The 20 Best Podcasts of 2024, including podcasts about the Guantánamo Bay...
The 20 Best Podcasts of 2024, including podcasts about the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, Stevie Wonder, the NYPD, and guns.
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Last week, Alessandro Slebir rode one of the largest waves ever surfed,...
Last week, Alessandro Slebir rode one of the largest waves ever surfed, a 100-ft monster at Mavericks.
Embroidery Journaling
Since January 2020, Sophie O’Neill has been keeping an embroidery journal. Each day, she sews an “icon” to represent that day’s events and memories.
“I embroider an icon every day,” Sophie says. “So at the end of this year, I’ll have 366 icons.”
The 29-year-old has now ...
Mapping Police Violence: “Police killed more people in 2024 than any year...
Mapping Police Violence: “Police killed more people in 2024 than any year in more than a decade.” And: “Black people were 30% of those killed by police in 2024 despite being only 13% of the population.”
The top 10 videos shared by The Kid Should See This in...
The top 10 videos shared by The Kid Should See This in 2024. Includes how wire photos worked in 1937 and “living in a tree for 3 weeks to film 10 million bats”.
Happy Public Domain Day!
Yesterday was Public Domain Day and Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has the scoop on what works entered the public domain in the US on January 1, 2025. They include:
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms...
Apple TV+ is going to be free this weekend for non-subscribers. You...
Apple TV+ is going to be free this weekend for non-subscribers. You can stream Silo, Severance, Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, For All Mankind, etc. to your heart’s content.
Saying Goodbye to 2024
Well, I really don’t know what happened here. One minute it was the second week of January 2024 and the next minute we’re a scant 12 hours away from 2025 — a ludicrously futuristic date, a sci-fi date. And I didn’t do a media diet post all year! I have no excuse; it just…d...
Inside Zildjian, a 400-year-old cymbal-making company in Massachusetts. Their business took off...
Inside Zildjian, a 400-year-old cymbal-making company in Massachusetts. Their business took off after The Beatles’ Ed Sullivan appearance and the alloy they use for making cymbals is a closely guarded secret.
Great Art Explained: The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci
Curator James Payne’s Great Art Explained channel is one of YouTube’s gems. For his latest video, he takes a look at Leonardo da Vinci’s mural The Last Supper and explains what makes it such an unusual, impressive, and revolutionary work of art. Here’s how the main part of...
If the highly unlikely Silurian hypothesis is true (if the Earth was...
If the highly unlikely Silurian hypothesis is true (if the Earth was home to an intelligent civilization prior to ours), “it’s the cephalopods…who are the most likely candidates to have reached at least some level of civilization”.
52 things Kent Hendricks learned in 2024, incl. “walking speed on the...
52 things Kent Hendricks learned in 2024, incl. “walking speed on the streets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia has increased 15% since 1979” and “after fluoride is introduced into a city’s drinking water, the number of dentist offices drops 9%”.
77 Facts That Blew Our Minds in 2024
From The Atlantic Science Desk, 77 Facts That Blew Our Minds in 2024. Some that caught my eye:
5. Your body carries literal pieces of your mom — and maybe your grandmother, siblings, aunts, and uncles.
15. The weight of giant pumpkins increased 20-fold in half a century.
19. In the Middle Ages, people took their pet squirrels for walks and decked them out in flashy accessories.
31. One breadfruit tree can feed a family of four for at least 50 years.
38. Classical composers used dice to randomly compose songs.
52. Dogs may be entering a new wave of domestication.
71. The 10,000-steps-a-day goal doesn’t originate from clinical science. Instead, it comes from a 1965 marketing campaign by a Japanese company that was selling pedometers.
Tags: best of · best of 2024 · lists
Haalarit are overalls worn by Finnish university students, covered in patches they...
Haalarit are overalls worn by Finnish university students, covered in patches they get from attending events, organization affiliations, and friendships. It’s giving NASCAR merit badge pajamas?
The Walmart Effect. According to new research, “Walmart makes the places it...
The Walmart Effect. According to new research, “Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all. Sometimes consumer prices are an incomplete, even misleading, signal of economic well-being.”
Eight Clams Control This Polish City’s Water Supply
In the city of Poznań, Poland, a group of eight clams controls the local water supply through a clever bio-monitoring system:
These biological systems are comprised of eight mussels with sensors hot-glued to their shells. They work together with a network of computers and...
Great read: Heather Cox Richardson on Jimmy Carter’s “life characterized by a...
Former President Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100. Easily...
Former President Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100. Easily the most impactful former President in US history and, too rarely for that powerful position, a good man.
“Depending on the printer, trying to photocopy money might result in a...
“Depending on the printer, trying to photocopy money might result in a warning message or the paper being completely ink-filled.”
Crazy Football Commentary, Animated!
I’ve shared animator Nick Murray Willis’ videos before — he takes snippets of sound & dialogue from sports commentary & movies and creates context-shifted animations from them. For instance, in the two videos above with football (soccer) commentary, a commentator’s chant of “Messi, Messi, Messi” becomes a French street performer thanking the crowd (“merci, merci, merci”).
(Ok, I’ve caught myself attempting to explain humor, so I’m gonna wrap this up by urging you to watch the videos if you want.)
Tags: animation · Nick Murray Willis · remix · soccer · sports · video
The 7 Coolest Mathematical Discoveries of 2024, including “the biggest prime number...
The 7 Coolest Mathematical Discoveries of 2024, including “the biggest prime number yet, a new formula for pi, mysterious patterns in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and even a whole new kind of shape”.
“Architecton is an epic, intimate, and poetic meditation on architecture and how...
“Architecton is an epic, intimate, and poetic meditation on architecture and how the design and construction of buildings from the ancient past reveal our destruction — and offer hope for survival and a way forward.”
You can use this game to narrow down 30 monospaced typefaces to...
The most popular Wikipedia articles of 2024 (thru Nov 22), including Deaths...
The most popular Wikipedia articles of 2024 (thru Nov 22), including Deaths in 2024, Project 2025, Griselda Blanco, UEFA Euro 2024, ChatGPT, Taylor Swift, and Kamala Harris.
Costco Board Pushes Back Against Anti-DEI Activists
A group of Costco shareholders, emboldened by the Supreme Court’s continued assault on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, called on the company’s board to “conduct an evaluation and publish a report” on the risks involved in maintaining their DEI program, whi...
Absolutely brilliant interactive explainer on everything about the Moon: how it moves,...
Absolutely brilliant interactive explainer on everything about the Moon: how it moves, how it formed, what causes tides, solar eclipses, etc. So fun to play with all the gravity widgets in this.
A reader found her father in a photo on the back cover...
A reader found her father in a photo on the back cover of Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste. The photo was of a crowd of people at the 1963 March on Washington.
The unbearable slowness of being: “Streaming a high-def video takes about 25M...
The unbearable slowness of being: “Streaming a high-def video takes about 25M bits/sec. The download rate in a typical American home is about 262 million bps. Now researchers have estimated the speed of information flow in the human brain: just 10 bps.”
An Epic 2024 Movie Trailer Mashup
How to Make 80s School Cafeteria Pizza
Food historian Max Miller stumbled upon the original recipe for 1980s/90s school cafeteria pizza (you know, with the iconic rectangular slices) and decided to whip up a batch (with “pourable dough”).
Tastes just like it. You can like — all of those herbs are exactly the s...