Deadpan comic icon Bob Newhart has died at age 94. I was a weekly viewer of Newhart in the 80s and, I’m just now realizing, followed in the footsteps of the titular character in being an NYC writer who moves to VT. 🫠
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Peregrine Falcon Killing a Duck in Mid-Air
The Peregrine Falcon is the world’s fastest animal;1 it can reach speeds of more than 240 mph during dives. It uses that speed to kill other birds in mid-air. Here’s a video of a Peregrine diving and killing a duck, shot with a camera mounted on the falcon’s back.
It’s cool watching her fly around, but the exciting part starts right around 2:45. The acceleration is incredible. The same bird does a longer and faster dive in this video (at ~0:55):
Here’s what the Peregrine’s dive looks like from an observer’s point-of-view:
Our family had a lively discussion about Peregrine Falcons around the dinner table a couple of weeks ago…I can’t wait to show the kids these videos when I get home tonight. (via @DavidGrann)
Although Joseph Kittinger and Felix Baumgartner might quibble with that.↩
Heartbreaking: This Guy Has No Idea That He’s So Strange And Memorable-Looking That Everyone From His Flight Is Using Him As A Landmark To Figure Out Which Baggage Claim Area Is Theirs. “Ah, there’s that guy.”
Keanu Reeves & China Miéville have written a novel called The Book of Elsewhere, centered on an 80,000-year-old warrior who cannot die.
Moving Posters for Studio Ghibli Films
British designer Hayden Wills has created some cool moving posters for Studio Ghibli films like Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away, and The Wind Rises.
You can see more of Wills’ posters on Behance, download the collection on Steam, or learn how to make your own moving posters in Photoshop.
See also Moving Film Posters. (via @0xjessel)
California has strengthened its electrical grid significantly in recent years: no rolling blackouts or grid emergencies during heatwaves because of solar energy and battery storage (“now equivalent to 5 very large nuclear power plants”).
Interactive map from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science: What will my city’s climate feel like in 60 years? “Many cities could experience a future climate unlike anything present on Earth today.”
Inside the Trump Plan for 2025
In a well-researched piece for the New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer writes about the “network of well-funded far-right activists” who are making plans for Trump’s second term. It’s more than just Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation — and as his first term showed, it’s not necessarily about what Trump himself wants, it’s that the chaos that surrounds him creates opportunities for these ultra-conservatives to wreck havoc on the freedoms enjoyed by Americans.
I can’t decide which of the plans in these three excerpts is most terrifying:
Stephen Miller, at America First Legal, has been devising plans to enact a nationwide crackdown on immigration, just as he had hoped to carry out on a vast scale in the first Trump term. The impediment then was operational: a lack of personnel to make arrests, a shortage of space to detain people, resistance from Democratic officials at the state and local levels. Miller has since vowed to increase deportations by a factor of ten, to a million people a year, according to the Times. The President would have to deputize federal troops to carry out the job, because there wouldn’t be enough agents at the Department of Homeland Security to do it. The government would need to build large internment camps, and, in the event that Congress refused to appropriate the money required, the President would have to divert funds from the military.
The person close to C.P.I. considered himself a denizen of the far-right wing of the Republican Party, yet some of the ideas under discussion among those working on Project 2025 genuinely scared him. One of them was what he described to me as “all this talk, still, about bombing Mexico and taking military action in Mexico.” This had apparently come up before, during the first Trump term, in conversations about curbing the country’s drug cartels. The President had been mollified but never dissuaded. According to Mike Pompeo, his former Secretary of State, Trump once asked, “How would we do if we went to war with Mexico?”
Those close to Trump are also anticipating large protests if he wins in November. His first term was essentially bookended by demonstrations, from the Women’s March and rallies against the Muslim ban to the mass movement that took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd, in the summer of 2020. Jeffrey Clark and others have been working on plans to impose a version of the Insurrection Act that would allow the President to dispatch troops to serve as a national police force. Invoking the act would allow Trump to arrest protesters, the person told me. Trump came close to doing this in the final months of his term, in response to the Black Lives Matter protests, but he was blocked by his Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
You don’t even need to be a scholar of authoritarianism to recognize where this is going — it’s not like they are being secretive about it.
The reintroduction of beavers in southwest England has resulted in a marked increase in resilience against flooding and droughts and the formation of habitats for endangered wildlife.
An Online Database of Marimekko Patterns
Maripedia is an online database of hundreds of print patterns that Marimekko has used in their products since the 1940s. You can browse by decade, designer, or style…or you can search by image. That’s right, just upload an image of the pattern on your pillowcase or dress and it’ll tell you who designed it and when.
