We’re going to use the movie as a sort of primer to help explain what patriarchy actually is, what it isn’t, and how it ends up harming everyone, including men. To have any kind of productive conversation, we have to get over that defensiveness that so many men feel whenever they they come across the word “patriarchy”. Contrary to popular belief, patriarchy is not a synonym for men, nor is it a code word for masculinity, and it certainly has nothing to do with hating men.
The bibliography in the description of the video lists three books if you’d like to do some reading on the topic:
P.S. While I was watching this video, YouTube removed it after Warner Brothers “blocked it on copyright grounds”. The channel is challenging the takedown and has uploaded it to Patreon and archive.org in the meantime. (I’m leaving the embed in case it comes back to life.) This bullshit is so irritating — Google just totally letting massive media corporations decide what’s copyright infringing without recourse. And Warner (and Gerwig & Robbie too to some lesser extent)…you made the fucking movie to get a message across and to get people talking and someone posts a thoughtful video essay about the central issue of the film and you fucking take it down?
In order to leave comments on posts, you need to be a current kottke.org member. If you'd like to sign up for a membership to support the site and join the conversation, you can explore your options here.
A lovely essay: Variations on the Theme of Silence. “I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.”
Seabike is an “underwater mobility device” that can propel you through the water at “superhuman speed”. You pedal with your feet, driving a small propellor.
The movies begin with the camera located nearly 400 million miles (640 million kilometers) away, with the black hole quickly filling the view. Along the way, the black hole’s disk, photon rings, and the night sky become increasingly distorted — and even form multiple images as their light traverses the increasingly warped space-time.
In real time, the camera takes about 3 hours to fall to the event horizon, executing almost two complete 30-minute orbits along the way. But to anyone observing from afar, it would never quite get there. As space-time becomes ever more distorted closer to the horizon, the image of the camera would slow and then seem to freeze just shy of it. This is why astronomers originally referred to black holes as “frozen stars.”
At the event horizon, even space-time itself flows inward at the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit. Once inside it, both the camera and the space-time in which it’s moving rush toward the black hole’s center — a one-dimensional point called a singularity, where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate.
“Once the camera crosses the horizon, its destruction by spaghettification is just 12.8 seconds away,” Schnittman said. From there, it’s only 79,500 miles (128,000 kilometers) to the singularity. This final leg of the voyage is over in the blink of an eye.
Here are a couple newish lyric videos that share a nice spirit of “Good riddance!!!”-ness. I learned of the Chappell Roan video from a comment in a post from earlier this week (comment of the week?? by my standards, anyway), and I love it. (Here’s Roan’s awesome Tiny Desk Concert, by the way.) And the Miranda Lambert reminds me of a specific situation in my own life and makes me smile. 🔥👖
AI Copilots Are Changing How Coding Is Taught; they can “free up time for us to teach higher-level thinking — for example, how to design software, what is the right problem to solve, and what are the solutions.”
Some tips for long walks. “We’re prone to lean forward when we walk. Over long distances, this wreaks havoc on one’s lower back and hips. As such, ‘head over hips’ is something to be conscious of.”
If you play carefully by not stomping enemies, not collecting coins, not eating mushrooms or flowers, and hopping on the flagpole at the very last second, you can rescue the princess in Super Mario Bros with only 500 points.
One bit is surprisingly tricky:
How tough is that jump in 8-1? Well, the timing of the liftoff, the duration of holding the jump button, and the timing of the wall jump are all frame perfect. NES games run at 60 frames per second, which means all the necessary inputs need to be timed within 1/60 of a second. In addition, the starting position before running I used not only has to be on the right pixel, but also the x sub-pixel has to fall within a certain range (technical stuff blah blah blah). In short, it’s a pretty annoying jump.
When I was a kid, I left my NES on for three straight days to flip the score in SMB, using the 1UP trick and another spot in the game to get many lives and points. Scoring lower would have been a lot quicker.
“Was the human voice the very first musical instrument? I don’t know, but I expect it will end up as the very last one.” Tyler Cowen shared an eclectic choral music playlist the other day, with the preceding lines as an intro, and the idea of a “last instrument” was pleasingly creepy to me. It also reminded me of the above video, of artist Maria Coman singing the “Love is patient, love is kind” lines from the First Epistle to the Corinthians, from the Bible. (1 Corinthians 13: 1-8.) More of Coman’s music can be found on her website. And what is that church she’s in?
