A short thread of videos that sync perfectly to other audio tracks, e.g. This Is America video clip set to Call Me Maybe or the Peanuts dance party set to Joy Division.
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A Syllabus for Generalists. Featuring resources for learning about geometry, chemistry, world history, home maintenance, origami, tying knots, and playing chess.
Floor Maps of Iconic NYC Fast Food Joints
When he was asked to design a new outpost of iconic NYC hot dog joint Papaya King in the East Village, Andrew Bernheimer went around to several other establishments in the city built to serve food quickly — Chipotle, Russ & Daughters, Katz’s, Shake Shack, Gray’s Papaya — and looked at their floor plans and flow of customers through their spaces. Mark Lamster talked to Bernheimer about the survey.
ML: I think at fast food joints we’re conscious that we’re in a very controlled environment, but perhaps don’t realize (because we are in a rush), just how manipulative that space can be. How did you see this playing out in the places you looked at?
AB: It ranged. Artisanal places (like Russ & Daughters) don’t feel manipulative in an insidious way at all (other than showing off some great food and triggering all sorts of synaptic response), while others do (Five Guys and their peanuts, a pretty nasty and obvious trigger to go order soda or spend money on WATER). We didn’t just look at fast food joints, but also icons of New York (R&D, Katz’s) that do try to serve people quickly but I don’t think qualify as “fast food joints.” In these cases the manipulation is either entirely subliminal and beyond recognition, or it has been rendered unnecessary because a place has become iconic, the domain of the “regular.”
Speaking as a customer, places like Katz’s and Russ & Daughters always felt like a total mess to me. Katz’s in particular is the worst: the whole thing with the tickets, paying on the way out, the complete lack of a single line, separate ordering locations for different types of food, etc.
That Gray’s Papaya that used to be on the corner of 8th St and 6th Ave, however, was fantastic. It had the huge benefit of being situated on the corner, but when you walked in, there was the food being cooked right in front of you. It was obvious where the line was and what direction it was moving. And after getting your food, you could exit immediately out the “back” door or circle back against the line to find a counter spot to quickly eat your meal.
The Most Sought-After Travel Guide Is a Google Doc. “Nothing is more embarrassing than waiting for a viral pastry because some influencer said it was yummy after not paying a dime.” Personally shared Google Docs or Maps are often more trustworthy.
Newly remastered and available on YouTube, Interview Project (presented by David Lynch) is a series of 121 interviews of people from all around the United States.
Photos of Spanish Human Tower Competitions. “More than 40 teams of ‘castellers’ recently gathered for the city’s 29th biannual human-tower competition — working together to build the highest and most complex human towers (castells) possible.”
The Distorted Paper Collages of Lola Dupré
Collage artist Lola Dupré makes these wonderfully weird images of exaggerated objects, animals, and people. You find more of Dupré’s work on her website and on Instagram. (via colossal)
Twin Peaks Actually Explained (in a four-hour video). “Lynch’s obsession with electricity and fire is essential to the theory” presented in the video.
I am tempted by this Lego Fortnite Battle Bus set. (Alas, it is backordered…)
Initial experiments in using Dungeons & Dragons as a group therapy tool are encouraging. “It seems particularly useful in combating the effects of social isolation and improving both interpersonal skills and intrapersonal skills (problem-solving).”
The trailer for season 2 of The Diplomat. Keri Russell? Witty banter? What’s not to like? I enjoyed season 1 and will probably give this a shot. Premieres Oct 31 on Netflix.
Radiohead’s Everything in Its Right Place, 800% Slower
Songs played back at much slower speeds were a thing several years ago — the effect can turn even the harshest rock song or bounciest pop tune into something that sounds like Enya or an ethereal Gregorian chant. I listen to these while I work sometimes and I’ve got a new one for the rotation: Radiohead’s Everything in Its Right Place, but played 800% slower.
See also the Seinfeld Theme Slowed Down, Justin Bieber slowed down 800%, a whole playlist of 800% slower songs, and, perhaps best of all, 80s Pop Hits sung by Alvin & the Chipmunks played at 16 RPM on a record player (“secretly the most important postpunk/goth album ever recorded”).
