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Some profiles of first-time voters who were formerly incarcerated. “I’m carrying all the people that can’t vote in my vote. And that’s an honor.”

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I am *very* excited about this: Christian Marclay’s The Clock is going back on display at MoMA. Member previews: Nov 7–9, Nov 10, 2024 through Spring 2025. “The work is both a cinematic tour-de-force and a functioning timepiece.”

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The NY Times has had a difficult time covering the 2024 election in a clear, responsible manner. But I wanted to highlight this short opinion piece from the paper’s editorial board, which I’m reproducing here in its entirety: You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to le...

Based on Our Election Forecast, We Are 100 Percent Sure Anything Could Fucking Happen. “In 1 percent of simulations, Trump and Harris settle the presidency via cage match. In 2 percent of simulations, they open a quaint bakery in Vermont for dogs…”

No seriously, how is everyone doing today? We’re coming down to the wire on the most cuckoo bananapants presidential election campaign in recent memory. There’s so much at stake and there are so many unknowns, a potent cocktail for anxiety. If that’s where you are right now,...

Type Revival for Film & TV. “Type revival involves recreating period lettering and typography as digital typefaces.”

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Over the past several months, I’ve settled into a routine that involves reading one book at a time on paper or on the Kindle and listening to one book on audiobook. This way, I can switch back and forth without feeling like I am abandoning one book for the other. Right now...

Iceland embraced a shorter work week. Here’s how it turned out. “Iceland’s economy is outperforming most European peers after the nationwide introduction of a shorter working week with no loss in pay, according to research released Friday.”

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This is a great piece by Jamelle Bouie: Donald Trump Is Done With Checks and Balances. The first half is a short lesson on how our present Constitution came to be, which might differ slightly from the version you learned in school: It is important to remember that the Cons...

The newest book from Atlas Obscura: Wild Life: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Living Wonders. “Learn how dung beetles navigate by the stars, and trees communicate through their roots.”

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A pair of physicists from MIT and Jefferson Lab and an animator have created a new visualization of the atomic nucleaus.

For the first time, the sizes, shapes and structures of nuclei in the quantum realm are visualized using animations and explained in the video.

The video also establishes what appears to be a new unit of measure with an adorable name, the babysecond:

To better define the velocities of particles at such small distance scales, we establish the baby second as 10^-23 seconds. A photon moving at the speed of light crosses three femtometers (a bit more than the radius of oxygen-16) in one baby second.

Tags: infoviz · physics · science · video

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Crows hold grudges. “When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years, creating multigenerational grudges.”

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Nintendo Music, an iOS app for “enjoying music from Nintendo games”. The extended playback option lets you “lengthen the duration of certain tracks to 15, 30, or 60 minutes to enjoy an uninterrupted listening experience.”

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Game recommendation from Dan Sinker: UFO 50. “I’m doing a disservice in calling UFO 50 a game. Because it’s actually fifty games and, I think, a larger meta game or story that I still have yet to even scratch the surface of.”

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An oral history of HotWired, Wired’s original website. “We had a meeting to decide whether we should do writing that includes hyperlinks.”

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TIL that the dunk tank has extremely racist origins. Unbelievable but also not.

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Hey everyone. Since the membership program here at kottke.org is eight years old (tomorrow!) and the first anniversary of the new commenting system happened a couple of weeks ago, I thought it might be a good time to do another introduction thread. Here’s the prompt from the...

“If you were to modify the flash cooling process so that the toffee had more time to harden and work out its air bubbles, it’s possible we could get a type of Butterfinger bar that might be strong enough to be used as a makeshift building material.”

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So first of all, before you watch this analysis of Chris Marker’s fantastic La Jetée, you should watch the film itself if you’ve never seen it. It’s 28 minutes long, entirely in black & white, and is a “speculative fiction masterpiece” done with “422 photos, a voiceover, and a score”. You can find it streaming at Amazon, Apple, Criterion Channel, or Kanopy. You will not regret it. And then come back and watch this analysis/appreciation by Evan Puschak.

Tags: Chris Marker · Evan Puschak · film school · La Jetee · movies · time travel · video

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In a unique settlement agreement, Parkland shooting survivor Anthony Borges now owns the rights to the gunman’s name. “The settlement prevents the gunman from talking to the media or making money by telling his story.”

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Halloween is not really my thing, but I always like looking through some of the best mundane costumes from Japan via Spoon & Tamago and Nick Kapur. A few of my favorites: “Man who keeps getting mistaken for a store employee” “Students who went to the cafe to study but ended up spending the whole time reading manga and looking at their phones” “Person who was stingy and only paid for the smallest plastic bag” “That one coworker who kindly fills the office humidifier with water every morning” “Referee at a tug-of-war competition” Tags: Halloween · holidays · Japan 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

The plan to hand Trump the White House if he loses the election. “Preventing this scenario requires Republicans to act in good faith and certify the results of elections that go against their guy.” I don’t have election anxiety; I’m worried about this.

From Every Frame a Painting, an appreciation of Jackie Chan and his particular and excellent brand of action comedy.

I love old Jackie Chan movies. When I lived in Minneapolis, a theater there showed them on Saturday nights, late. Drunken Master II is a particular favorite…the final fight scene is AMAZING. The part about how the camera never moves and shoots wide-angle during his scenes is why action in contemporary Hollywood films leaves me yawning.

[This is a vintage post originally from Dec 2014.]

Tags: Jackie Chan · movies · timeless posts · video

From the NIH, a collection of 2,000+ public domain science and medical art visuals (molecules, plants, viruses, proteins, brushes for repeating items like DNA, fungi, equipment…). High-resolution, free to use — scientists on social media seem pretty pumped about this. See also PhyloPic, a collection of 10,000 “free silhouette images of animals, plants, and other life forms, available for reuse under Creative Commons licenses”. (via @waldo.net) Tags: art · science 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

In 2002, the US military lost a $250 million war game in 10 minutes. A newly declassified report “warned of military vulnerabilities to unconventional tactics that were later exploited by enemies in real conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan”.

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Lidar drone mapping has revealed previously unknown cities in the mountains of modern-day Uzbekistan that were important Silk Road way stations. One was bigger than many major cities in Italy at the time.

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Digital Divinity is a fascinating series on how tech is transforming religion, feat. a Muslim Strava-type app for prayers, tapping digital wooden fish in China, a sharia-compliant streaming service in Malaysia, and Bible advice from an AI chatbot.

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Edith Zimmerman has put some new stuff in her Etsy shop, including original watercolors and this print of Mermaids of North America (which I love).

Tags: art · Edith Zimmerman

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Bidenomics Is Starting to Transform America. “Objectively, and improbably, he has passed more new domestic programs than any Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson — maybe even since Franklin Roosevelt.”

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Kelli Anderson details how the clever A-to-Z 7-segment display mechanism works on the front of Alphabet in Motion, her new pop-up book about typography.

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