going crazy because I would hear my Samsung dryer “Load Complete” song play but I didn’t have the dryer going and it sounded far away but not like it was in the house. On Saturday, I was out working in the yard and heard it again and there was a bird perfectly emulating the “Load Complete” song note for note! I started the dryer and from the tree the bird was in, you can clearly hear the dryer which is I guess how it learned it. Nature is so cool!
Imagine teaching a whole species of birds one song that draws a bird on a spectrogram. Suppose it survives with the species for millennia. One hell of a trip for future civilisations to find.
yeah I host my files on an AAS (Avian Accessible Storage). It’s a cloud storage solution
A Rainbow Lorikeet chose me for a partner 4 years ago. Excellent mimic. He calls my two cats to the back door, ” Here Kitty Kitty, Here Puddy Puddy” in MY voice. The cats come, expecting and looking for me. The bird then proceeds to laugh at them, with MY laugh. I’m also attempting to teach him to whistle the last stanza of the Italian national anthem.
Can you run Doom… on a bird?
A perfect game in Tetris is defined as achieving the max score (999,999) in the least amount of time possible, meaning you need to score a bunch of Tetrises in a row (and nothing else) at the highest possible starting speed. A few years ago, a player used a tool to develop a sequence of moves and timing to score a perfect game, proving that it was possible. But could a human do it just by the playing the original game in the way it was intended? Well, you’ve got to watch the video to find out.
I’ve said it before — I love these Tetris analysis videos. Both aGameScout, who did the video above, and Summoning Salt (who made this feature-length video about the history of Tetris world records) are world-class at using video to explain the innovation, competition, and cooperation that allow these players to keep pushing higher and faster, past what anyone thought possible even a few years ago.
Thinking back to the Jackson Goldstone post, what I really want is a aGameScout- or Summoning Salt-caliber video about the differing riding styles of mountain bike riders, how each of them uses their own style to go faster, and where the innovations are happening. I’m sure these videos exist and I just don’t know where to find them, but if they don’t, this would be a hell of an opportunity for someone with ace communication & video editing skills.
Last week, I linked to a video mashup by Bill McClintock of several metal songs, saying “although the video was posted a day or two before Ozzy Osbourne died, it feels like a fitting tribute to one of metal’s true pioneers”. This morning, YouTube helpfully informed me that McClintock had since done a proper tribute in the form of a compilation of every Ozzy/Sabbath-related video mashup he’d ever done.
Rest in darkness, Ozzy. 🤘
Meet Jackson Goldstone. He’s 6 years old, lives in British Columbia, and is already ripping it up on his bike. Here’s a video of him taking the long way around on his way to kindergarten:
Wow, if he keeps riding and improving, I wonder how good this kid could be? Ok, I’m funning you a little bit because that was several years ago and Jackson is starring in GoPro videos at the age of 10 and riding the hardest trails faster and better than many adult riders:
I mean, I think Jackson could really be world-class some da— Ha, more tricks! Jackson is actually 21 years old here in the present of 2025 and is actually now one of the best downhill mountain bikers in the world. Here’s the POV video from a recent win of his:
There are a couple of notable things about this video:
1. Watch the way he goes through a bunch of tree stumps at full tilt at ~1:10 by basically jumping over the whole thing with a couple of quick hops. Adjust the playback speed of the video to 0.5 or 0.25 to see how he does it. I’ve watched this like 10 times and it’s still bonkers.
2. And then at ~1:52, he screams through a tunnel and gaps directly onto a wooden berm — and you can hear how the crowd reacts. Here’s another view of that same gap and the rest of his run:
Other riders clear that gap too, but somehow not as big or direct as Jackson does it. I don’t actually know enough about mtn biking to know how Goldstone is doing what he’s doing, but if you want a hint, check out the “Bike Jesus” section of this video that starts at ~5:30:
3. Oh yeah, and just how ungodly fast he and the other riders are going past trees and through rocks and all sorts of other lurking assailants. Blimey.
From MinuteEarth, a quick tour of all the different kinds of dogs in the world, wild & domesticated, and how they are related to each other.
Great Danes are the tallest dogs in the world. Standing on his hind legs, the Great Dane Zeus was taller than Shaq. He could drink directly from the kitchen sink.
Slow Light is an animated short film about a man whose eyes are so dense that light needs seven years to travel across them. Everything he sees happened seven years ago, like a very precise, obligatory memory playback.