Oh, and some artists are releasing their own slowed-down versions of songs. LXNGVX’s Yum Yum comes in regular, slowed (my fave), super slowed, and sped up. Thom Yorke released a slower version of Creep in 2021. And Underworld released Slow Slippy, a slowed-down remix of Born Slippy, in 2017. (via @jameskelleher.pilcrow.ie)
Whoa, new Nintendo hardware! And it’s…an interactive alarm clock? You can wake up to the sounds of Zelda or Mario Kart, shush the clock by waving your hand, and if you snooze too long, the alarm will become more intense and Bowser appears.
“Covid-19 may increase the risk of heart attacks, strokes and deaths for three years after an infection, study suggests.” What’s more, the risk does not appear to diminish over time.
“One woman and two men with severe autoimmune conditions have gone into remission after being treated with bioengineered and CRISPR-modified immune cells.” This is a first for people w/ autoimmune diseases using donor cells.
The Best Panoramic Photos of 2024
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)
The myth of the climate haven. “Because of its speed and scale, however, human-caused climate change is especially extreme, and everywhere will be impacted by some degree of risk. There is no completely safe haven.”
Who died and left the US $7 billion? “It was the biggest estate-tax payment in modern history, but no one knew who made it. Then an anonymous phone call pointed to one man.” We don’t even know who our billionaires are.
Photo Remakes of Famous Art
I love everything about this…I scrolled through the entire list. This one was my favorite:
(via waxy)
This simple tool finds your Letterboxd besties, people who have listed the same favorite films as you on Letterboxd.
Forums Are Still Alive, Active, And A Treasure Trove Of Information. A huge list of still-active internet forums on topics like audio, drugs, plants, home repair, crafting, sports, cars, and all sorts of other things.
Imprints of Nature
Maximilian Prüfer makes art in collaboration with nature and animals like ants & snails. Using paper with a very sensitive coating on it, he’s able to record the slightest moments of activity, like a raindrop or an ant’s footstep. Here’s a video of some ants leaving their marks:
And some rain drops:
You can find more of Prüfer’s work on his website and on Instagram.
In their own words, what volunteer health care workers saw in Gaza. “Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die.”
Waffle House “has developed an advanced storm center FEMA consults with”. Their Waffle House Storm Index rates Hurricane Milton as a “Code Red”, meaning that they are closing stores in its path.
On Monday, Dave Winer’s Scripting News turned 30 years old. Dave is still one of the purest of the pure bloggers.
Stupid dipshits are starting to fill Wikipedia with “unsourced, poorly-written AI-generated content” (that is also totally false in some cases), prompting a purging effort by some WP editors: WikiProject AI Cleanup.
Green Day “demastered” their 1994 album Dookie into 15 “obscure, obsolete, and inconvenient” formats, like wax cylinder, Fisher Price record, Teddy Ruxpin, and player piano roll. This is amazing.
Erin Kissane on Trying to Save the Internet for the Humans
I attended the XOXO Festival back in August, and video of some of the talks are starting to trickle online. I’m going to highlight a couple of my favorites here on the site; the first one I’d like to share is Erin Kissane’s talk about fixing the social internet.
From her notes:
The talk was about why I left the internet, how the Covid Tracking Project got me back online, and most of all how the work we did at CTP led to me to believe that we — the weirdos of internet-making and online life — have to not merely retreat from the big-world social internet, but fix it.
Kissane talked about the work she’s been doing recently: the COVID Tracking Project, the Fediverse Governance project, and the Meta in Myanmar series. It’s a great talk…I recommend setting aside some time to watch it.
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS should be visible with the naked eye in the night sky tonight (Oct 9). “Astronomers are expecting the comet to be especially vivid, possibly rivaling the brightness of Jupiter in the night sky.”
“Milton Is the Hurricane That Scientists Were Dreading”
Zoë Schlanger writes about the potentially dangerous and incredibly powerful hurricane now bearing down on Florida’s Gulf Coast and how it’s been supercharged in several ways by climate change.