A couple years ago, the NYT columnist David Brooks published a story called “The Greatest Life Hacks in the World (For Now).” It was mostly a tribute to Kevin Kelly’s famous life advice posts, but Brooks added one of his own, and I’ve thought of at least once a week since:
…over the last few years I have embraced, almost as a religious mantra, the idea that if you’re not sure you can carry it all, take two trips.
Take two trips. Nothing serious, but of all the “life advice” posts I’ve read, this is the one that’s changed my own life the most. Anyone else have something from an advice list that really made it into their brains/lives?
The closest thing to a life advice aphorism I’ve ever come up with is maybe too gross to write down. And it’s running-themed, so it could be too specific. But maybe if I share it here, I will exorcise it from my brain: Sometimes you’re so worried about pooping your pants that you don’t realize you’ve already pooped your pants.
This is the first I’m learning of the spookily named Decline at 9 phenomenon, in which kids apparently lose interest in reading around age nine. (Per the article, 57% of 8-year-olds claim to read for fun daily, vs. only 35% of 9-year-olds.) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s another Thursday Afternoon With Edith, and here are a bunch more comics from my journal! I’m publishing everything through my new baby’s birth, because it seemed silly to draw it out any longer than I have! She’s now four months old. 👶 (Previously.)
Rupert Friend, Jason Schwartzman, and Wes Anderson star in an Anderson-directed commercial for Montblanc pens. You know the drill: it’s twee, it’s charming, it’s art-directed to within an inch of its life. Me personally? I love it.
It’s Time to Tax the Billionaires. In 2018, “for the first time in the history of the United States, billionaires had a lower effective tax rate than working-class Americans”.
As someone who reads almost exclusively on an ereader (a Kindle Paperwhite), I have been intrigued by Craig Mod’s recent evangelism of the BOOX Palma, a pocket-sized e-ink device that he’s been using as an ereader. In the latest issue of his Roden newsletter, he explains why he likes it so much:
Once you hold a Palma, you realize that for most situations it’s an ideal reading container. On the train? In line? In the waiting room at the doctor’s office? I’ve carried my Palma with me every day for the past three or so months with the goal of reaching for it rather than my iPhone. I call it the Gentle Librarian. Soft screen, clean interface, no SIM card and so mostly no internet (it loads up with new articles while at home on Wi-Fi; I can always tether to my phone to update or add something new to read on the go), a refresh rate that is plausible enough on which to watch movies (!! hypnotizing, actually, like watching a magic trick, like what Victorians may have imagined “computer screens” to look like) but not really responsive enough to seduce you into installing social media apps. There’s a lot of friction in this little bugger, and it turns out a bit of friction is a good friend of the kind of reading we love.
Hmm. Hmm! Like Mod, I’m frustrated with Amazon’s lack of vision and activity on the ereader front and lament the time I spend on my Casino Rectangle / Dingdong Casino of Hell. Maybe I’ll try the Palma out…
When the magazine asked the photographer Jack Davison to create the art for this story, he took inspiration from Cate Blanchett’s legendary gift at transforming herself on film. Over the course of a four-hour shoot, across nine different setups, Davison made the fantastical, perspective-bending portraits that appear here.
In 2019, artist and engineer Tega Brain gave some kids the opportunity to create targeted advertising relevant to their particular interests: Bushwick Analytica.
Politicians and marketers now use data and targeted advertising to try to change our behaviors and influence our worldviews. But why should these tools only be available to people in places like Washington DC, Manhattan and London?
Some of the kids’ ads targeted their parents:
While others were aimed at people who could help with causes the kids were interested in:
The Cheese-Making Magic of Alka-Seltzer, Explained. You can make a creamy nacho cheese sauce at home using Alka-Seltzer — its ingredients react to form an emulsifying agent. Plop, plop, Cheez Whiz, oh what a trick this is…
A short essay on freediving. “In the mindful state of freediving, I don’t panic. I find stillness. Centeredness. Calm. I am belonging in the moment. I’ve retrained my mind to be underwater.” I love mind vs. body stuff like this.
It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents.
I heard about it from NPR’s Fresh Air — check out this completely metal behavior:
Schlanger notes that some tomato plants, when being eaten by caterpillars, fill their leaves with a chemical that makes them so unappetizing that the caterpillars start eating each other instead. Corn plants have been known to sample the saliva of predator caterpillars — and then use that information to emit a chemical to attract a parasitic wasp that will attack the caterpillar.
Schlanger acknowledges that our understanding of plants is still developing — as are the definitions of “intelligence” and “consciousness.” “Science is there [for] observation and to experiment, but it can’t answer questions about this ineffable, squishy concept of intelligence and consciousness,” she says.