I feel like this is related to whether or not you can visualize things in your mind and also Braid, a video game where you can collaborate with your past self. (via colossal)
This is a great 5-minute mashup of several metal and metal-adjacent songs from artists like NIN, Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, KISS, Dio, Black Sabbath, and Soundgarden. Even if you don’t care for metal, I feel confident that you’ll enjoy this anyway — it’s a bop. Here’s the track list:
Nine Inch Nails - Terrible Lie
Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the Name
Dio - Holy Diver
Soundgarden - Outshined
Judas Priest - Hot Rockin’
KISS - All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose
Pantera - 5 Minutes Alone
Black Sabbath - Into the Void
Billy Squier - The Stroke
Judas Priest - You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’
Alice in Chains - Them Bones
Metallica - Sad But True
Although the video was posted a day or two before Ozzy Osbourne died, it feels like a fitting tribute to one of metal’s true pioneers. (via neatorama)
Follow Architectural Digest as they head behind the scenes at the offices of NPR Music to see how the now-iconic Tiny Desk Concerts come together. My favorite bits are the callouts of all the stuff on the shelves behind the artists: Adele’s water bottle, Sabrina Carpenter’s bedazzled martini glass, a Green Bay Packers helmet signed by Harry Styles. And: “Chappell Roan’s wig is actually sitting on Cypress Hill’s skull.”
I love the look of this black & white animated video made by Anthony Dickenson from thousands of hand-painted frames for Rival Consoles’ song Soft Gradient Beckons. Stick around after the song ends for a behind-the-scenes look at how it was made.
If I plan too much, it’s often disappointing. It’s much nicer if I just let it go the way it wants to go. But obviously sometimes it just doesn’t work and, you know, that’s okay. Sometimes, the mistakes are the bits that really reveal kind of new techniques. I love these little moments of imperfection. Otherwise, you know, you might as well just build it in AI.
The skateboard dolly! (via colossal)
In Florida, flooding is a huge cause of death and destruction from hurricanes. This video looks at how a town called Babcock Ranch was designed to withstand hurricane flooding through some smart engineering.
Yet this one town, Babcock Ranch, has been hit by four hurricanes and basically came out unscathed. There was no flooding at all. So we asked the engineer who helped build this town to break down its hidden designs.
Related: John Seabrook’s piece in this week’s New Yorker, In an Age of Climate Change, How Do We Cope with Floods? (archive).
Vermont feels like the frontier of climate change in the Northeast. Farmers in the bottomlands, who previously planted wheat and barley, are beginning to plant rice, which can be underwater for two days without damage to the crop. The old roads that early Vermont settlers hacked out on hilltops, which lasted for more than two hundred years, are melting back into the forest. Extreme-rain events scour the roads down to bedrock ledges, rendering them impassable, and, because no one then uses them, any blown-down trees don’t get cleared. The next storm brings more blowdowns. A road that I went mountain biking on ten years ago, when it was a distinct pathway with old-growth trees on each side, lined by aged stone walls, is now such a tangle of fallen trees, branches, and rocks that it’s hard to tell a road was ever there.
Vermont is the second least populated state, after Wyoming, with fewer than six hundred and fifty thousand residents; it is also the fourth highest in disaster-relief funding per capita, nearly all of it flood-related. Washington County ranked first nationally in disaster declarations between 2011 and 2024. Annual precipitation in the state has increased six inches since the nineteen-sixties, and heavier-than-normal rain events in the Northeast are expected to increase by as much as fifty-two per cent by 2100. Vermont is a laboratory for the study of intense rainfall in steep terrain, and a proving ground for scientists, policymakers, regulators, and land-use planners who are on the front lines of a recurring catastrophe that traditional methods of prevention — dredging a river’s bottom, armoring its sides, berming its banks — have only made worse.
I live in Washington County so how communities are attempting to mitigate flooding is of great interest to me.
Noah Kalina is uploading videos of the “long photograph” variety of peaceful & contemplative nature scenes to YouTube. 4K. No AI. “Press play and walk away.”
Twenty years! It’s been twenty years since Bloc Party’s debut album Silent Alarm was released. To celebrate, the band stopped by the NPR office’s for a Tiny Desk Concert.
To celebrate, this Tiny Desk set begins with the super catchy and energetic pop anthem “Banquet” from Silent Alarm. The band continues with a couple songs from 2008’s Intimacy: the shimmery, glockenspiel-forward “Signs,” then “Mercury,” where we give a sneak peek of Okereke’s vocal effects rig under the Desk. Bloc Party closes with “Blue,” a sweet song on the slower side of the band’s catalog. It ends quietly, yet powerfully, as Okereke sings, “I fall asleep on your sleeve / with those three words in my dreams.”