As Hurricane Milton exploded from a Category 1 storm into a Category 5 storm over the course of 12 hours yesterday, climate scientists and meteorologists were stunned. NBC6’s John Morales, a veteran TV meteorologist in South Florida, choked up on air while describing how quickly and dramatically the storm had intensified. To most people, a drop in pressure of 50 millibars means nothing; a weatherman understands, as Morales said mid-broadcast, that “this is just horrific.” Florida is still cleaning up from Helene; this storm is spinning much faster, and it’s more compact and organized.
In a way, Milton is exactly the type of storm that scientists have been warning could happen; Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, called it shocking but not surprising. “One of the things we know is that, in a warmer world, the most intense storms are more intense,” he told me. Milton might have been a significant hurricane regardless, but every aspect of the storm that could have been dialed up has been.
My thoughts are with everyone in Milton’s path and also with those still recovering & cleaning up from Helene. Please stay safe, everyone.
The passwords generated by Apple Passwords consist of two-syllable gibberish words designed to be easier to input in non-optimal situations. “The syllables help them to be memorable briefly, but still not memorizable.”
Mainstream journalists are clamoring for Harris to do more interviews, but these interviews haven’t been substantive. “Not only are these interviews not terribly valuable for the candidate; they’re not terribly valuable as journalism.”
The Move
I really liked this entertaining short film by Eric Kissack (editor & producer for The Good Place), in which a couple moving into a new apartment together discovers a previously unnoticed feature of their new space, which in turn…well, I don’t want to spoil anything. Just watch it.
A look at Mozilla’s rebrand. “Mozilla’s new logo is a flag symbol built from the Mozilla M that comes to life to reveal the company’s iconic Tyrannosaurus Rex symbol and mascot, originally designed by Shepard Fairey.”
Finalists for the 2024 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards
The finalists of the 2024 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards competition have been announced, so if you need a laugh, here you go.
There are so many “tag yourself” moments in these photos. You can check out all of the finalists here and vote for the People’s Choice Award until Oct 31.
From Kenji López-Alt, a list of potential red flags that he looks for when deciding to patronize restaurants. “I try to avoid spending my money at establishments where that money may end up in the hands of people who are abusive or exploitative.”
Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing, an investigation of fake objects. “Value is found through fakeness, not in spite of it, giving the fake object the potential to be even better than the real thing.”
Infinite Cosmos: Visions From the JW Space Telescope
Out today from National Geographic is Infinite Cosmos, a gorgeous-looking book by Ethan Siegel (intro by Brian Greene). It’s about the history of the JWST, humanity’s biggest ever space telescope, a machine that allows us to peer deeper & clearer into the universe than ever before, and some of the amazing results obtained through its use.
Siegel wrote a piece about the book for Big Think, which includes an excerpt. Gravitational lensing is so cool:
Even with its unprecedented capabilities, JWST’s views of the universe are still finite and limited. The faintest, most distant objects in the cosmos — including the very first stars of all — remain invisible even in the longest-exposure JWST images acquired to date. The universe itself offers a natural enhancement, however, that can reveal features that would otherwise remain unobservable: gravitational lensing.
Whenever a large amount of mass gathers together in one location, it bends and distorts the fabric of the surrounding space-time, just as the theory of general relativity dictates. As light from background objects even farther away passes close to or through that region of the universe, it not only gets distorted but also gets magnified and potentially bent, either into multiple images or into a complete or partial ring. The foreground mass behaves as a gravitational lens. The amount of mass and how it’s distributed affect the light passing through it, amplifying the light coming from those background sources.
Infinite Cosmos is available for purchase at Amazon and Bookshop.
Report: NBC is shelving Separated (Errol Morris’ documentary on Trump’s inhumane child separation policies) until after the election because they don’t want to offend Trump — they hope he’ll agree to another debate. (Maybe they bought it to shelve it?)
Nobel Physics Prize Awarded for Pioneering A.I. Research by 2 Scientists (John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton). I’m a little confused why this qualifies for the physics prize? Applied physics I guess?
An exhibition of dozens of iconic photographic prints from the 20th century, along with the annotations on the reverse sides including “crop lines, grease pencil markings, date stamps of when the photograph was run, captions used by the newspaper…”
Chef’s Table: Noodles
The food documentary series Chef’s Table returns with chefs & culinary experts from Italy, China, Cambodia, and the US who all work in the medium of the noodle. Here’s the trailer for Chef’s Table: Noodles:
The four main chefs profiled are Peppe Guida, Guirong Wei, Nite Yun, and Evan Funke. Now streaming on Netflix.