Also, just take a look at these patterns:
Endless design and color palette inspiration. (via @presentcorrect.bsky.social)
A Guide to Miyazaki’s Weird Little Guys: warawara, susuwatari (soot sprites), kodama, Ponyo’s sisters. “Their designs are quite simple, but their meaning frequently is not.”
A useful tool for students & researchers (“educational purposes only”): Bypass Paywalls Clean extension for Chrome.
Lessons from the recent French elections. “You have to vote! You have to. You can’t do anything without voting. The freaking French, who’ll protest for anything, are showing up to vote.”
Project 2025: The Minority Rule by Extremists
I’ve been waiting, sitting at my desk with hands tented, for historian Heather Cox Richardson to write about Project 2025 and just now I found out that she did so back in March, because of course.
In almost 1,000 pages, the document explains what these policies mean for ordinary Americans. Restoring the family and protecting children means making “family authority, formation, and cohesion” a top priority and using “government power…to restore the American family.” That, the document says, means eliminating any words associated with sexual orientation or gender identity, gender, abortion, reproductive health, or reproductive rights from any government rule, regulation, or law. Any reference to transgenderism is “pornography” and must be banned.
The overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the right to abortion must be gratefully celebrated, the document says, but the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision accomplishing that end “is just the beginning.”
Dismantling the administrative state in this document starts from the premise that “people are policy.” Frustrated because nonpartisan civil employees thwarted much of Trump’s agenda in his first term, the authors of Project 2025 call for firing much of the current government workforce-about 2 million people work for the U.S. government-and replacing it with loyalists who will carry out a right-wing president’s demands.
On Friday, journalist Daniel Miller noted that purging the civil service is a hallmark of dictators, whose loyalists then take over media, education, courts, and the military. In a powerful essay today, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder explained that with the government firmly in the hands of a dictator’s loyalists, “things like water or schools or Social Security checks” depend on your declaration of loyalty, and there is no recourse. “You cannot escape to the bar or the bowling alley, since everything you say is monitored,” and “[e]ven courageous people restrain themselves to protect their children.”
It’s worth reading in full. I wish Richardson did better at citing her sources than an unordered list of links at the end of each article (and also, I wish she weren’t on Substack), so here’s the Daniel Miller note from the excerpt above:
You know who else purged the civil service: Orbán, Erdoğan, Chávez, Milosevic, Ayatollah Khomeini, Pinochet… There was also this guy in Germany in 1933 who purged the civil service months after taking power.
And here’s Timothy Snyder on dictators and declarations of loyalty:
The new bureaucrats will have no sense of accountability. Basic government functions will break down. Citizens who want access will learn to pay bribes. Bureaucrats in office thanks to patronage will be corrupt, and citizens will be desperate. Quickly the corruption becomes normal, even unquestioned.
As the fantasy of strongman rule fades into everyday dictatorship, people realize that they need things like water or schools or Social Security checks. Insofar as such goods are available under a dictatorship, they come with a moral as well as a financial price. When you go to a government office, you will be expected to declare your personal loyalty to the strongman.
If you have a complaint about these practices, too bad. Americans are litigious people, and many of us assume that we can go to the police or sue. But when you vote a strong man in, you vote out the rule of law. In court, only loyalism and wealth will matter. Americans who do not fear the police will learn to do so. Those who wear the uniform must either resign or become the enforcers of the whims of one man.
The best Prime Day deal is Apple’s AirPods Pro (2nd gen) on sale for $169 (32% off) — I think that’s the lowest price I’ve ever seen.
Immunotherapy Is Changing Cancer Treatment Forever. “Immunotherapy…has produced breakthroughs for previously untreatable forms of the disease, especially in liquid tumors like leukemia and lymphoma and skin cancers like melanoma.”
On Politics and Poetry
In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent.
Scientists extracted DNA from an exceptionally preserved woolly mammoth. “A complete genome has been extracted from a 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth, which might bring us closer to resurrecting the species.”
Jimi Hendrix Goes Acoustic
A true master of the electric guitar, Jimi Hendrix missed the era of MTV Unplugged by almost 20 years and video & audio clips of him playing an acoustic guitar can be difficult to find. Open Culture recently collected a pair of videos of Hendrix unplugged.
While Hendrix did more than anyone before him to turn guitar amps into instruments with his squalls of electric feedback and distorted wah-wah squeals, when you strip his playing down to basics, he’s still pretty much as good as it gets.
