Spring and Summer Skies by Amy Jean Porter
Just some lovely painted skies to end the day. (Above, below.)
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Romanian Singer Maria Coman
“Was the human voice the very first musical instrument? I don’t know, but I expect it will end up as the very last one.” Tyler Cowen shared an eclectic choral music playlist the other day, with the preceding lines as an intro, and the idea of a “last instrument” was pleasingly creepy to me. It also reminded me of the above video, of artist Maria Coman singing the “Love is patient, love is kind” lines from the First Epistle to the Corinthians, from the Bible. (1 Corinthians 13: 1-8.) More of Coman’s music can be found on her website. And what is that church she’s in?
Take Two Trips
A couple years ago, the NYT columnist David Brooks published a story called “The Greatest Life Hacks in the World (For Now).” It was mostly a tribute to Kevin Kelly’s famous life advice posts, but Brooks added one of his own, and I’ve thought of at least once a week since:
…over the last few years I have embraced, almost as a religious mantra, the idea that if you’re not sure you can carry it all, take two trips.
Take two trips. Nothing serious, but of all the “life advice” posts I’ve read, this is the one that’s changed my own life the most. Anyone else have something from an advice list that really made it into their brains/lives?
The closest thing to a life advice aphorism I’ve ever come up with is maybe too gross to write down. And it’s running-themed, so it could be too specific. But maybe if I share it here, I will exorcise it from my brain: Sometimes you’re so worried about pooping your pants that you don’t realize you’ve already pooped your pants.
This is the first I’m learning of the spookily named Decline at 9 phenomenon, in which kids apparently lose interest in reading around age nine. (Per the article, 57% of 8-year-olds claim to read for fun daily, vs. only 35% of 9-year-olds.) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Diary Comics, Dec. 21-25
It’s another Thursday Afternoon With Edith, and here are a bunch more comics from my journal! I’m publishing everything through my new baby’s birth, because it seemed silly to draw it out any longer than I have! She’s now four months old. 👶 (Previously.)
“I maintain that the trash compactor onboard the Death Star in Star Wars is implausible, unworkable, and, moreover, inefficient.”
Wes Anderson’s Montblanc Commercial
Rupert Friend, Jason Schwartzman, and Wes Anderson star in an Anderson-directed commercial for Montblanc pens. You know the drill: it’s twee, it’s charming, it’s art-directed to within an inch of its life. Me personally? I love it.
It’s Time to Tax the Billionaires. In 2018, “for the first time in the history of the United States, billionaires had a lower effective tax rate than working-class Americans”.
The Gentle Librarian
As someone who reads almost exclusively on an ereader (a Kindle Paperwhite), I have been intrigued by Craig Mod’s recent evangelism of the BOOX Palma, a pocket-sized e-ink device that he’s been using as an ereader. In the latest issue of his Roden newsletter, he explains why he likes it so much:
Once you hold a Palma, you realize that for most situations it’s an ideal reading container. On the train? In line? In the waiting room at the doctor’s office? I’ve carried my Palma with me every day for the past three or so months with the goal of reaching for it rather than my iPhone. I call it the Gentle Librarian. Soft screen, clean interface, no SIM card and so mostly no internet (it loads up with new articles while at home on Wi-Fi; I can always tether to my phone to update or add something new to read on the go), a refresh rate that is plausible enough on which to watch movies (!! hypnotizing, actually, like watching a magic trick, like what Victorians may have imagined “computer screens” to look like) but not really responsive enough to seduce you into installing social media apps. There’s a lot of friction in this little bugger, and it turns out a bit of friction is a good friend of the kind of reading we love.
Hmm. Hmm! Like Mod, I’m frustrated with Amazon’s lack of vision and activity on the ereader front and lament the time I spend on my Casino Rectangle / Dingdong Casino of Hell. Maybe I’ll try the Palma out…
Hackers can reprogram NES Tetris *from within the game*, which may lead to new high scores. The hack involves “reading the game’s high score tables as machine code instructions”.