Tressie McMillan Cottom reflects on her profile of Sean Combs for Vanity Fair three years ago. “I’ve talked to some strange characters in my time, but this was in the top tier of strangeness.” Great kicker too.
An A.I. Model Helped Uncover 303 Previously Unseen Nazca Lines in Peru. “The A.I. model has been adept at detecting the smaller, relief-type renderings that mainly portray wild animals and are more difficult to find.”
Every Frame a Painting: What Would Billy Wilder Do?
Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment, Some Like It Hot) was both a great director and a great writer. In this video essay, Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou examine how Wilder balanced the verbal, dramatic, and situational ironies of his scripts with making it all work on the screen, emotionally and structurally.
Spain & Barcelona legend Andres Iniesta is retiring from football at the age of 40. I always loved watching him play…one of the all-time greats.
Private Snafu: The World War II Propaganda Cartoons Created by Dr. Seuss, Frank Capra & Mel Blanc. “[Private Snafu] was an adorable dolt who sounded like Bugs Bunny and looked a bit like Elmer Fudd.”
New Film by Errol Morris: Separated
Separated is the newest documentary film from Errol Morris. Based on Jacob Soboroff’s 2020 book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, the film probes the inhumane family separation and immigration policies of the Trump administration. From a review in The Guardian:
The Trump administration’s southern border policy began with the dream of a wall in the desert and ended with the nightmare of family separation: children torn from their parents and loaded en masse into wire-mesh cages. It was inhumane treatment, which was precisely the point. The White House’s intention was to use terror as a deterrent and effectively write every parent’s worst fear into law. “When you have that policy, people don’t come,” Donald Trump said blithely. “I know it sounds harsh, but we have to save our country.”
Errol Morris’s forensic, procedural documentary walks us through the bureaucratic backrooms to show how the policy was hatched and implemented. It explains how its principal authors — Trump adviser Stephen Miller and attorney general Jeff Sessions — junked the pre-existing catch-and-release scheme (which had allowed migrants to remain in the country until their immigration hearing) in favour of a bold new tactic of forced separation and mass imprisonment. If Separated lacks the rueful exuberance that typifies much of Morris’s early work (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, even last year’s John le Carré film), that is entirely understandable. The material is sobering and the mountain of evidence needs unpicking. The film-maker handles his brief with the cold, hard precision of an expert state prosecutor.
From a Variety review:
“Harm to children was part of the point,” says Jonathan White, a committed public servant who saw his department, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, hijacked by a blatantly inhumane strategy that the Trump administration implemented for its deterrent potential. “They believed it would terrify families into not coming.” White isn’t exactly a whistleblower, although he comes across as no less courageous in describing a dictated-from-the-top family separation scheme for which he had a front-row seat.
And here’s an interview with Morris & Soboroff about the film:
For his second term, Trump and his team are planning a blockbuster sequel to these inhumane crimes entirely in the open: deporting up to 20 million people (undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, and political opponents) with a minimum of due process, which will require a massive increase in the scale of the police state and concentration camps. That’s 6% of the US population. We don’t know if they will succeed but they will try. Those are the stakes.
Lots of good links and reads in Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything newsletter this month.
The British Pathe Archive
Newsreel archivist British Pathé has uploaded their entire 85,000 film archive to YouTube. This is an amazing resource.
British Pathé was once a dominant feature of the British cinema experience, renowned for first-class reporting and an informative yet uniquely entertaining style. It is now considered to be the finest newsreel archive in existence. Spanning the years from 1896 to 1976, the collection includes footage — not only from Britain, but from around the globe — of major events, famous faces, fashion trends, travel, sport and culture. The archive is particularly strong in its coverage of the First and Second World Wars.
I’ve shared videos from British Pathé before: the Hindenberg disaster and this bizarre film of a little boy being taunted with chocolate. The archive is chock full of gems: a 19-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger at a bodybuilding competition, footage of and interviews with survivors of the Titanic, video of the world’s tallest man (8’11”), and the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. And this film from 1956 showing how cricket balls are made by hand:
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