A YouTube commenter said:
Jimi could make an acoustic sound like an electric, and an electric like something else.
P.S. Here are several clips of another otherworldly musician playing an acoustic guitar…his name is Prince (and he is funky).
In this interview, Errol Morris talks about truth, documentary filmmaking, and AI. “Truth, I like to remind people — whether we’re talking about filmmaking, or film journalism, or journalism, whatever — it’s a quest.”
Important not to forget with all that is going on: Republicans will likely try to end almost abortion access in the US if the elections go their way this fall. Those are the stakes, period.
E.B. White Writes to a Man Who Has Lost Faith in Humanity
From Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note, here’s a letter written by E.B. White in 1973 to a man who said he had “lost faith in humanity”. It begins:
As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.
God, I hope he’s right.
If you’re on Bluesky, you can follow the Downticket Democrats bot: “I share donation links to US Democrats running for legislative seats in competitive districts.”
After 12 years, Pete Wells is stepping down as the NY Times’ restaurant critic. “I realized I wasn’t hungry. And I’m still not, at least not the way I used to be.” But also: “My cholesterol, blood sugar and hypertension were worse than I’d expected.”
Nothing About the Attempted Assassination Redeems Trump. “That Trump is a victim does not obligate anyone to forget the millions of people he would make victims if given the opportunity.”
It’s Random Midsummer Shopping Day Again! (AKA Prime Day)
For the last few years, Amazon has spent a couple of summer days putting a bunch of their most popular items on sale for their Prime members. This year, Prime Day runs from July 16-17 and includes a number of things that I can personally recommend (or are currently coveting). Keep in mind that you need to be an Amazon Prime member to take advantage of these deals: here’s where you sign up for Prime if you’re interested (there’s a free 30-day trial).
I’ve said it before: I love the 2nd-gen AirPods Pro and they’re on sale today for $169 (32% off). And I don’t think I’ve ever seen a lower price on the 2nd-gen AirPods: $69 (47% off, nice).
Oooh, Apple’s M2 Macbook Air is down to $800 (20% off). I love my M1 Air but am curious about a slightly faster machine… Or maybe I should go for an even faster machine: the M3 Macbook Air is on sale for $850 (23% off; note the coupon).
Apple Watch Series 9 is 30% off right now at $280. Apple Watch SE is 32% off, only $170.
This Breville air fryer is on sale for 25% off ($300) and this Philips one is only $90 (50% off). I’ve heard good things about these — should I get an air fryer? Is that an upgrade worth the counter space?
I’m surprised the Kindle Paperwhite isn’t available at a deeper discount (10% off, $135)…usually they are up to 40% off. Maybe they’ll drop the price tomorrow?
This is cool: the AirFly Duo plugs into a standard 3.5 mm audio jack (like on an airplane seatback screen) and then you can connect up to two sets of AirPods (or other Bluetooth headphones) to it. $36, 20% off. Oh, I’m getting one of these.
One my family’s recent favorite board games, Splendor, is 53% off ($21). And this technically isn’t a Prime Day deal, but I also noticed that there’s an expansion set for Wingspan that features birds and habitats from Asia ($39, 13% off).
Booooks! Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin ($10, 64% off). Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain ($7.50, 60% off). King: A Life by Jonathan Eig ($14.50, 59% off). The Wok: Recipes and Techniques by Kenji López-Alt ($30, 39% off). The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller ($8, 54% off). Ottolenghi Simple by Yotam Ottolenghi ($16.50, 53% off).
I do not play pickleball but here’s a deal on pickleball balls for up to 45% off.
The KitchenAid mixers are on sale. The 3.5-quart model is 34% off ($249) and is perfect for smaller kitchens with limited counter space. The 5-quart model (this is the one that I have) is $349 (27% off).
TVs are generally good Prime Day buys. Like, here’s TCL 65-Inch Q7 QLED 4K TV for $600 (25% off).
I have this paddleboard and it’s great for the price: ROC inflatable stand-up paddleboard ($200, 20% off).
I have no idea if this hand massager (31% off, $69) works or is worth the bucks, but I do think it would be funny to sell a gom jabbar test version of this as Dune merch.
This Levoit air purifier is highly rated and on sale for $79 (21% off).
I use these on the regular and they are yummy: Nuun Sport: Electrolyte Drink Tablets ($18, 39% off).
Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza by Ken Forkish ($20.50, 41% off). Everything you’d ever want to know about bread and pizza dough.