After launching last month, the Delta game emulator has been one of the most popular apps in Apple’s App Store. It allows you to play NES, GB, SNES, N64, and DS games on your iPhone or Mac.
Attempting to thwart ticket scalpers, Billie Eilish is selling supposedly “untransferable” tickets for her new tour. 404 Media has the details on how these tickets can actually be transferred.
Fantastical Portraits of Cate Blanchett
I love these (haunting? are they haunting?) photos of Cate Blanchett taken by Jack Davison for this 2022 profile in the NY Times Magazine.
When the magazine asked the photographer Jack Davison to create the art for this story, he took inspiration from Cate Blanchett’s legendary gift at transforming herself on film. Over the course of a four-hour shoot, across nine different setups, Davison made the fantastical, perspective-bending portraits that appear here.
(via @gray)
I’d missed that Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend now has a graphic novel adaptation.
Parents Micro-Targeted by Their Kids’ Hand-Drawn Ads on Facebook
In 2019, artist and engineer Tega Brain gave some kids the opportunity to create targeted advertising relevant to their particular interests: Bushwick Analytica.
Politicians and marketers now use data and targeted advertising to try to change our behaviors and influence our worldviews. But why should these tools only be available to people in places like Washington DC, Manhattan and London?
Some of the kids’ ads targeted their parents:
While others were aimed at people who could help with causes the kids were interested in:
(via dens)
The Cheese-Making Magic of Alka-Seltzer, Explained. You can make a creamy nacho cheese sauce at home using Alka-Seltzer — its ingredients react to form an emulsifying agent. Plop, plop, Cheez Whiz, oh what a trick this is…
A short essay on freediving. “In the mindful state of freediving, I don’t panic. I find stillness. Centeredness. Calm. I am belonging in the moment. I’ve retrained my mind to be underwater.” I love mind vs. body stuff like this.
“For the first time ever, more online news sites produced Pulitzer finalists than newspapers did.“
How Rope Was Made the Old Fashioned Way
This is a clip from the BBC series Edwardian Farm that shows how rope was made in the olden days.
The entire series is available to watch online.
New Pompeii excavations reveal frescoes & mosaics about the Trojan War. “The flickering light of the lamps had the effect of making the images appear to move, especially after a few glasses of good Campanian wine.”
The Light Eaters and Plant Intelligence
Zoë Schlanger’s new book (out today) sounds really interesting: The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth (Bookshop.org).
It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents.
I heard about it from NPR’s Fresh Air — check out this completely metal behavior:
Schlanger notes that some tomato plants, when being eaten by caterpillars, fill their leaves with a chemical that makes them so unappetizing that the caterpillars start eating each other instead. Corn plants have been known to sample the saliva of predator caterpillars — and then use that information to emit a chemical to attract a parasitic wasp that will attack the caterpillar.
Schlanger acknowledges that our understanding of plants is still developing — as are the definitions of “intelligence” and “consciousness.” “Science is there [for] observation and to experiment, but it can’t answer questions about this ineffable, squishy concept of intelligence and consciousness,” she says.
I’ve known Anil Dash for 20+ years and I still keep finding out all sorts of crazy things about him. “Fun fact: Prince bought the house used in the filming of Purple Rain right after I tweeted at him that it was on sale.”
Did you know that “Broccolini” is actually a registered trademark of Del Monte? That they haven’t enforced for decades? “That, generally speaking, is how marks lose their distinctive nature and become generic.”
An Update on the Beloved Broccoli Tree
Do you remember the Broccoli Tree? Photographer Patrik Svedberg photographed a Swedish tree that resembled a broccoli floret over a number of years, posted the results to Instagram, and made the tree internet famous. Then some asshole vandal sawed through the branches of the tree and it had to be chopped down. John Green eulogized the Broccoli Tree in a video:
To share something is to risk losing it, especially in a world where sharing occurs at tremendous scale and where everyone seems to want to be noticed, even if only for cutting down a beloved tree.