Still bangs. (via @unlikelywords.bsky.social)
Wanting to get away from manufactured perfection, artist Wang Mansheng makes his own paint brushes.
Manufactured things are, you know, have a certain form. Like a manufactured brush; they’re all really fine. The factory trying to make as fine as they could, but when you use it, all the lines come out smooth and beautiful. But sometimes, I think it’s too perfect, because I really love the rough surface of a rock or the big tree trunk.
Wang’s work is currently on display at The Huntington near LA in San Marino, CA.
A question from a viewer of XKCD’s What If? series: “What would happen if the Moon were replaced with an equivalently-massed black hole? And what would a lunar (“holar”?) eclipse look like?” The answer to the first part of the question is: not that much. But the explanation of why that is is fascinating.
It’s worth reading the comments on the post as well…XKCD brings out the nerds and their interesting observations:
Imagine if a species grew up on a planet that had a black hole moon the mass of the moon. They’d have tides, they’d have an unobstructed view of the night sky, and they’d have no clue about this behemoth out there and would be unable to explain these bizarre perturbations in Earth’s orbit when they finally worked out Earth’s orbit.
EDIT: To everyone mentioning lensing effects: no. The eye can discern about 1 arc minute which at the distance of the moon is 280km. The lensing effect is detectable generally about double the event horizon. If the event horizon is about the size of a grain of sand, doubling it is not going to come close to being detectable with the naked eye from Earth. It is probably safe to assume that the same would be true of captured dust — that the particle size is too small to be detectable to the naked eye.
Another commenter points out that the video never explicitly answers the second question:
It never answered the part of the question about the eclipse. A grain of sand passing in front of the sun wouldn’t be visible, but if it’s a black hole, would lensing effects do anything weird?
The consensus in the comments seems to be that the effect would be minor and nearly imperceptible:
Lensing is dependent on two things: Mass of the object around which light passes, and how close by light passes. Since the black hole is one lunar mass, a very small mass on gravitational level, the lensing would be minor. Light could get a lot closer to the black hole, though. You might see a very slight “shimmer” at the edge of the sun when the black hole passes by the edge, but not much more than that. If the black hole happened to perfectly pass in front of a star that you’re observing with a telescope, you might very very briefly see a small ring instead of a point of light, but that’s about it.
Science!
Baggage is a short, stop-animation film by Lucy Davidson about the sometimes unpleasant experience of being seen — when going through airport security and also just generally.
Three girlfriends check in their baggage at the airport, but one is carrying a little more than the others. As they travel along the conveyor belt to security, can she hide what’s inside?
(via colossal)
This is a unique look at the history of the world from 1925 to 2025, told through the lens of movies whose plots take place in those years. For example, the WWII era is represented by The Sound of Music (1965), The Pianist (2002), The Darkest Hour (2017), Casablanca (1942), The Thin Red Line (1998, Come and See (1985), Son of Saul (2015), Oppenheimer (2023), and Godzilla Minus One (2023).
As the video goes on, more and more of the scenes depict imagined past futures from films like 1984, Transformers: The Movie, Blade Runner, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Johnny Mnemonic.
In the end, it’s not a happy video — lots of war, both past and future. Hollywood does like to dwell on our worst times.
Clocking in at almost an hour, this “definitive interview” with Wes Anderson by Vanity Fair about all 12 of his films is perhaps only for Wes stans or cinephiles, but then again, listening to thoughtful, creative people talking earnestly about their work is almost always worth the time.
Hi, I’m Wes Anderson. I have made, apparently, 12 films and I’m now going to walk us through every one of them in some way.
(via open culture)
Living Colour recently visited the NPR Music office for a Tiny Desk Concert. Cult of Personality might be an all-time top 10 song for me — I vividly remember their 1989 appearance on Saturday Night Live.1 They still got it!
Slice of Life (trailer) is a feature-length documentary about the American Dream through the lens of former Pizza Huts that have been transformed into everything from bars to churches to candy stores to cannabis dispensaries. A woman who runs an LGBTQ+ church out of a former Pizza Hut says:
It’s the stained-glass windows that draw people and touch people, and I think really takes it out of the realm of a Pizza Hut. It’s the power of transformation. When things continue to transform, beauty can come from it, good things can come out of it.
You can rent or buy the film from their website.