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Update: I added some more items to the list above, including a paddleboard and an air purifier.
“15 Books About Appalachia to Read Instead of Hillbilly Elegy”
From Kendra Winchester at Book Riot:
Since Hillbilly Elegy came out in 2016, I’ve experienced countless people claiming to now “understand” where I come from and what Appalachian people are like. But they don’t think of my childhood watching my dad lose himself while arranging music on his piano or my grandfather tenderly nurturing plants in his ridiculously large garden. Instead, they imagine the stereotypes of J.D. Vance’s version of Appalachia, where the entire region is made up of poor rural white people consumed with violence who have no one to blame but themselves for their life circumstances.
Vance is of course the Republican VP candidate who once called Trump “America’s Hitler”, supports total abortion bans, and says he would not have certified the results of the 2020 election.
Winchester goes on to recommend fifteen books about Appalachia that will provide a clearer view of the region and the people who live there. They include:
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte. “If you’re still wondering why Hillbilly Elegy is so problematic, I’d suggest starting with What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia.”
Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place by bell hooks. “In this poetry collection, she laments how Black Appalachians are all too often left out of narratives about Appalachia.”
Any Other Place by Michael Croley. “Croley’s perspective as a Korean American informs his writing as his stories deal with many topics around race, identity, and belonging.”
When These Mountains Burn by David Joy. “When These Mountains Burn features two men deeply impacted by the opioid crisis in Appalachia.”
See also Hillbillies Need No Elegy, an excerpt from Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy.
Investigation Finds Secret Service Failed To Account For Nation’s 393 Million Guns. “The Secret Service failed to heed the real threat posed to the former president by the hundreds of millions of firearms in the hands of everyday Americans.”
There’s a 25th anniversary edition version of Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe coming out. I devoured this book when it first came out and I still have not read an easier-to-understand summary of modern physics and quantum mechanics.
Baltic Ice
Oh, I really like this particular image from Bernhard Lang’s series of aerial photographs of sea ice in the Baltic (part one, part two). (via colossal)
Cyanokites are a collection of five paper kites of different shades of blue, a sly homage to the cyanometer, an instrument designed to measure the blueness of the sky.
Printernet: Get a custom print version of your reading list sent right to your door. Each issue has five slots you can fill with any text-based content (articles, etc.)
Molly White: Fighting bots is fighting humans. “Any attempt at limiting bot access will inevitably allow some bots through and prevent some humans from accessing the site, and it’s about deciding where you want to set the cutoff.”
The Cleverness of the Axe
There’s a version of The Woodcutter and the Trees series of fables that I ran across the other day that’s particularly relevant to this moment in history:
The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe; for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.
Or perhaps it’s always resonant because some variation of it has been told for thousands of years now.
Illustration in the triptych above by Ferdinand Hodler.
Area codes that are also HTTP response headers. For instance, 404 (Not Found) is an area code in Atlanta and 406 (Not Acceptable) is the area code for Montana.
Reading Miranda July’s All Fours
Links:
- Miranda July, All Fours (There’s also a sizable free sample on Libby)
- NYT: The Women Rethinking Marriage and Family Life Because of Miranda July (“the talk of every group text”)
- Yale Review: The novelist on the difference between emotional honesty and autobiography
Have you read it? What did you think?
This Crystal Fragment Turns Everything You See Into 8-bit Pixel Art, and It’s Fascinating. “The lens minecrafts scenery without electricity.”
Gene Kelly Doesn’t Want to Perform Singin’ in the Rain on the Muppet Show
The legendary dancer, actor, and singer Gene Kelly appeared on The Muppet Show in season five, in what turned out to be the last episode of the show ever filmed. The episode’s gag involved Kelly being under the impression he was turning up to watch the show and not perform. Kermit tricks him into it, but in the final act, Kelly refuses to do his most famous song, Singin’ in the Rain. Until…
As Jonathan Hoefler said about this bit on Threads:
For all the satire and irony and anxiety that shaped Gen X, we were so lucky to grow up with the gentleness, wit, kindness, and respect of Jim Henson, the Children’s Television Workshop, and public television generally. How lovely is this?
Enduring 129°F in Death Valley. “The breeze only makes things worse, by blasting apart the thin and fragile atmosphere of cooled air that millions of your pores produce by sweating. Your heart hammers faster and faster. Your cognition starts to blur.”
