Brutalist cuckoo clocks

Artist Guido Zimmermann has updated the architectural styling of the cuckoo clock with models based on buildings by Bru

The 100 best one-hit wonders

Today’s playlist is The 100 Best One-Hit Wonder Songs: You can read the rationale behind all 100 picks on Consequence

The Americans is over, The Americans was great.

Given the recent Netflix-driven Cambrian explosion in television shows, there is no Best Show On TV™ anymore. But over

A visual history of light

From the Atlantic, a quick visual history of human-created light sources over the past ~400,000 years, from wood fires

The top 100 stories that changed the world

BBC Culture recently polled authors, journalists, and other literary types from 35 different countries and asked them “

The ABCs in motion

For this year’s 36 Days of Type project, Ben Huynh submitted this 3D animation of the alphabet from A to Z. You can se

You don’t have a right to believe whatever you want to

Professor of philosophy Daniel DeNicola on the right of people to believe what they want to believe. Unfortunately, ma

Sculptures made from scraps

Artist Lydia Ricci collects scraps (of paper, cardboard, etc.) and sculpts them into everyday objects. I love these

The whole world is The Onion now

(A version of this story is an excerpt from this week’s Noticing newsletter. You can read more about Noticing here.) In

In defense of boredom

Monica Heisey was recently stuck on an airplane without much to do. Luckily, she made an essay out of it. “Being Bored

Mosaicism, or DNA differences from cell to cell (not just person to person)

Science writer Carl Zimmer has a new book on genetics and heredity called She Has Her Mother’s Laugh. The New York Time

The history of escape

On the heels of Texas’s lieutenant governor blaming school shootings on “too many entrances and too many exits” in buil

Intricate circuit board model sculpted from plasticine clay

When commissioned to create some artwork for a London music duo, Tim Easley spent 80 hours making this model circuit

The official “Cheaters Edition” of Monopoly

Hasbro has come out with an official “Cheaters Edition” of Monopoly (available at Amazon) where popular game cheats li

Global warming blankets

Using simple graphic representations of annual temperatures (like this one posted by climate scientist Ed Hawkins), peo

The arrested development of the Arrested Development cast

Sopan Deb recently sat down with some of the cast of Arrested Development (Jeffrey Tambor, Tony Hale, Jason Bateman, Al

A graceful underwater dance by freediver Julie Gautier

Ama is a short film that was written, directed, and performed by freediver Julie Gautier. Ama is a silent film. It te

Bill Gates’ reading recommendations for Summer 2018

As he does every year, voracious reader Bill Gates has recommended five books worth reading this summer. Gates’ recomme

The Songs of the Years, 1925-2018

Back at the end of 2010, Ben Greenman created a playlist for the New Yorker’s holiday party that featured one song from

Ultra ultra HD 12K aerial video of NYC

Phil Holland shot some aerial footage of NYC that he stitched together into a video with a resolution of 12K. That’s a

The political alignments of Mario Kart characters

In this short video, Art House Politics goes through all of the characters in Mario Kart 8 and describes their politica

Ask An Ice Cream Professional: AI-generated ice cream flavors

Hello, it is I, once and future Kottke.org guest editor Aaron Cohen. In the years since my objectively wonderful and te

Raymond Loewy’s 1934 chart of the evolution in design

From legendary designer Raymond Loewy, a chart published in 1934 that shows the evolution in design of items such as c

Imaginary insects based on Star Wars characters

Illustrator Richard Wilkinson is drawing a series of insects inspired by Star Wars and other pop cultural items. Th

The coup has already happened

I’ve been thinking about Trump’s presidency in terms of a coup to come, but Rebecca Solnit makes a compelling case for

More trippy audio illusions

Hot on the heels of the Yanny/Laurel audio illusion, many people shared other illusions that are just as weird and fun.

Noticing Excerpt: Getting lost on the internet

Each week (more or less), I write a newsletter for Kottke.org called Noticing that summarizes the previous week, looks

1927 documentary on how to dial a telephone

This charming short film (part documentary, part cartoon) explains how to use a dial telephone: If you think about it,

Against political analogies

It’s a common and (on its face) rhetorical move: take something that’s happening now and map it onto the past. Better y

A year-by-year history of economic growth and pollution in the Roman Empire

A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzes deep ice cores in Greenland for trac

Degrees of Uncertainty

Degrees of Uncertainty is an upcoming documentary by Neil Halloran that “uses data-driven animation to explore the top

Plastic iceberg

Speaking of great magazine covers, for their issue on plastic, National Geographic put artist Jorge Gamboa’s arresting

The respect of personhood vs the respect of authority

In April 2015, Autistic Annie wrote on their Tumblr about how people mistakenly conflate two distinct definitions of “r

The hilarious cover of GQ’s comedy issue

I laughed for a minute straight at the cover of GQ’s comedy issue. Nicely played. (via taffy brodesser-akner) Tags: GQ

The Last Dance, a 10-part documentary on Michael Jordan

A 10-part Netflix/ESPN documentary series on Michael Jordan and the 1990s Chicago Bulls? Sure, I will watch the hell o

Hans Zimmer’s clever use of the Shepard scale in Dunkirk

I’ve written before about the Shepard scale and its use by Hans Zimmer in the soundtrack for Dunkirk. Zimmer and Dunki

Optimism

For the Universe in Verse 2018 poetry event, Kelli Anderson created this wonderful papercraft stop motion animation to

A breakdown of Black Panther’s visual effects

Black Panther animation supervisor Daryl Sawchuk goes through some of the digital visual effects from the film, with a

Sound illusion: Do you hear Yanny or Laurel?

Take a listen to this short audio clip of a computerized voice speaking a single word repeated twice: Do you hear it s

Maira Kalman’s books for kids featuring Max the dog

The New York Review is reissuing five of legendary illustrator Maira Kalman’s books for children that were originally

The fascinating history of the “orchestra hit” in music

I’m a big fan of Estelle Caswell’s Earworm series for Vox, and this most recent one might be my favorite. It’s about t

Old memories, accidentally trapped in amber by our digital devices

Part of what humans use technology for is to better remember the past. We scroll back through photos on our phones and

A short animated explanation of Stoicism

From TED-Ed, Massimo Pigliucci, and Compote Collective, a short animated introduction to the philosophy of Stoicism.

Intricate miniature models of rusty things

Eddie Putera makes incredibly detailed scale models and miniature scenes, often of rusting and decaying things. I lov

The cultural shift from not selling out to blowing up

In an essay called After Authenticity, Toby Shorin writes: I haven’t heard about anyone selling out in a long while. S