I’ve known Anil Dash for 20+ years and I still keep finding out all sorts of crazy things about him. “Fun fact: Prince bought the house used in the filming of Purple Rain right after I tweeted at him that it was on sale.”
Did you know that “Broccolini” is actually a registered trademark of Del Monte? That they haven’t enforced for decades? “That, generally speaking, is how marks lose their distinctive nature and become generic.”
To share something is to risk losing it, especially in a world where sharing occurs at tremendous scale and where everyone seems to want to be noticed, even if only for cutting down a beloved tree.
Well, the stump of the tree was left in the hopes that it would grow again and I’m pleased to say that it has — here’s a photo from three years ago:
You can even see it on Google Maps. I’m glad the tree is growing again but wish the destruction hadn’t happened in the first place.
In honor of novelist C.J. Sansom’s passing, I wanted to recommend his marvelous Matthew Shardlake historical crime thrillers, for anyone who isn’t already familiar. I definitely learned and remembered more about Thomas Cromwell-era England from Dissolution than I did from any textbooks (not that I’ve read any of those in a while, but still). It was all very visceral in a damp-stone-monastery, heavy cloaks, burning candles, teeth-being-pulled-in-the-Tower-of-London kind of way. Also his novels are just super fun, and the Matthew Shardlake character — a sort of proto-detective lawyer — is especially memorable.
Zadie Smith: “To send the police in to arrest young people peacefully insisting upon a ceasefire represents a moral injury to us all. To do it with violence is a scandal. How could they do less than protest, in this moment?”
This is a toxic combination: universities reliant on investment portfolios in a system where mega-profits are made by companies that threaten and destroy human life, influenced by an increasingly radicalised class of billionaires, teaching students whose degrees won’t earn them enough to pay off their loans, managed by supine administrators threatened by (or willingly collaborating with) a reactionary right, who have decided that young people’s minds are being turned against capitalism not by their own lived experience of austerity and racialised police violence but by ‘woke Marxist professors’. This situation has now met with a live-streamed genocide which is supported, and brazenly lied about, by political leaders and commentators who claim to stand for truth and justice. Students, like much of the public, cannot square the reality of what they see with the world as constructed by politicians and the media.
Under such circumstances, pitching tents, raising placards and demanding divestment are really quite mild-mannered responses. That they have been met, in many US universities, with militarised policing reflects the fragility of liberalism — in the face of the growing hegemony of the conservative right as well as its own inability to offer a future even to Ivy League college students, let alone the less privileged.
Booting up an Apple IIc to play Lode Runner. Oh maaaaaan, this takes me back. I played so much Lode Runner as a kid. And made probably 50 of my own levels with the built-in level editor.
These folks wrote an autopilot in Javascript that can control planes in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (via the API). “To allay any concerns: this is not about running JavaScript software to control an actual aircraft. That would kill people.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a skate video like this before: a group of riders skating the smooth, flowing rocks on the Maltese island of Gozo (site of Calypso’s cave in the Odyssey). Skateboarding has always been such an urban-coded sport — surfing on concrete, reliant on the human-made infrastructure against which it rebels — that it’s a little bit of a mindbend to see it out in nature like this.
Oh cool, spiders can swim now. “The diving bell spider is the only one known to survive almost entirely underwater, using bubbles of air it brings down from the surface.” And have you met the underwater bees?
Wondering why “people invent false conspiracies when there are so many real ones to worry about”, George Monbiot interviews a conspiracy theorist. “Conspiracy fantasists may get the facts wrong, ‘but often get the feelings right.’”
Jen Bekman, the founder of the online gallery 20x200, reflected on Mr. Polan’s legacy while she sat beside his sketches.
“These are not doodles,” Ms. Bekman said. “That word is diminishing. People remember him as an illustrator, but Jason was a great artist, and his practice was his life.”
It’s great to see Polan’s legacy being preserved and his art being spread around the world. And to be reminded of that time he went to a fashion show.
I sort of stood still because I was a little confused as to what just happened. Kim walked right by me. Puff Daddy took a picture with someone right in front of me. I then saw Beyoncé walking toward me and I said, “Hi Beyoncé,” and she said, “Heeey,” and smiled and it was kind of like having a Bar Mitzvah. Then Jay Z walked by and I said, “Hi Jay,” and in the second I said that I thought, am I supposed to add a Z? but didn’t and he said hey but not as beautifully as Beyoncé. I love her so much. I drew a couple more people and then went outside and forgot where I was and then walked to the train and went home.
Stay Connected