Song Exploder talks to Theodore Shapiro about how he created the main title theme music for Severance.
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From One Million Experiments, a printable zine meant to be “used as a template for those seeking to make an activism or organizing plan” with knowledge distilled from seasoned activists.
The Curious 100 from The Eames Institute is, “a celebration of one hundred courageous leaders and creative minds across the United States who are harnessing the transformative power of curiosity to solve today’s most pressing problems”.
Indie game Blobun has a joke setting that eliminates its lesbian content. But the main character is gay “so flipping the so-called ‘lesbian toggle’ in the options menu removes her from the game and renders it totally unplayable”.
If you’re mad as hell, one thing you can do is run for elected office. Run For Something recruits & supports “young, diverse progressives to run for down-ballot races in order to build sustainable power for Democrats in all 50 states”.
A really important point from Masha Gessen about the Trumpist attacks on (and “denationalization” of) trans people: “The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others.” 🎯🎯🎯
A good, long piece from Thomas Zimmer about how we “underestimated the Trumpist threat and overestimated how resilient both the political system as well as American civil society would be…that is something we all need to grapple with in earnest.”
Timothy Snyder on the terrifying deportations being undertaken by the Trump regime. This is a prelude to any American being stripped of citizenship and expelled from the country for any reason (protesting, faving the wrong photo, using pronouns).
The World’s Deadliest Infectious Disease Is About to Get Worse. John Green, author of Everything Is Tuberculosis, warns that the Trump regime’s gutting of international aid and scientific funding will result in more death & suffering from tuberculosis.
Canada is so furious at the US right now. “Everything Trump has said and done has led to a level of rage and defiance that I think very few Americans fully appreciate.” And rightly so!
Beginning April 20, Pride & Prejudice (w/ Keira Knightley & Matthew Macfadyen) is heading back to US theaters to mark the 20th anniversary of its release.
Something new from Radiohead on the horizon? Radiohead Members Form New LLP, Historically a Telltale Sign of New Activity. New album? Reissue? Tour?
Ross Andersen writes thoughtfully about LeBron James’ protectiveness of his son Bronny James and accusations of nepotism. “The emotions of parenthood are gigantic. They can knock anyone off their game, even the great LeBron James.”
A bunch of people who have never heard of Radiohead listen to Creep for the first time. Some of them were in tears. It *is* a pretty great song.
The Pudding: How do animals sound across languages? “How can cultures hear the same physical sounds yet translate them into language so differently?”
This One Goes to 27
On this day 27 years ago, on March 14, 1998, I started this here website. I’m not sure what there is to say about the ridiculous length of time that I’ve spent doing this “moderately anachronistic thing” that I haven’t already said before:
A little context for just how long that is: kottke.org is older than Google. 25 years is more than half of my life, spanning four decades (the 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s) and around 40,000 posts — almost cartoonishly long for a medium optimized for impermanence.
As always, thank you so much for reading and for the membership support. 💞
Wired has a big story (150+ sources) that takes a look Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’. “The next step: Unleash the AI.” 😱
Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoir about working at Facebook, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (Bookshop), is on the bestseller charts after Meta tried to get the book pulled from sale. The Streisand effect strikes again.
Ted Lasso is returning for a fourth season. Not every actor is on board (yet)…it’ll be interesting to see where this goes.
Trailer for season two of Poker Face. If you haven’t seen it, it’s directed by Rian Johnson (Knives Out/Glass Onion) and Natasha Lyonne plays an itinerant Benoit Blanc sort of character. Very good.
Harvey Silikovitz tried 10 times to get on Jeopardy! over 24 years and finally made it. (And won!) “He’s pretty sure he has made history as the first Jeopardy! contestant to play with Parkinson’s.”
Mahmoud Khalil’s Detention Is a Trial Run. “You may believe that Khalil does not deserve free speech or due process. But if he does not have them, then neither do you. Neither do I.”
404 Media has obtained a list of 200+ sites monitored by a contractor for ICE (Amazon, Apple Music, BabyCenter, Bluesky, Facebook, Github, GoFundMe, etc.). They can “pull a target individual’s publicly available data” from these sites “all at once”.
