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Hey, folks. I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to be away from the site for a couple of weeks for a family vacation. No guest editor or anything…just going off the air for a much needed rest. Wishing everyone well and I will see you in mid-June.
The latest issue of Jodi Ettenberg’s The Curious About Everything newsletter is typically great — every link worth your attention. Best to have a few hours free before diving in.
Astronomers discover strange new celestial object in our Milky Way galaxy. “It was the first time X-rays had been seen coming from a so-called long-period radio transient, a rare object that cycles through radio signals over tens of minutes.”
King of the Hill is returning after 15 years. “Hank and Peggy Hill are now retired and return to a changed Arlen after years of working in Saudi Arabia; and Bobby is 21 and living his best life while navigating adulthood as a chef.”
Taylor Swift has bought back the rights to her first six albums. “All of the music I’ve ever made now belongs to me.”
Teaser trailer for Wake Up Dead Man, the third in the Knives Out series by Rian Johnson.
David Lynch’s estate auction, including cameras, clothes, books, memorabilia, megaphones, scripts, vinyl, furniture, coffee makers & grinders, art supplies, musical instruments, etc.
If you can stop gawping at Alaska’s gorgeous scenery long enough, you can witness drone footage of a whole lot of salmon migrating upstream from Lake Iliamna1 to spawn. (via digg)
Lake Iliamna is home to the supposed Iliamna Lake Monster, a beast “10-30 feet in length with a square-like head that is used to place blunt force unto things such as small boats”. Where’s the drone footage of that?!↩
I like this song (Lifelike’s So Electric) and I like this video (footage of Olivia Newton John in the movie Xanadu set to Lifelike’s So Electric).
Two interesting things about the rock paper scissors game: 1. scissors were actually invented before paper, and 2. an early Japanese variant was frog slug snake (frog beats slug, slug beats snake, snake beats frog).
A supercut of every point scored by Kobe Bryant in his 81-point game in 2006. He only had 26 at the half and his team needed the points…they were losing until just before the 4th quarter.
The Criterion Collection is releasing a new boxset of Wes Anderson films, The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years.
Wes Anderson’s first ten features represent twenty-five years of irrepressible creativity, an ongoing ode to outsiders and quixotic dreamers, and a world unto themselves, graced with a mischievous wit and a current of existential melancholy that flows through every captivating frame. This momentous twenty-disc collector’s set includes new 4K masters of the films, over twenty-five hours of special features, and ten illustrated books, presented in a deluxe clothbound edition.
The boxset’s trailer is predictably Andersonian:
More details:
New 4K digital masters of Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, and The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, supervised and approved by director Wes Anderson, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks
This boxset will set you back a cool $400, but look at all that stuff!
The actor Patrick Stewart exists in the Star Trek universe and “Jean-Luc Picard is aware of him” and other little-known Star Trek facts.
28 slightly rude notes on writing. “Most writing is bad because it’s missing a motive. It feels dead because it hasn’t found its reason to live.”
Grammar movies: Apostrophes Now, Rebel Without a Clause, Gerund Brockovich, Alien vs Predicator, Indicative Jones and the Last Clause, Silence of the iambs, etc.
“All three of the country’s largest carriers (American Airlines, United Airlines, and Delta) are penalizing solo travelers with higher ticket prices than you can book when traveling with a group.” Assholes.
ESA’s Proba-3 is planning on creating an artificial eclipse to study the sun’s corona. The two halves of the solar probe recently achieved “millimetre precision” while flying autonomously in formation for several hours 50,000 km above the Earth.
Caine is nine years old, lives in LA, and built his own arcade out of cardboard boxes in the back of his father’s auto parts store.
You’ve go to watch until at least 3:10 when he explains how to check the validity of the “Fun Pass” using the calculators located on the front of each game. So so so good!
Don’t mind me, I’m just watching old episodes of The Great Space Coaster on YouTube (Does anyone else remember this show? I watched it as a kid along with 3-2-1 Contact, Captain Kangaroo, H.R. Pufnstuf, The Bugaloos, etc.)
In this video, a writer named Hannah shares an experiment her Intro to Psychology professor ran on her class. Here’s a transcript:
It’s 11 years ago, I’m in a massive university Intro to Psychology class. Everybody in my 250-person lecture is freaking out because it’s the last class before the exams and none of us are ready. Professor says, “you know what, you guys seem stressed. I’m just gonna give all of you a 95%, blanket across the board — but you have to vote unanimously on it.”
He puts the poll on the board. We vote. 20 people say, “nope, I don’t want the guaranteed 95%”.
He puts another poll up that’s just like, why? Option A is: I selected the 95% because I want it. B: I think I could do better. C: I don’t want a grade I didn’t deserve. D: I don’t want somebody else to get the same grade as me even if they didn’t study as much. And all 20 people who didn’t want the 95% didn’t want it for that last reason.
The professor said, “this is the most important psychological lesson I will teach you this semester. I’ve been doing this experiment on classes for the past 10 years and not one class has agreed unanimously because there’s always somebody who doesn’t want someone to have what they have because they don’t think they deserve it. Statistically only 10 of you will get a 95% or above.” Because in life, greed will always hurt you more than it helps you.