I’ve written before about how Pizza Hut was a special place to visit when I was a kid:
Pizza Hut was the #1 eating-out destination for me as a kid. My family never ate out much, so even McDonald’s, Arby’s, or Hardee’s was a treat. But Pizza Hut was a whole different deal. Did I enjoy eating salad at home? No way. But I had to have the salad bar at Pizza Hut. Did I normally eat green peppers, onions, and black olives? Nope…but I would happily chow down on a supreme pizza at Pizza Hut.
ImillaSkate is a Bolivian female skate collective whose members dress in traditional cholita clothing. This is a great short documentary about the group, the challenges they face, and the change & joy they’re trying to bring to their communities.
Some people in my generation are embarrassed to wear a pollera [traditional skirt]. Because the pollera highlights your features. Your indigenous features. Highlight what we are as indigenous people, as the daughters of women of polleras. It’s a part of my family legacy. And without my family, I’m nobody. It’s about giving the pollera new meaning.
I wrote about ImillaSkate a few years ago as well. I poked around to see if they were raising funds for their activities (lessons, building a skatepark) because I wanted to contribue, but didn’t find anything — if anything pops up, I’ll let you know. You can follow their adventures on Instagram and via their website. (via @lizziearmanto)
In a collaboration with the National Gallery of Art, Evan Puschak made a video about 16th-century Dutch artist (and all-around polymath) Joris Hoefnagel, who painted some of the first dedicated and detailed images of insects in the world. His paintings were so accurate that if he’d lived 200 years later, you would have called him a naturalist.
I love how some of the caterpillars in the last image are crawling along the “frame” of the painting — that strikes me as a modern flourish.
From The Marvelous Details of Joris Hoefnagel’s Animal and Insect Studies:
These watercolors served as sources for a series of 52 prints engraved by Hoefnagel’s teenage son, Jacob. That series, Archetypes and Studies, offered the earliest printed images of dozens of species.
The relatively cheap prints enabled little beasts to multiply and crawl out into the world. They inspired a broader interest and study of nature which continues today.
Some of Hoefnagel’s insect images are on display at the NGA in the Little Beasts exhibition, which runs through Nov 2, 2025.
The fantastic art history YouTube channel Great Art Explained has a great two-episode series on Jackson Pollock.
In Part One of my film I look at how, post World War Two, the art scene shifted from Paris to New York. How America was searching for “The Great American painter”, and why he is so loved and hated at the same time. I look at just what Abstract Expressionism means, how we can “read it”, and I look at the myths surrounding Pollock and modern art itself. I also look at his influences ranging from Mexican sand Painting, to the Regionalist art movement, to Picasso and the modernists.
In Part Two of my film I look at how fame affected Jackson Pollock, and how alcohol destroyed his relationships. I look at the science behind why we are so affected by his work, and I also look at a lesser known story, of how art became an unlikely player in the Cold War and the global contest of ideas. How Abstract Expressionism was enlisted as an unknowing agent in a shadowy propaganda war, bankrolled by the CIA, to sell the story of freedom… and capitalism.
Ok so this is weird and delightful. Swedish electronics company Teenage Engineering makes a collection of singing wooden dolls called the Choir. The dolls are basically speakers but with some autonomy and personality…and they can work together:
what you see are eight wooden dolls, made to serenade you with a repertoire of choral classics as well as perform your own original compositions through midi over ble. each member has their own characteristic vocal range. individually one can sing a dynamic solo, together they perform an immersive a cappella concert.
Composer Rob Simonsen used three Choirs together to help create the score for Elio, the newest Pixar movie that takes place in space.
we were looking for an otherworldly sound—something that sounded relatable, that echoed vocalizations, communication that humans could understand, but felt like it was from another world. i came across these choir dolls and heard their sound. it was beautiful — electronic, but human. each body is handcrafted. they have a robotic but organic sound at the same time. it felt like a perfect answer to what we were looking for.
In this interview with Simonsen, he talks about working with the Choir to create the movie’s sound; the relevant part starts at the 15:20 mark and includes some of the music they composed with it.
There’s a flip flop element to this too: they mic’d up the dolls to record the audio, just like they would with human performers.
Here’s another short clip of the Choir in action:
Like I said, weird and delightful. You can get your own full ensemble from Teenage Engineering for about $2000.
See also Dueling Carls, which this reminded me of for some reason.
I read Project Hail Mary (by The Martian author Andy Weir) a few summers ago; it was fine. I suspected at the time it might make a better movie than a book and after watching the trailer, I’m excited to see this next summer. Ryan Gosling stars and Phil Lord & Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie, produced the Spider-verse movies) are directing. Out in theaters March 2026.
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