An article about The Quintessential Urban Design of ‘Sesame Street’ with a bunch of photos? This is extremely up my alley. One of the show’s big influences when it began was Jane Jacobs’ landmark book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which informed the set des...
Science Is Winning the Tour de France. Data, nutrition, equipment, and training are propelling riders to performances that best the dopers of yesteryear. “In other words, Armstrong on dope then would be an also-ran next to Pogačar today.”
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An analysis of every word that’s visible on NYC’s streets (from 18 years of Google Street View Data). “The data is astonishing; it feels like sifting through the city’s source code. For example, here’s all 111,290 matches for ‘pizza’, on a map.”
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Season 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is going to feature an episode where all the characters are Muppetized (with puppets created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop). I love this show.
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A list of the top 100 “most innovative, influential, and informative” podcasts of all time. The list includes 99% Invisible, The Big Dig, Code Switch, Heavyweight, In Our Time, Radiolab, Slow Burn, and You’re Wrong About.
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Meet Jackson Goldstone. He’s 6 years old, lives in British Columbia, and is already ripping it up on his bike. Here’s a video of him taking the long way around on his way to kindergarten:
Wow, if he keeps riding and improving, I wonder how good this kid could be? Ok, I’m ...
Is starvation in Gaza really Israel’s fault? The facts are clear. “Israeli officials have, for months — indeed, since the start of the war — not only admitted to working to restrict the aid that makes its way to Gaza, but bragged about doing so.”
Another piece from Hitler scholar Timothy Ryback that is uncomfortably resonant today: What Happened When Hitler Took On Germany’s Central Banker.
José Andrés: The World Cannot Stand By With Gaza on the Brink of Famine. “There is no excuse for the world to stand by and watch two million human beings suffer on the brink of full-blown famine.”
From MinuteEarth, a quick tour of all the different kinds of dogs in the world, wild & domesticated, and how they are related to each other.
Great Danes are the tallest dogs in the world. Standing on his hind legs, the Great Dane Zeus was taller than Shaq. He could drink directly from the kitchen sink.
Tags: dogs · science · video
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Watch this: Chinese EV maker BYD built a driverless car that can *jump over potholes*, has a top speed of 243mph, and can charge from 30% to 80% battery in 10 minutes. It’s a Mario Kart World kart IRL — hold ZR to Charge Jump!
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New York Times’ Style Guide Substitutions for “The President Violated the Constitution”. “The president, tiptoeing precipitously down the sidelines of legality, inadvertently ran the constitutional football out of bounds.”
Is this the beginning of the end of HIV/AIDS? Lenacapavir “offers 100% protection” against contracting HIV and there are already 6 generic manufacturers lined up to produce the drug under royalty-free licensing agreements.
“Alto turns your Apple Notes into a website.”
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From Genny Rumancik:
Hard things are supposed to be hard.
Changing old patterns, ending relationships you’ve outgrown, raising children, creating from your core, letting go, stretching, growing, and stepping into the unknown.
The more worthwhile endeavors require you to ...
Carbon chauvinism, perhaps coined by Carl Sagan, refers to the narrow-minded view that extraterrestrial life must be based on carbon because all life on Earth is.
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Na Kim is one of the best book cover designers out there, and I love her set of covers for four of Vladimir Nabokov’s books being released in advance of the 70th anniversary of Lolita. Pictured above are her covers for Pale Fire (Bookshop, Amazon) and The Defense (Bookshop, Amazon).
Tags: book covers · books · design · Na Kim · Vladimir Nabokov
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The full official trailer for Tron: Ares. I want this to be good. Can this just be good, you know, as a treat?
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Artist Amy Sherald has canceled her solo show at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery because “she learned that her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty might be removed to avoid provoking President Trump”.
Slow Light is an animated short film about a man whose eyes are so dense that light needs seven years to travel across them. Everything he sees happened seven years ago, like a very precise, obligatory memory playback.
I feel like this is related to whether or not you can visualize things in your mind and also Braid, a video game where you can collaborate with your past self. (via colossal)
Tags: memory · time · video
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Six Films Better Than the Books They’re Based On. Including Jurassic Park, The Devil Wears Prada, and The Social Network. What are some of your favorite films that hold their own with the books they’re based on?
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They’re Made Out of Meat, a classic sci-fi short story by Terry Bisson. “Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal!”
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Over the weekend, I added a new feature to the site that, for now, is only accessible from the front page of the site, right after the third post on the page. It’s a list of websites and people that I follow — “kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fel...
In her last column for WaPo, columnist Catherine Rampell shares some advice for aspiring pundits. “Know your immovable principles and red lines — journalistically, ethically, ideologically — and why you’re columnizing in the first place.
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A lovely trailer for a documentary called The Nettle Dress. “Allan Brown makes a dress by hand just from the fibre of foraged stinging nettles over 7 years. A modern day fairytale and hymn to the healing power of nature and slow craft.”
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After Paramount cancelled the Late Show with Stephen Colbert after he criticized the network’s $16 million bribe to Trump, David Letterman’s YouTube channel uploaded this 20-minute supercut of archival Letterman footage trashing CBS. That’s the stuff.
Wilmer Chavarria, a US citizen from VT, was detained for many hours by US immigration, who suggested his job as a school district superintendent was fake. Chavarria said the ordeal was “nothing short of surreal and the definition of psychological terror”.
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