This explains the people who are mad about student loan forgiveness. Seems like that 8% is who’s running the country right now.
The 100 best sports moments of the 21st century (so far). Hmm. That’s all I’m going to say about this list. Hmm.
Re: SpaceX rockets that keep exploding: You Can’t Make an Omelette Without Exploding Several Billion Dollars Worth of Eggs. “Look, things explode. It’s just part of nature. Cybertrucks explode, and it’s no big deal.”
Alexandra Petri has some advice for the 2025 Harvard grad who will become ludicrously rich: “After the cataclysmic Event happens that unravels society and sends me scurrying to my luxury bunker, how do I keep my guards loyal?”
Among a number of things I’ve read online that I think about all the time is David Roberts’ 2020 piece for Vox about shifting baselines.
Humans often don’t remember what we’ve lost or demand that it be restored. Rather, we adjust to what we’ve got.
Concepts developed in sociology and psychology can help us understand why it happens — and why it is such a danger in an age of accelerating, interlocking crises. Tackling climate change, pandemics, or any of a range of modern global problems means keeping our attention on what’s being lost, not just over our lifetimes, but over generations.
Roberts cites the work of fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly in explaining the concept:
So what are shifting baselines? Consider a species of fish that is fished to extinction in a region over, say, 100 years. A given generation of fishers becomes conscious of the fish at a particular level of abundance. When those fishers retire, the level is lower. To the generation that enters after them, that diminished level is the new normal, the new baseline. They rarely know the baseline used by the previous generation; it holds little emotional salience relative to their personal experience.
And so it goes, each new generation shifting the baseline downward. By the end, the fishers are operating in a radically degraded ecosystem, but it does not seem that way to them, because their baselines were set at an already low level.
Over time, the fish goes extinct — an enormous, tragic loss — but no fisher experiences the full transition from abundance to desolation. No generation experiences the totality of the loss. It is doled out in portions, over time, no portion quite large enough to spur preventative action. By the time the fish go extinct, the fishers barely notice, because they no longer valued the fish anyway.
Shifting baselines can also occur in individuals and across shorter timelines, especially in intense situations. In a recent piece for the NY Times, M. Gessen warns that we’re entering a new phase of the Trump Era:
In this country, too, fewer and fewer things can surprise us. Once you’ve absorbed the shock of deportations to El Salvador, plans to deport people to South Sudan aren’t that remarkable. Once you’ve wrapped your mind around the Trump administration’s revoking the legal status of individual international students, a blanket ban on international enrollment at Harvard isn’t entirely unexpected.
Once you’ve realized that the administration is intent on driving thousands of trans people out of the U.S. military, a ban on Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care, which could have devastating effects for hundreds of thousands, just becomes more of the same. As in a country at war, reports of human tragedy and extreme cruelty have become routine — not news.
This stasis, complacency, and boredom is what I was getting at in this post from March:
And but so anyway, the point is that there’s so much important stuff going on! Fundamental human rights are under fresh attack daily! This is not a drill! But at the same time, the fundamental situation has not materially changed in a few weeks. There was a coup. It was successful. It is ongoing and escalating. Elon Musk retains more or less total control over a huge amount of the federal government’s apparatus and its spending. Protests are building. Congress largely hasn’t reacted. The Democratic Party shows few signs of behaving like an opposition party. Some of the purges are being walked back, piecemeal. The judiciary is weighing in, slowly. There’s talk of cracks in the conservative coalition. We’re in a weird sort of stasis where each day’s events are both extremely significant and also just more of the same.
Humans can get used to almost anything. At times, our shifting baselines can be a source of resilience even in the face of great peril. They also can result in great injustice. I don’t have any advice about staying engaged during periods like these, but awareness is surely part of it.
Pediatrician Dr. Annie Andrews is running against Lindsey Graham for one of South Carolina’s Senate seats. Based on the commercial launching her campaign, I kinda want to move to SC just so I can vote for her.
Harvard student: “I shall fight Secretary of Education Linda E. McMahon in a televised cage match, the winner of which gets $2.7 billion in federal grants and the power to uphold or destroy America’s continued technological and economic success.”
New apt acronym for America’s lamest president: TACO, which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. He should be hounded about his perpetual lack of spine…this is the sort of thing that really gnaws at fake strongmen.
The curse of Toumaï: an ancient skull, a disputed femur and a bitter feud over humanity’s origins. “‘This piece,’ he warned, holding it before her: ‘You forget you ever saw it.’” Great read.
This rings true: “Elon Musk is less like Tony Stark and more like Michael Scott.” The future he’s selling us is Stark Industries but what we’re getting is Dunder Mifflin.
Happy 20th anniversary to Swissmiss, Tina Roth Eisenberg’s design/creativity/positivity blog.
Born in 1790 just a few months after George Washington took office, John Tyler was America’s 10th president, serving from 1841-1845. Harrison Ruffin Tyler, Tyler’s last living grandson, died this past weekend at the age of 96.
As long as he lived, much of the great sweep of American history could be contained in just three generations of memory.