US added to international watchlist for rapid decline in civic freedoms. The Us joins a list of countries with “deteriorating civic space conditions, in relation to freedoms of peaceful assembly, association and expression”.
Things have been a little weird lately so I missed this when it came out but lolol: mustaaaaaaaaaard!
It’s Infrastructure Week!
Following on from my post this morning, I think this is a good time to step back from the site for a bit and focus on some long-neglected backend things that just don’t get the attention they deserve when I’m busy with the day-to-day posting. There are a couple of projects in particular that I’ve been noodling with that need some focus, so I’m gonna do that for the rest of the week. I’ll probably pop in with a few links here and there, but for the most part, I will see you back here on Monday. Until then, be excellent to each other and party on dudes!
The creator of Poetry Is Not a Luxury Instagram account is coming out with a poetry anthology in May: Poetry Is Not a Luxury: Poems for All Seasons.
How Much Do I Really Need to Know?
On Inauguration Day in January, Eliza McLamb wrote about her abstention from social media for a month and the challenge of keeping up with current events “without either turning towards ignorance or overwhelming myself with information”:
I’ve been thinking deeply about this idea recently — how much do I really need to know? I by no means think that I (or anyone) should be exempt from keeping up with the political and social going-ons of the world. Certainly, it’s invaluable to remember that one’s personal life is not reflective of the lives of everyone else. But I have recognized an impulse in myself to keep intaking information, as though it were a moral imperative to know every meticulous detail of all Earthly horrors. And, as much as I would like to think that it does, I don’t think that this impulse comes from duty. I think it comes from guilt. If I couldn’t directly help, the least I could do was witness. The least I could do was watch, feeling increasingly helpless, feeling increasingly numb.
Ultimately, I realized that this impulse actually resulted in me feeling less about the things I purported to care about. All the information swelled to a terrifying, dizzying checked-out-ed-ness, where I would make my way through a timeline that showed me children missing limbs in Palestine to an influencer’s makeup tutorial to details about Trump’s incoming cabinet to a house tour in the Hamptons. The bizarre, violent juxtaposition of it all started to turn my brain off. It was simply too much information.
I read this essay a few days after it was published and have been thinking about it (and related articles) more or less constantly ever since, not only in terms of what media & information I am consuming, but also in terms of what I’m sharing here.
Every damn day over the past month an a half, the Trump administration has dropped some new horror in their attempt to speed-run the fascist takeover of American democracy.1 All of it is relevant and all of it matters. Just two days ago, Palestinian student Mahmoud Khalil, who is legally residing in the United States with a green card, was detained and imprisoned by DHS agents on some Trumped up nonsense about “[leading] activities aligned to Hamas” (he was one of the leaders of Columbia University’s Gaza solidarity encampment). This is right out of the fascist playbook; Adam Serwer:
The way it works is that you strip fundamental rights from targets with less political support that people will turn their consciences off to justify persecuting and then eventually the state can do it to anyone, that’s always been the plan. Immigrants, trans people, palestinian rights activists, eventually it’s going to be your turn when the regime decides you are an enemy.
Here’s Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as reported by the New Republic:
You are shredding the Constitution of the United States to go after political enemies. Seizing a person without reason or warrant and denying them access to their lawyer is un-American and tyrannical,” she continued. “Anyone celebrating this should be ashamed.”
“If the federal government can disappear a legal US permanent resident without reason or warrant, then they can disappear US citizens too,” she wrote in a separate post. “Anyone - left, right, or center - who has highlighted the importance of constitutional rights + free speech should be sounding the alarm now.
Trump said he was going to deport his enemies (i.e. people who oppose him) and you’ve read the fucking poem, so I hope that somehow this can be stopped long before it reaches 50-something, white, male bloggers who live in rural Vermont, not at all for my personal sake but for every preceding person they try this shit on, up to and including Mahmoud Khalil.