Well, the stump of the tree was left in the hopes that it would grow again and I’m pleased to say that it has — here’s a photo from three years ago:
You can even see it on Google Maps. I’m glad the tree is growing again but wish the destruction hadn’t happened in the first place.
Thanks to a newly deciphered Herculaneum scroll, researchers have pinpointed the location of Plato’s grave in Athens and know what he did on his final day.
This is the goofiest, dorkiest advertising/marketing I’ve ever seen from Apple — and also really fun. See if you can find all of the Star Wars Easter eggs.
A North Yorkshire county authority banned apostrophes on street signs because they cause problems with poorly designed computer systems. “I walk past the sign every day and it riles my blood to see inappropriate grammar or punctuation.”
The Shardlake Series
In honor of novelist C.J. Sansom’s passing, I wanted to recommend his marvelous Matthew Shardlake historical crime thrillers, for anyone who isn’t already familiar. I definitely learned and remembered more about Thomas Cromwell-era England from Dissolution than I did from any textbooks (not that I’ve read any of those in a while, but still). It was all very visceral in a damp-stone-monastery, heavy cloaks, burning candles, teeth-being-pulled-in-the-Tower-of-London kind of way. Also his novels are just super fun, and the Matthew Shardlake character — a sort of proto-detective lawyer — is especially memorable.
Hi, I am Needs to Read About A Rap Beef in the NY Times to Understand What’s Going On With Drake and Kendrick Lamar years old.
Zadie Smith: “To send the police in to arrest young people peacefully insisting upon a ceasefire represents a moral injury to us all. To do it with violence is a scandal. How could they do less than protest, in this moment?”
Squaring the Reality of What We See
Gareth Fearn writing for the London Review of Books about the student protests on US campuses: Liberalism without Accountability.
This is a toxic combination: universities reliant on investment portfolios in a system where mega-profits are made by companies that threaten and destroy human life, influenced by an increasingly radicalised class of billionaires, teaching students whose degrees won’t earn them enough to pay off their loans, managed by supine administrators threatened by (or willingly collaborating with) a reactionary right, who have decided that young people’s minds are being turned against capitalism not by their own lived experience of austerity and racialised police violence but by ‘woke Marxist professors’. This situation has now met with a live-streamed genocide which is supported, and brazenly lied about, by political leaders and commentators who claim to stand for truth and justice. Students, like much of the public, cannot square the reality of what they see with the world as constructed by politicians and the media.
Under such circumstances, pitching tents, raising placards and demanding divestment are really quite mild-mannered responses. That they have been met, in many US universities, with militarised policing reflects the fragility of liberalism — in the face of the growing hegemony of the conservative right as well as its own inability to offer a future even to Ivy League college students, let alone the less privileged.
Hey everyone, it’s Hot Frank Summer! Aka we’re all reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein this summer. Just a few pages a day from May 15 to June 12 — check out the schedule and put it in your calendar. #HotFrankSummer
Booting up an Apple IIc to play Lode Runner. Oh maaaaaan, this takes me back. I played so much Lode Runner as a kid. And made probably 50 of my own levels with the built-in level editor.
These folks wrote an autopilot in Javascript that can control planes in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (via the API). “To allay any concerns: this is not about running JavaScript software to control an actual aircraft. That would kill people.”
Skating the Contours of Nature
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a skate video like this before: a group of riders skating the smooth, flowing rocks on the Maltese island of Gozo (site of Calypso’s cave in the Odyssey). Skateboarding has always been such an urban-coded sport — surfing on concrete, reliant on the human-made infrastructure against which it rebels — that it’s a little bit of a mindbend to see it out in nature like this.
Oh cool, spiders can swim now. “The diving bell spider is the only one known to survive almost entirely underwater, using bubbles of air it brings down from the surface.” And have you met the underwater bees?