I wrote about Harrison and his brother Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. back in 2012 and again in 2020 when Lyon died.
John Tyler was born barely a year into George Washington’s first term and undoubtedly met and even worked with some of the nation’s earliest political figures, including Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams. Amazing to think that just three generations of the same family stretch almost all the way back to the founding of our country. It underscores just how young the United States is — after all, the last person to receive a Civil War pension just died back in June.
You can read more about these sorts of human bucket brigades across time on The Great Span page. (via @jeremywallace.bsky.social)
A recent study: “Ibn al-Shatir was the first astronomer to have successfully challenged the Ptolemaic cosmological system of planets revolving around Earth and corrected the theory’s inaccuracies about two centuries before Copernicus.”
Top 25 Premier League goals of 2024-25 season. I like a good screamer from outside the box as much as anyone, but where are the good team goals? Were there any?
Resourceful: “Shooting down a $100,000 Russian drone with an air-defense missile might cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Shooting it down with a shotgun from a light plane might cost a few thousand dollars.”
Hank Green believes how grocery stores are organized is broken. (True.) His solution is to take inspiration from libraries and organize the shelves of every grocery store in the entire world according to the Chewy Decimal System.
TIL that maybe librarians don’t like the Dewey Decimal System?
Dewey sucks so much and it’s never going away. It was designed in a 19th century white dude mindset that splits religion (200-299) into Christianity (200-289) and Other (290-299), sections books about indigenous peoples in the history section (900s) rather than the culture section (300s) as if they don’t continue to exist, and arbitrarily separates wild animals (in the 500s) from pets and working animals (600s). It’s particularly unintuitive for kids, who often are taught it before they’re taught what decimals are, and has multiple better alternatives that aren’t used because it’s financially unfeasible for large collections to be changed.
(thx, caroline)
This a great piece about the challenges many are facing in participating in activism. “Nothing will feel like enough because everything we know and love is at stake.”
You can play Doom in this NY Times article about how you can run Doom almost anywhere (in a PDF, on an iPod, on a pregnancy test, on a treadmill, etc.) “Doom was developed in a really unique way that lent a high degree of portability to its code base.”
A Disillusioned Urban Planning Glossary. “NIMBY – Stands for ‘Not in My Backyard.’ From the Old English nimm bæc yarde, meaning ‘no change shall occur within sightline of my bird feeder.’”
This looks really interesting: Rogue One recut and rescored in the style of a three-episode Andor arc that moves “its energy from emulating the jaunty, swashbuckling [original trilogy] to more in line with its prequel show’s feel”.
We’re witnessing the reversal of Reconstruction. “ICE raids are the new night rides. Detention centers are the new plantations. The trauma, the terror, the family separations — they’re not unintended consequences. They are the point.”
I love this gorgeous woodblock print from Hasui Kawase, View of Azalea Garden from Mt. Fuji. Hasui was a significant influence on Studio Ghibli & Hayao Miyazaki.
After all, the influence of Kawase on Ghibli, Miyazaki and his team of genius illustrators and animators is plain to see, and Miyazaki himself has previously stated his deep admiration for the legendary painter. The ability of Kawase to capture natural beauty alongside the human experience plays a significant part in Miyazaki’s love for Kawase, and it finds its way into several of the best Studio Ghibli films.
The likes of My Neighbour Totoro, Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke all feature landscapes that are highly reminiscent of Kawase’s woodblock print style. Whether in the lush forests or beautiful countryside settings, it’s clear that Miyazaki was always keen on paying his respects to one of his favourite artists.
Here are a few more of Hasui’s hundreds of works:
You can find a large catalog of Hasui’s work here, at Wikimedia Commons, and at Flickr.
It usually takes weeks to climb Mt Everest due to altitude acclimation. A group of British climbers did it in less than a week by inhaling xenon gas, which allegedly helps acclimatize people to high altitudes more quickly.
The Who Cares Era. “At a time where the government’s uncaring boot is pressing down on all of our necks, the best way to fight back is to care. Care loudly. Tell others. Get going.”
European airlines are redirecting flights from American cities to destinations like Canada, Mexico, and Brazil as “more passengers [opt] for destinations that offer smoother entry, better seasonal deals, and fewer political complications”.
These are owls in towels. That’s it, that’s the post. Nothing in the animal kingdom emotes better than an owl. (thx, david)
“Fascism sets in EXACTLY like this. Days go by. Nothing improves. The people wait with bated breath for SOMETHING or SOMEONE to help…”
Some photos, videos, and observations from a visit to a West Virginian snake handling church. “Chris Wolford, their pastor, handles snakes, drinks strychnine, brushes fire across his face and hands…”
The Crafters of Andor. Anil Dash has compiled the DVD extras for Andor, an expertly crafted action drama about fighting fascism that also happens to be a Star Wars series.
It’s Friday and so we’ll end the week with a pair of poems. Good Bones by Maggie Smith:
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
Those are just excerpts…click through to read the whole poems. I’ll see you next week.
A new offering from Swiss hotels: Bees & Friends. “We’re welcoming bees, butterflies, insects and hedgehogs with their own charming little homes, nestled right next to our hotels.”
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