Stephen Colbert is co-writing a Lord of the Rings movie. “The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past is set 14 years after the passing of Frodo. Sam, Merry and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure…”

“Feminism is far from dead, but people love to write its obituary,” writes Rebecca Solnit. “In reality, it’s naively defeatist to assume millennia of patriarchy…could be or should have been fully disassembled in one lifetime.”

We watched Zoolander last night and right before the Derelicte DJ throws on Relax, there’s a 2-second snippet of something that sounded super familiar. It took me a bit to track it down, but it’s trance banger Free by Mono Culture.

A new edition of On Liberty, a canonical work of political philosophy, “is the first to officially name Harriet Taylor Mill as a co-author alongside John Stuart Mill”.

“COVID probably killed 150,000 more people in its first two years than official U.S. tolls show”. Not surprising when you look at excess mortality numbers for that period.

“Plain text accounting is a way of doing bookkeeping and accounting with plain text files and scriptable, command-line-friendly software.”

Just renewed my membership for The Kid Should See This, a genuine internet treasure.

Hey folks. The site is going to be very light this week and early next week — I’m spending some time with my family and accompanying my daughter on some spring break college visits. I’ll be back to full force mid-next week.

In the meantime, I thought the open thread we did a couple of weeks ago was so lovely that it should be a regular thing. So, what’s going on in your world? What are you working on? Reading or watching or listening to anything good these days? How can we help you with something that’s been weighing you down?

Tags: kottke.org

An interview with Andy Weir about the accuracy of the science in Project Hail Mary. “I’m proud that the only true violation of physics in the story is something you have to go down to the quantum level to find.”

“Stop naming things after people, living or dead. No schools. No streets. No courthouses. No fountains. Just quit it.”

A cartographer posits that our maps should be messier. “The idea that we must have a crisp line dividing one country from another is often inaccurate when it comes to what states are actually claiming.”

This is a diabolical phishing attack. “That generated a real case ID, and triggered real Apple emails to my inbox, properly signed, from Apple’s actual servers.”

This is hilarious. A man was pictured in two different photos on the same front page of a local newspaper: one of him painting a holiday sign and a gs station security cam still of him taking a wallet.

“Some countries are better positioned to weather this energy crisis than they would have been just a few years ago. That’s because of the rapid growth of renewable energy, battery systems and electric vehicles…”

Of the current 200 nations in the world, the British have invaded all but 22 of them. The lucky 22 include Sweden, Luxembourg, Mongolia, Bolivia, and Belarus. The full analysis is available in Stuart Laycock’s book, All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded. Stuart Laycock, t...

An online museum of Chinese cigarette packaging art.

The words shark (the animal) and shark (a predatory scoundrel) may have two different origins. “This would make ‘shark’ possibly the only word borrowed from a Mayan language into English directly.”

Parachord is “a new kind of music player that invites all your streams, local audio files, and playlists scattered across multiple services to the same party”. Interesting!

Every Fashion Designer, Explained. If you don’t know anything about fashion, this video will get you up to speed quickly. Vivienne Westwood, Nigo, Issey Miyake, Miuccia Prada, Dapper Dan, Hubert de Givenchy, etc. etc.

300+ issues of the UK music magazine NME from 1969-1983. The ads alone are incredible.

“The Tenth Muse is an art discovery engine. Over 120,000 artworks from museums and institutions — searchable by feeling, mood, atmosphere, era, and medium.”

Typos Have Plagued Us for Centuries. There’s the 1631 Bible that says “thou shalt commit adultery” but James Joyce resisted some of his corrections: “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.”

Paris now has a cycling network bigger than Amsterdam and “more daily trips in Paris are now made by bike than by car”.

Photographer and drone pilot Pio Andrea Peri captured this overhead photo of a Sicilian city called Centuripe. Perched atop hilltops, the city looks like a person from above — even on Google Maps. (via daily overview)

Tags: drones · pareidolia · photography · Pio Andrea Peri

Gender Play in Nineteenth-Century Theater. “The most popular Shakespearean roles for women in the tragic repertoire were Romeo and Hamlet, but women also played Macbeth, Cardinal Wolsey, Shylock, Richard III, and Iago…”

A study pitted adults vs little kids to see which was better at making paintings in the style of Jackson Pollack. “The researchers found that the kids’ paintings made in this manner resembled genuine Pollacks more than did those from adult painters.”

Dawn Wilcox’s quest to chronicle the life & death of every woman in the US killed by a man. “Did women have no choice, Wilcox wondered, but to wander the world hoping never to step on a landmine of a man?”

Checking in with Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests, kinetic machine sculptures that move under their own power along the beach. Some of the most recent versions are quick fast and can even tow humans along behind them.

This is maybe the best baseball catch you’ll ever see. Or the most fun one anyway.

Miuccia Prada is worth $4.8 billion. How good of a person do you expect her to be? “I got to thinking about all this the other day while mulling the curious, oft-repeated fact that Miuccia Prada was, in her 1960s youth, a Communist.”