Wondering why “people invent false conspiracies when there are so many real ones to worry about”, George Monbiot interviews a conspiracy theorist. “Conspiracy fantasists may get the facts wrong, ‘but often get the feelings right.’”
Jason Polan: I Want to Know All of You
Recently, some of the items from the personal collection of the late artist Jason Polan were auctioned off. The NY Times wrote about the effort to preserve his legacy.
Jen Bekman, the founder of the online gallery 20x200, reflected on Mr. Polan’s legacy while she sat beside his sketches.
“These are not doodles,” Ms. Bekman said. “That word is diminishing. People remember him as an illustrator, but Jason was a great artist, and his practice was his life.”
I “lost” a bunch of time browsing through the collection this morning, which includes both work by Polan and things he collected & received from other artists.
It’s great to see Polan’s legacy being preserved and his art being spread around the world. And to be reminded of that time he went to a fashion show.
I sort of stood still because I was a little confused as to what just happened. Kim walked right by me. Puff Daddy took a picture with someone right in front of me. I then saw Beyoncé walking toward me and I said, “Hi Beyoncé,” and she said, “Heeey,” and smiled and it was kind of like having a Bar Mitzvah. Then Jay Z walked by and I said, “Hi Jay,” and in the second I said that I thought, am I supposed to add a Z? but didn’t and he said hey but not as beautifully as Beyoncé. I love her so much. I drew a couple more people and then went outside and forgot where I was and then walked to the train and went home.
Reminder: you can buy prints and things of Polan’s work at 20x200. I have several of these, including the Zoo Baggu, which I get compliments on almost every time I use it for grocery shopping.
The trailer for Senna, a Netflix limited series about Brazilian F1 driver Ayrton Senna. Kinda skeptical about this, considering how great the documentary Senna (2010) is.
Road Snacks #2 — Jack Van Cleaf
The second issue of Road Snacks is out featuring an interview with Nashville-based singer/songwriter Jack Van Cleaf. I like his song Rattlesnake, maybe you will, too. Road Snacks is semi-regular interview series between an ice cream shop and a touring musician talking exclusively about food on tour. I have made it my mission to find out which snacky treats touring musicians live for.
Jack Van Cleaf: That’s the thing, when I get to the gas station, they only have the small bags. The price per pound ratio doesn’t appeal to me as much, but when I get those big bags from Costco, I don’t know, something about the endlessness of it. It really, really drives me.
Gracie’s: You get lost in the bottom of bag.
Jack Van Cleaf: I do, I do. Probably at the gas station I’m gonna go with a Reese’s Cup or a Take Five.
Gracie’s: Tell me anything else about food while touring?
Jack Van Cleaf: The gas station question has me thinking about Twist of Lime Hot Cheetos. Are you familiar with those?
Looking to relax or fall asleep? Try Sleep Baseball (aka “baseball radio ASMR”). “Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio is a full-length fake baseball game. There is no yelling, no loud commercials, no weird volume spikes.”
A Calming Visit to Claude Monet’s Famed Gardens in Giverny
The Water Lilies paintings that French impressionist Claude Monet is most known for were all painted in the garden of his house in Giverny. Pay a relaxing visit to the set of the MBU (Monet Botanical Universe) with this leisurely video. Here’s another tour of the gardens with music.
See also Monet painting in his gardens, Claude Monet’s War Paintings, and Monet’s Ultraviolet Vision. (via the kid should see this)
From designer Frank Chimero, a list of stuff he learned in his 30s. “Knowing when to stop is a form of talent.” Happy birthday, Frank! 🎉
Jack Kerouac’s 30-item list of Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, including “Write in recollection and amazement for yourself” and “Submissive to everything, open, listening”.
The Flashlight Gun Is Peak WTF America
An officer “accidentally” fired his weapon during an NYPD raid on a student-occupied building at Columbia University on Tuesday. Apparently, he mistook his gun for a flashlight. You may be wondering: how could this happen? Well, like this. From a 2014 article in the Denver Post:
Ronny Flanagan took pride in his record as a police officer in Plano, Texas. He had an incident-free career. He took safety training regularly. He was known at the range as a very good shot.
