I am almost positive that I have posted this before but I don’t care: rotating sandwiches. (There seem to be a couple spinning clockwise but maybe that’s just an optical illusion?)

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First published in 1955, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 (Bookshop) is a book by Milton Mayer for which he interviewed ten ordinary Germans about their experiences living in Nazi Germany. From the synopsis: “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer...

Jamelle Bouie: “Either democracy was on the ballot in November, or it wasn’t, and if it was, it makes no political, ethical or strategic sense to act as if we live in normal times.” 100,000%!! This is driving me *nuts*. Dem pols: fight or piss off.

🔔 Laaaast call for The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide. If you still have holiday shopping to do, it’s probably coming down to the last day or two for ordering in time for Dec 25 (Xmas and also the first night of Hanukkah).

36 Things That Stuck With Us in 2024, including Chappell Roan, Missy Elliott, Kendrick Lamar, The Substance, Twisters in 4DX (🤔), and Nobody Wants This. (I think there’s maybe a better version of this list out there…)

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A group of scientists warns against creating mirror cells. This sentence is somehow not sci-fi: “Drug developers might be able to create mirror antibiotics, but the treatments might not be ready to use until a mirror pandemic was out of control.”

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Writer Karen Attiah recently wrote about the pleasure of perusing other people’s personal libraries and then asked her followers what their “personal foundational texts” were…those books that people read over and over again during the course of their lives. Here was her an...

Then Comes The Body is a great short documentary from Jacob Krupnick about a Nigerian man who taught himself how to dance ballet from watching YouTube tutorials, the ballet school he started in Lagos, and the students who are branching out into the rest of the world. Ther...

It is easy to be cynical about the do-gooding motivations of a $3 trillion company, but Apple’s commitment to accessibility is admirable. This music fan bought Airpods Pro and nearly cried after learning they were also hearing aids.

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Yo-Yo Ma played the prelude to Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G major at the reopening of the Notre Dame in Paris. I bet this sounded wonderful, with the sound reverberating around the cathedral.

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Speaking of speaking of Tiny Desk Concerts here are two recent good ones. (Eep, wait, they’re all really good. What if any performance by a very talented performer in an intimate setting is always going to be special?)

Waxahatchee was solo in her 2013 performance, but here she is with an excellent five piece band, including Jeff Tweedy’s son on drums.

And here’s Doechii with a NINE piece. Gosh, this is so good and so fun to watch.

This is also worth a watch about how the NPR engineers make the concerts sound so good.

Tags: Doechii · music · Tiny Desk Concerts · video · Waxahatchee

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Apple has renewed Silo for two more seasons. The show will end after season four, having told “the entire story contained within Hugh Howey’s books”.

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A teaser trailer for the third season of The White Lotus is out and the release date has been revealed: February 16, 2025. Parker Posey? Walton Goggins? Yes, please. But I’ve got a love/hate relationship with this show (I couldn’t get through the first season but thought the second season was great), so I’m feeling cautiously optimistic.

Tags: HBO · The White Lotus · trailers · TV · video

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Speaking of Tiny Desk Concerts, the most popular set of 2024 (18M views) is by “Argentine power duo” Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso. Their music is “heavily dependent on electronic sounds” but for Tiny Desk they went traditional and it sounds great.

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Actual things my parents said while watching my son’s swimming lesson. “MOM: He’s so beautiful. The teacher must be beside herself. DAD: She’s barely controlling herself. She’s trying not to cry. [HE IS CRYING A BIT]”

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HPV vaccines have been linked to a steep drop in cervical cancer deaths in young women. “We observed a substantial reduction in mortality — a 62% drop in cervical cancer deaths over the last decade.”

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During the pandemic, Billie Eilish did a Tiny Desk Concert at home amidst a very faithful recreation of the NPR office. Last week, Eilish played a proper set at the actual office. From the video’s description: Saudade is a Portuguese word that can be roughly defined as a...

“Americans spend more years being unhealthy than people in any other country.” Among high income countries, the US has the highest rates of adults with multiple chronic conditions, shortest life expectancy at birth, highest rate of avoidable deaths, etc.

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Isle of Tune: a web-based game where you build streetscapes that play music when a car is driven on them — trees, house, and light poles all make different sounds. Big Star Guitar vibes.

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From an old version of the Wikipedia page for Warren G and Nate Dogg’s Regulate, an extremely dry synopsis of the song. “Warren, unaware that Nate is surreptitiously observing the scene unfold, is in disbelief that he is being robbed.”

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Hello, everyone. I just launched a few new features related to the comments here on kottke.org: 1. The ability to fave comments. This feature has been in test mode for the past few months, and I’m happy it’s finally getting a wider release. Only kottke.org members can fave ...

Once again, The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide. If you’re shopping online, especially from smaller retailers, getting your order in this weekend is probably a good idea for delivery before Xmas or the first day of Hanukkah.

Adam Sharp has curated the most flamboyant ways to tell someone to pound sand in other languages, and it’s delightful. There’s “go ski into a spruce” from Finland, in Brazil you tell someone to “go pick little coconuts,” while in Poland you say “go to the park and paint the ...

“What would happen if you spent a nanosecond on the surface of the sun? Would it warm you up, burn you to a cinder, or do nothing at all?”

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Watch a stone pine grow from a seed harvested from a pinecone into a small tree, a 2-year growth period compressed into just 110 seconds through the ✨magic✨ of time lapse photography. Don’t you snicker…it is magic! Its invention in the 1870s made it possible to observe, study, and appreciate objects and events in entirely new ways — it’s literal time travel.

Tags: time lapse · video

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Look at feisty confectionary upstart Skittles trying to get in on the NERDS Gummy Cluster candy innovation money bazooka. Freeze-dried Skittles? They sound terrible. I must try them.

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This is a really interesting video about something called the gang-nail plate, a construction innovation that enabled larger roofs to be built on houses, removed the need for internal load-bearing walls, and made the process of construction cheaper & more efficient. W...

I really like this: “If you think about it, the very best books are really just extremely long spells that turn you into a different person for the rest of your life.” —Jonathan Edward Durham

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Watching these expert restorers mend & refresh a pair of vintage Star Wars posters (neither of which features the logo we’re familiar with today and one of which is signed by the designer) is both fascinating and relaxing. It’s like the posters are having a spa day: bit of a soak, a gentle scrub, some light bodywork, and voila, you’re brand new. (via meanwhile)

Tags: art · movies · Star Wars · video

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Evan Gershkovich, recently freed by the Putin regime, has the lead byline on a story revealing the secret Russian agency that was responsible for his arrest and is “leading the biggest campaign of internal repression since the Stalin era”.

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