Ayo Edebiri Browses the Criterion Collection
As if we needed more reasons to love her, Ayo Edebiri is a total film dork. First, there’s the account on Letterboxd — her review of Empire Strikes Back: “this movie is great but I was really shocked by how ugly Yoda was sorry if that pisses anybody off but I had only seen baby Yoda and adult Yoda is fucking busted”. And recently, she totally nerded out in the Criterion Collection closet.
The actor shares her love for sexy and stylish heist movies like Charade and Thief; praises the work of Juzo Itami (whom she calls “the G.O.A.T.”) and his wife, Nobuko Miyamoto; and talks about the African American surrealist imagery in To Sleep with Anger.
So infectiously joyful! As one of the YT commenters said:
Between the prepared list on her phone and the Radiohead t-shirt I feel like this was the closest the comments section has been to having one of us in the closet
There’s a Devil Wears Prada sequel coming… “Gird your loins.”
XKCD: A Crossword Puzzle
Although I am slightly disappointed this isn’t a “real” crossword puzzle, I do admire Randall Munroe’s commitment to the bit. And then there’s the gray letters…
I’ve linked to these before, but the Do Not Reply images (which gently dunk on social media reply guys) are now available on their own site — and you can order IRL stickers too.
The Teasingest Teaser Trailer for Severance Season Two
Well, the teaser trailer answers almost no questions about the second season of Severance, so job well done with the teasing there lads. Here’s one thing though: the season starts on January 17, 2025 on Apple TV+. Oh, and this:
In season two, Mark and his friends learn the dire consequences of trifling with the severance barrier, leading them further down a path of woe.
Season 2 reunites its ensemble cast of stars including Emmy Award nominee Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Tramell Tillman, Zach Cherry, Jen Tullock, Michael Chernus, Dichen Lachman, Emmy Award winner John Turturro, Academy Award winner Christopher Walken and Academy and Emmy Award winner Patricia Arquette, and welcomes new series regular Sarah Bock.
✅ Teased
✅ Interest piqued
✅ New event created in my calendar for Jan 17
✅ And a stick of butter
Did you know you can renew your US passport online now? The State Department is beta testing the new online renewal system for the next several months.
New book out this fall: Comic Sans: The Biography of a Typeface. “Author Simon Garfield tells the story of how Comic Sans emerged from speech bubbles on educational software to become one of the most recognized — and reviled — typefaces on Earth.”
The Science Behind the Emotions in Inside Out 2
For National Geographic, Tony Hale (who played Fear in Inside Out 2) talks to psychologist and author Dr. Lisa Damour about Pixar’s new film, her role as a consultant for the filmmakers, and what science says about the emotions in the movie. From The Kid Should See This:
By blending Pixar’s storytelling with scientific expertise, the Inside Out films and this discussion help make the complex topic of emotional development approachable and more familiar. They offer viewers of all ages vocabulary to better understand and express their feelings, while normalizing the intricate emotional experiences we encounter throughout life.
I have heard a lot of good things about Damour’s books from other parents, particularly Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood and The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents.
Vox also has a really interesting article on the science of the emotions of Inside Out 2, with quotes from Damour and emotion scientist Dacher Keltner.
One of the things that happens when people become teenagers is that their brain becomes more sophisticated, and it allows for self-conscious emotions. Before age 13, kids are concrete in their thinking. They can’t always see things from another perspective. Then around 13 or 14, the ability to picture oneself on the outside, to imagine different scenarios, arrives as a result of brain development.
With that arrival comes the ability to be embarrassed and to imagine what other people think of you. Or to have envy, to want something somebody else has and to want to know why you don’t have it. Ennui is so funny and wonderful and really maps onto the natural disdain and over-it-ness teenagers can have for everything. Then, of course, anxiety is a major player in this movie. What anxiety requires is the ability to imagine and anticipate. Fear is our response to the threat right in front of us, whereas anxiety is picturing things that might happen.
See also The Making of “Inside Out 2” episode of Damour’s podcast.
As the parent of two teens and also as someone who perhaps remembers a little too much what it felt like to be a teenager, I found Inside Out 2’s portrayal of the emotions (and how to manage them) to be really convincing. (via the kid should see this)
The International Astronomical Union is currently running an open competition to name one of Earth’s quasi-moons. They’re doing this in association with Radiolab — remember their Zoozve episode?
If dragons were real, how might fire-breathing work? “A dragon could draw on some chemistry used by the bombardier beetle. This insect has evolved reservoirs adapted to store hydrogen peroxide…”
True statement that sounds completely false: Steph Curry cannot spin a basketball on his finger (without Globetrotter help).
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