Yet he killed a man when he was simply trying to press a flashlight switch mounted beneath the trigger on his pistol.
In a deposition, Flanagan expressed his remorse and made a prediction.
“I don’t want anyone to ever sit in a chair I’m in right now,” he said. “Think about the officers that aren’t as well trained, officers that don’t take it as seriously, and you put them in a pressure situation, another accident will happen. Not if, but will.”
Jeeeeesus Christ this is the most American shit ever. First of all: guns, guns, guns!! We love ‘em! Don’t forget the complete militarization of the police (they’ve got tanks!), which happens in tinpot countries where leaders fear the citizenry. Those gun flashlights were initially developed for the Navy SEALs and now city cops wield them around students.
And then. And then! There’s the completely genius idea of PUTTING A SECOND TRIGGER ON A GUN — I wish I had letters more uppercase than uppercase for this next part — RIGHT BELOW THE FIRST TRIGGER!!!!!!! 1
You know, the one that propels a projectile out of the weapon at deadly speeds!?
You’re familiar with those doors where the handle makes it seem like a pull but you actually have to push it? They’re called Norman doors, the canonical example of bad design. These flashlight guns are like Norman doors that kill people. W T Actual Fuck. (via @ygalanter.bsky.social)
- I know I’m gonna get email about this so I’ll stop you right there Johnny Gmail: I am sure “not all guns” 🥴 with flashlights are designed like this. I am positive that putting yet another switch on a firearm that’s designed to be used when the gun is pointed at something or someone is a Bad Idea. And anyway, this whole thing about being an “accident” is BS anyway…there is nothing accidental about where that officer was with the gear that he had, doing what he was doing. It is all perfectly predictable that guns are fired by militarized police in Gun Land USA.↩
From 1912 to 1952, the Olympics gave out medals for the arts in events like graphic works, compositions for orchestra, epic works (literature), statues, and drawings & watercolors.
The Art of Work in the Age of AI Production
I enjoyed Ezra Klein’s podcast conversation with Nilay Patel, the editor of The Verge. They talked about media and AI mostly.
(First of all, anyone who says they’re trying to “revolutionize the media through blog posts” is a-ok in my book.)
Anyway, here’s Patel on the limitations of AI and where humans shine:
But these models in their most reductive essence are just statistical representations of the past. They are not great at new ideas.
And I think that the power of human beings sort of having new ideas all the time, that’s the thing that the platforms won’t be able to find. That’s why the platforms feel old. Social platforms like enter a decay state where everyone’s making the same thing all the time. It’s because we’ve optimized for the distribution, and people get bored and that boredom actually drives much more of the culture than anyone will give that credit to, especially an A.I. developer who can only look backwards.
Later he talks more specifically about why curation will grow more important in a world inundated with aggressively mid AI content:
And the idea is, in my mind at least, that those people who curate the internet, who have a point of view, who have a beginning and middle, and an end to the story they’re trying to tell all the time about the culture we’re in or the politics we’re in or whatever. They will actually become the centers of attention and you cannot replace that with A.I. You cannot replace that curatorial function or that guiding function that we’ve always looked to other individuals to do.
And those are real relationships. I think those people can stand in for institutions and brands. I think the New York Times, you’re Ezra Klein, a New York Times journalist means something. It appends some value to your name, but the institution has to protect that value. I think that stuff is still really powerful, and I think as the flood of A.I. comes to our distribution networks, the value of having a powerful individual who curates things for people, combined with a powerful institution who protects their integrity actually will go up. I don’t think that’s going to go down.
Yeah, exactly. Individuals and groups of like-minded people making things for other people — that stuff is only going to grow more valuable as time goes on. The breadth and volume offered by contemporary AI cannot provide this necessary function right now (and IMO, for the foreseeable future).