And but so anyway, the point is that there’s so much important stuff going on! Fundamental human rights are under fresh attack daily! This is not a drill! But at the same time, the fundamental situation has not materially changed in a few weeks. There was a coup. It was successful. It is ongoing and escalating. Elon Musk retains more or less total control over a huge amount of the federal government’s apparatus and its spending. Protests are building. Congress largely hasn’t reacted. The Democratic Party shows few signs of behaving like an opposition party. Some of the purges are being walked back, piecemeal. The judiciary is weighing in, slowly. There’s talk of cracks in the conservative coalition. We’re in a weird sort of stasis where each day’s events are both extremely significant and also just more of the same.
So, the question I’ve constantly been asking myself is: How should I be covering all this? What is the best use of your attention and my time, platform, and abilities? For the first couple of weeks, getting good information and analysis out about what was going on seemed most important, along with expert contextualization of events, providing actionable information, focusing on the stakes not the odds, and emphasizing the human stories and costs of the coup.
I believe all those things are still important to highlight. And writing about this still feels like something I have to do. However it feels increasingly unproductive for me to keep up with the “day to day” (even when that means something as consequential as the disappearing of legal residents for political reasons) on KDO. Other people and outlets are better equipped to keep you informed about such events. I do not want to contribute to folks feeling helpless or numb from information overwhelm — that won’t do any of us, or our future prospects for democracy, any good.
So yeah, that’s where I am right now — between the opposite poles of too much and not enough — if that makes any sense at all. I don’t know what the answer is just yet, if there even is one, but I suppose I will figure it out.
(I’m gonna open comments on this because I want to hear what you have to say about How Much You Need to Know or What You Want to Hear From Me, but I’m gonna strongly suggest that your personal opinion on our current political situation is better addressed elsewhere. Thanks.)
- Which was well underway before Trump even came along. We’re in the “suddenly” part of our “gradually, then suddenly” political bankruptcy.↩
The First Three Episodes of Andor Available Online for Free
Disney has uploaded the first three episodes of season one of Andor to YouTube:
No idea how long they will be up or if they’re visible outside of the US. I started an Andor rewatch last week and I am finding it more enjoyable and interesting than I did the first time around. The writers obviously did their research on how fascism, dictatorships, and rebellions work — in almost every scene, you observe characters reacting and interacting with the constraints of bureaucratic totalitarianism. Very interesting to watch in this political moment. (via @rebeccablood.bsky.social)
Eyes on the Street
I ran across this story from Vanessa Guerrero on Instagram recently. She originally posted it to Twitter a few years ago; here’s the full text:
Living in LA, I’ve lived in many a neighborhood in which police helicopters circle all day and they don’t do anything except be loud an annoying. You know what improved the morale and safety of my neighborhood in less than two weeks?
A new taco stand. I’m 1000% serious.
In general street food vendors on a block means more pedestrian foot traffic round the clock, if they’re open late, that’s more eyes in a neighborhood. Additionally in an area with many dark empty storefronts, literally adds light and vitality to the area.
More of the neighborhood is meeting each other waiting in line for nearby tacos. I met people three houses down I didn’t know. It feels like we’re all only now getting to know each other, over a torta and some soda.
They also posted up at a bus stop and out open until 2am. Meaning people waiting for a bus stop are not longer waiting alone in the dark. There’s a noticiable air of camaraderie, safety and enthusiasm.
Street vendors did more for our neighborhood than the city ever did.
City planners had left the area in disrepair. The vendors literally CLEANED THE BLOCK. THEY PICKED UP TRASH THE CITY NEGLECTS.
I’m serious when I say in the area they posted up, it’s markedly cleaner. This is not the work of the local waste removal services. This is taqueros.
I love this. In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote about the importance of “having eyes on the street” and foot traffic to building successful neighborhoods:
A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, out of the presence of strangers, as the streets of successful city neighborhoods always do, must have three main qualities:
First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space. Public and private spaces cannot ooze into each other as they do typically in suburban settings or in projects.
Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.
And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street. Almost nobody does such a thing. Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity.
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE is interviewing (current & former) federal workers for a series that “aims to capture both the personal significance of [their] work and its broader impact on the American public”. 8 stories so far — these are great.
