Exercise is “the single most potent medical intervention ever known”. “People sleep better. They have better mood. They’re able to breathe better. There are just so many ways in which exercise helps.”
Jason Kottke’s weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
- Generator
- Movable Type 4.2
The 2024 Architecture and Design Awards. There’s a children’s book museum in...
The 2024 Architecture and Design Awards. There’s a children’s book museum in Kansas City? And Miranda July renovated the kitchen in her rental apartment without her landlord knowing?
HTML: the Most Significant Computing Language Ever Developed
Tim Carmody has a great appreciation of HTML in Wired magazine: HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me.
HTML is somehow simultaneously paper and the printing press for the electronic age. It’s both how we write and what we read. It’s the most democratic computer language and the most global. It’s the medium we use to connect with each other and publish to the world. It makes perfect sense that it was developed to serve as a library — an archive, a directory, a set of connections — for all digital knowledge.
I love HTML!
Tags: HTML · programming · Tim Carmody · web development
The Criterion Channel’s collection of Surveillance Cinema, including The Conversation, Gattaca, Minority...
The Criterion Channel’s collection of Surveillance Cinema, including The Conversation, Gattaca, Minority Report, Sliver, and The Lives of Others.
Meta’s Free Speech Grift
From The Verge: Meta abandons fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram in favor of Community Notes.
Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are ditching third-party fact-checkers in favor of a Community Notes program inspired by X, according to an announcement penned by Meta’s new ...
The Militia and the Mole. “A wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover,...
The Militia and the Mole. “A wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell his family or friends.” He returned with a trove of documents.
DOOM: The Gallery Experience
Have you ever wanted to browse art from the Metropolitan Museum in a first-person shooter interface? You are in luck because DOOM: The Gallery Experience exists.
DOOM: The Gallery Experience was created as an art piece designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world...
My friends Matt & Kay have written a book about travelling to...
My friends Matt & Kay have written a book about travelling to all 14 National Women’s Soccer League stadiums in the US, documenting the highs and lows of each stadium. This is extremely niche and I love it.
Do You Enjoy This Amazing Newsletter? Here’s How You Can Help.
Every month, my friend Jodi Ettenberg sends out one of the best links roundups around, her *free* Curious About Everything newsletter. This month’s issue came out yesterday and there’s really so much good stuff in there — Spotify’s ghost artists, biofarming animals for liv...
Director Steven Soderbergh’s annual list of everything he watched and read in...
Director Steven Soderbergh’s annual list of everything he watched and read in 2024. (I would love to read little media diet-style reviews of all this from him.)
“I will never understand how Jan. 6 was not the end of...
“I will never understand how Jan. 6 was not the end of Trump. So, what happened? The blame largely lies with Republican political leaders.” Remember: Mitch McConnell plainly stated that Trump incited the attack…then voted not to impeach him.
The Truth About January 6th
Today is the fourth anniversary of the attack on Congress and attempted coup of the United States government and the man who incited it will be sworn in as President of the United States later this month. On this dark day, it is important to remember what happened and why, s...
Gigantic SUVs are a public health threat. Why don’t we treat them...
Gigantic SUVs are a public health threat. Why don’t we treat them like one? “Like tobacco, its use can — and often does — kill innocent bystanders. I’m talking about oversized cars.”
Clip is a “plug & play” unit that upgrades almost any bike...
Clip is a “plug & play” unit that upgrades almost any bike to an e-bike. The “no-tools” gadget clips onto to the front forks of a bike and provides up to 12 miles of range.
I loved the first volume of this, so I’m pleased to see...
I loved the first volume of this, so I’m pleased to see that David Whyte is back with Consolations II. “To become intimate is to become vulnerable not only to what I want and desire in my life, but to the fear I have of my desire being met.”
Male college enrollment could be dropping because of male flight. “Male flight...
Male college enrollment could be dropping because of male flight. “Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.”
Man-Made Structures Now Outweigh the Mass of the Living World
Biocubes is a visualization comparing the mass of the living world (biomass) to the mass that’s been generated by humans (technomass). From a piece in the Times about the visualization:
“The website enables many comparisons that, once seen, can no longer be unseen,” he said. For instance, humans outweigh wild animals 10 to 1, a fact that surprised Dr. Ménard. (“In my experience, most people expect the opposite.”) But we weigh only half as much as the livestock herds we maintain to eat. Perhaps more ominously, humans use 100 times their own mass in plastic.
Tags: infoviz
A list of advice for defeating the authoritarian threat. “Authoritarians want you...
A list of advice for defeating the authoritarian threat. “Authoritarians want you to feel powerless because it makes their work easier. Courage, faith, and optimism are essential. Fascism feeds on cynicism and pessimism. Starve it.”
Depictions of children dying were rife in 19th century literture, mirroring high...
Depictions of children dying were rife in 19th century literture, mirroring high child mortality levels in real life. “People who want to dismantle a century of resolute public health measures, like vaccination, invite those horrors to return.”
An online-only conversation from the British Library with Lauren Groff about her...
An online-only conversation from the British Library with Lauren Groff about her novel Matrix, Marie de France, and “violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in the medieval world”. Jan 14, £10.
Fact-Checking the Spiciness of ‘Hot Ones’ Sauces
The team at Howtown closed out 2024 by investigating the spice level (i.e. the Scoville ratings) of the lineup of hot sauces on the popular YouTube interview series Hot Ones while also teaching us about how hot peppers evolved and how pepper spininess is measured. (Spoiler: the sauces are not as hot as advertised.)
Cheers to Adam Cole for Peter Pipering this particular passage:
By picking peppers, they could pinpoint the precise percentage of each patch that was pungent, and some patches were more pungent than others.
Perfect.
Huh, there’s going to be a Blade Runner 2099 TV series. It...
Huh, there’s going to be a Blade Runner 2099 TV series. It stars Michelle Yeoh & Hunter Schafer and will premiere at some point on Amazon Prime.
Say Nothing TV Series
Somehow I missed that Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent book on The Troubles, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, has been turned into a 9-part TV series (now available on Hulu in the US & on Disney+ elsewhere).
Spanning four decades, t...
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.
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.