And finally, I wanted to share this exchange:
EZRA KLEIN: You said something on your show that I thought was one of the wisest, single things I’ve heard on the whole last decade and a half of media, which is that places were building traffic thinking they were building an audience. And the traffic, at least in that era, was easy, but an audience is really hard. Talk a bit about that.
NILAY PATEL: Yeah first of all, I need to give credit to Casey Newton for that line. That is something — at The Verge, we used to say that to ourselves all the time just to keep ourselves from the temptations of getting cheap traffic. I think most media companies built relationships with the platforms, not with the people that were consuming their content.
I never focused on traffic all that much, mainly because for a small site like kottke.org, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do, vis-à-vis Google or Facebook, to move the needle that much. But as I’ve written many times, switching to a reader-supported model in 2016 with the membership program has just worked so well for the site because it allows me to focus on making something for those readers — that’s you! — and not for platforms or algorithms or advertisers. I don’t have to “pivot to video”; instead I can do stuff like comments and [new thing coming “soon”] that directly benefit and engage readers, which has been really rewarding.
See also Kyle Chayka’s recent piece for the New Yorker: The Revenge of the Home Page.
Perhaps the platform era caused us to lose track of what a Web site was for. The good ones are places you might turn to several times per day or per week for a select batch of content that pointedly is not everything. Going there regularly is a signal of intention and loyalty: instead of passively waiting for social feeds to serve you what to read, you can seek out reading materials-or videos or audio-from sources you trust. If Twitter was once a sprawling Home Depot of content, going to specific sites is more like shopping from a series of specialized boutiques.
I’m going to get slightly petty here for a sec and say that these “back to the blog / back to the web” pieces almost always ignore the sites that never gave up the faith in favor of “media” folks inspired by the former. It’s nice to see the piece end with a mention of Arts & Letters Daily, still bloggily chugging along since 1998. /salty
Designing a 3D-Printed Rollercoaster Clock. “I used to play tons of Rollercoaster Tycoon as a kid, and I spent a good portion of my life planning to be a rollercoaster designer.”
Ancient-ish Woolen Dutch Hats
Nothing more exciting than knitted items! This isn’t news, but a relative sent it to me recently, and I see it also made the rounds on Reddit a few days ago. Here’s the gist, per the Rijksmuseum:
In 1980 archaeologists investigated the graves of 185 Dutchmen — whale hunters, and workers at whale oil refineries — who had died on or near Spitsbergen [an island in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago] in the 17th century. Many skeletons were still wearing their knitted woollen head coverings. These caps were highly personal. The men were bundled up against the severe cold and could only be recognized by the colours and patterns of their caps. Presumably this is the reason why the caps went with them into their graves.
The hats look remarkably modern, especially if you zoom in. And in fact here are some modern caps, called Deadman Hats, inspired by the old ones. (More info and context for the Dutch hats can be found in this 2016 post from the blog A Bluestocking Knits.)
And this is maybe tangential, but it reminds me of an 18th-century kerfuffle I read about once, in which the young poet Thomas Chatterton claimed to have discovered a 15th-century poem, until a reference within the poem — to knitting — gave it away as contemporary, and presumably as written by Chatterton himself. Or that’s how I remember it, anyway … Although it looks like subsequent research places the advent of knitting earlier than believed at the time.
Even more tangential, to the above tangent: The smoking-gun reference to knitting doesn’t seem to actually appear in the poem, at least not as I’m currently finding it. (??) (The reference: “She sayde as her whyte hondes whyte hosen was knyttinge, Whatte pleasure ytt ys to be married!”) … Actually, I think I’m in over my head. … The “history of knitting” Wikipedia page also generally confirms this impression (of being in over my head).
Sorry to link to a paywall, but if you like my comics, you might really like Gabrielle Bell’s on Patreon, if you don’t already. Her latest post was especially excellent. (Or, for free from her Instagram: “New Patreon Tiers.”)
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