“Covid was a privatized pandemic. It is this technocratic, privatized model that is its lasting legacy and that will define our approach to the next pandemic,” says Siddhartha Mukherjee. “There are some public goods that should never be privatized.”
I Am Trapped in the Criterion Closet. “How long have I been in this place? I cannot say. In the darkness, time has lost meaning. The only days I remember are Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978), the only nights, Nights of Cabiria (Fellini, 1957).”
When This [Medical School] Professor Got Cancer, He Didn’t Quit. He Taught a Class About It. “He wanted his students to understand the humanity at the core of medicine.”
The latest edition of Jodi Ettenberg’s link-drenched Curious About Everything newsletter just dropped. I was going to steal about a dozens links from this, but you should just go read and subscribe to the source.
Purged gov’t employees, while scrambling to find work & health insurance, face MAGA relatives who are cheering their firing. “Some members of her mostly conservative family have unfriended her on social media. Others are giving her the silent treatment.”
I woke up Saturday wondering how observers of Ramadan time their fasting in polar regions, where sunrise & sunset don’t exist for months on end. “Muslims in the Arctic are generally advised by religious authorities to adopt one of three solutions…”
A forthcoming novel from Patricia Lockwood: Will There Ever Be Another You. Really looking forward to this one — her No One Is Talking About This is a favorite of mine from the past few years.
A game called “It is as if you were on your phone” is designed to make you look like you’re on your phone. “You’re just pretending to be on your phone! On your phone!”
A collection of movie clips containing inaccurate binocular shots, “(i.e., two overlapping circles instead of one, as you would see in real life)” — including Rushmore, Das Boot, Ronin, Chinatown, and Superman.
From Ben Fry, a visualization of the 5,000+ covers of the New Yorker from the past 100 years. “The horizontal line/artifact comes from the way that they re-run their first cover (and more recently, a variant of it) each year on their anniversary.”
Star Trek: TNG Opening Credits, But the Theme Music Is Coming From the Enterprise
This is the dumbest thing but it had me rolling in the aisles this morning: Star Trek TNG Theme but the theme music is coming from the Enterprise-D. It takes a bit to get going, but I laughed so hard when the ship whooshed by for the first time.
The same creator has made a number of videos in this vein, including The Imperial March but it’s coming from Vader’s chest control panel and Star Trek DS9 Theme but the theme is coming from DS9 Ops.
This is fantastic and very much worth your time: Marcin Wichary’s deep dive into a staunchly utilitarian font called Gorton, which you see almost everywhere in American cities, especially NYC. “Gorton is everywhere in Manhattan.”
I Took My Work Outside Every Day for a Month This Winter. (“My work” = typing on a laptop.) “Even though I’m not perfectly warm, it lifts my mood to be outside. I can hear the community of songbirds holding their morning conferences, a barking dog…”
The 100 Greatest TV Performances of the 21st Century (one per show & actor). Ian McShane (Deadwood), Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men), Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag), Anna Sawai (Shōgun), Maggie Smith (Downton Abbey), Peter Dinklage (GoT). Who’s your #1?
Watch Eagle Chicks Hatching on the Eagle Cam
High up in a pine tree in California’s Big Bear Valley, a pair of eagles guard their nest…and we can watch them live on YouTube.
The nest is located in Big Bear Valley in the San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California. It is about 145 feet up in a Jeffrey Pine tree. It is the current home for Jackie & Shadow, a local bald eagle pair.
The female eagle Jackie laid three eggs in January and two of them have hatched in recent days and the third egg is hatching as I write this at Friday around noon. You can scrub back through the video to see the chicks and some feedings. Or take a look at some of the clips of important moments in this YouTube playlist; here’s one from yesterday:
A full log of the important events is available on the Friends of Big Bear Valley website and you can see tons of photos & videos on their Facebook page. (thx, rion)
Some graphs showing how people’s Letterboxd ratings of the Star Wars films have changed over the past few years. The prequels’ rankings have increased while the Rey/Ren movies have fallen.
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