Most people think their jobs are boring or pointless or bullshit, but I don’t; if you look around you, everything you see was made by someone, somehow, and that’s really interesting to me. Work is Four Letters is an occasional series — edited for brevity and clarity — highlighting what people do for work and why they do it.

The conversations are informative and robust. The latest interview was with NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie and I found both his description of how he thinks about his job and the ways he DOES his job interesting. Also this nugget about our current experience:

I think the big thing that I’d like people to take away is an understanding that not everything we’re experiencing now has happened before — I reject that. The past is truly a different country. Although you can find historical analogies, they’re just that: analogies. They aren’t one-for-one equivalents. But what you can say is that past generations of Americans have had to sort out their own struggles, and have faced similar questions that we face today, similar questions about the nature of our country, the nature of who belongs here, etc., etc.

John Baskerville was an influential 18th-century printer and type designer; you’ve probably used (or at least heard of) the Baskerville typeface. Cambridge University has the original punches¹ used to create his signature typeface and has made high-res digital photos of them available online. If you, like me, are not familiar with how lead type was made back in the day, an explanation of what a punch is:

The typographic punch is the initial design for the letterform and one of the first of three stages in the manufacturing of metal type: short lengths of steel onto which his letters were cut in reverse and in relief. The punch was ‘tempered’ to increase its toughness and enable its use as a tool. Secondly, the punch was struck into the surface of a softer piece of metal (copper), leaving an impression of the ‘right-reading’ character to be cast. This was called the matrix. Finally, type was manufactured when the matrix was passed to the type-caster and inserted into a mould, into which molten lead-alloy was poured. This produced a cast of the type in relief and in reverse which were then arranged to create a text block and once inked, paper could be pressed against it.

Baskerville is available in a number of different modern versions and revivals, but seeing close-ups of the actual cut & shaped metal from 1757 is something else. (via @johnathanhoefler)

1. Note from the collection: “Not all punches in this collection are Baskerville’s originals; some are later additions.” ↩

A new world order is here. States (countries) are no longer the highest form of power globally. Power has shifted to wealthy individuals who work in groups and operate across borders: syndicates of capital.

Syndicates of capital cannot be categorized as legal or illegal. They exist primarily in the extralegal sphere, where either no regulations apply to their behavior or, where laws do exist, there is no entity powerful enough to enforce them in a manner that asserts control over the syndicates’ behavior.

Yeah. It’s seemed to me for quite awhile now that the most likely form of future world government evolves not from the United Nations but from big multinational corporations controlled by the billionaire class.

See also two recent pieces on the wealthy in America. The Scale of Billionaires’ Campaign Donations is Overwhelming U.S. Politics:

The extraordinary spending in Montana is part of a new era of political power for the rapidly growing number of billionaires minted over the past eight years. The Times analysis found that 300 billionaires and their immediate family members donated more than $3 billion — 19 percent of all contributions — in federal elections in 2024, either directly or through political action committees.

Five presidential elections ago, before the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling that lifted many remaining campaign finance restrictions, the share of billionaire spending was almost zero — 0.3 percent, to be precise.

The billionaire families gave an average total of $10 million each in 2024, an amount roughly equal to what 100,000 typical political donors gave, combined. And that does not count money that billionaires contributed through dark money groups that do not have to disclose their donors.

And How America Chose Not to Hold the Powerful to Account:

One way to look at the rise of Donald Trump is as part of a decades-long backlash among the American leadership class to the idea of accountability. Since Richard Nixon was forced to resign, powerful people in both political parties have worked assiduously to ensure that their leaders would escape the consequences of their actions. Trump has evaded punishment for crimes both low (campaign-finance violations, for which he was convicted, though he will serve no time thanks to his 2024 victory) and high (his attempted overthrow of the federal government in the aftermath of his 2020 election loss, for which he was spared by the Supreme Court’s decision to grant him kingly immunity). This is not just about Trump; his impunity is the product of a society that has worked hard to help the rich and powerful elude punishment for criminal behavior.

Ghost Elephants is a new documentary film directed by Werner Herzog for National Geographic. Here’s the trailer.

For over a decade, Dr. Steve Boyes, conservation biologist and National Geographic Explorer, has been in search of a mysterious, elusive herd of Ghost Elephants in the highlands of Angola, deep within its forests. From acclaimed director Werner Herzog (“Grizzly Man”), GHOST ELEPHANTS follows Boyes on an epic journey as he sets out with some of the best master trackers in the world, in pursuit of an animal long believed to be a myth.

From Peter Sobczynski’s rave review of the film:

The subject of Herzog’s fascination this time around is South African naturalist Dr. Steve Boyes, and while he seems perfectly staid and affable at first sight, he has an obsession within him that has consumed his life to such an extent that if he didn’t actually exist, Herzog might have had to invent him. The focus of his fascination is a species of giant elephant residing in the highlands of Angola, known as “ghost elephants” for their apparent ability to avoid detection. Indeed, not only has Boyes never actually seen one of these creatures with his own eyes, but he is not even certain that such creatures exist—the closest he has come is a massive elephant shot near that area in Angola in 1955, now on display at the Smithsonian.

Herzog, National Geographic, elephants, quixotic quest — who says no? Ghost Elephants is available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu.

The Shape of Paris is a balletic short film of skateboarder Andy Anderson zooming, grinding, spinning, and floating around Paris in the summertime. It is also beautifully shot by Brett Novak; Paris has never looked better. As a YT commenter put it: “bro wtf this is the cleanest footage I’ve ever seen. The cinematography and color grading is insane.”

Also, this is the first skate video I’ve seen with “trick acknowledgements” in the credits. Great touch. (via craig mod)

You can watch a digitized copy of the whole film here (it’s only 45 seconds long):

And here’s the story of how the film was discovered.

Equally delighted was Bill McFarland, the donor who had driven the box of films from his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, to have the cache evaluated.

His great-grandfather, William Delisle Frisbee, had been a potato farmer and schoolteacher in western Pennsylvania by day, but by night he was a traveling showman. He drove his horse and buggy from town to town to dazzle the locals with a projector and some of the world’s first moving pictures.

He set up shop in a local schoolroom, church, lodge or civic auditorium and showed magic lantern slides and short films with music from a newfangled phonograph. It was shocking.

“They must have been thrilled,” McFarland said. “They must have been out of their minds to see this motion picture and to hear the Edison phonograph.”

This is a great interview. Marchese’s first question is about how we find the positive in a world filled with grim news:

Even the right tells us something encouraging, if we listen carefully to what they’re saying. They tell us: You are very powerful. You’ve changed the world profoundly. All these things that are often treated separately — feminism, queer rights, environmental action — are connected, so they’re basically telling us we’re incredibly successful, which is the good news. The bad news is that they hate it and want to change it all back. There is a backlash, and it is significant. But it is not comprehensive or global.

And I loved this part (emphasis mine):

One of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex, when actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort. Thich Nhat Hanh said before he died a few years ago that the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha, in Buddhist terminology, is the community of practitioners. It’s this idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an Übermensch. I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society. A lot of the left wants social change to look like the French Revolution or Che Guevara. Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war.

Members can find a link to their profile by 1) clicking on your name in the menu in the upper righthand corner of the site (or under the hamburger menu on mobile); 2) clicking on the “edit profile” link by your name at the bottom of any post with active comments; or 3) clicking on your name or profile pic in any comment thread. You can change your username, provide a short bio (300 character limit, up to 2 URLs), and upload a profile pic (jpg, png, webp). Check the community guidelines for more advice/info.

The idea with this feature is to provide a lightweight way for KDO members to get to know who they’re conversing with in the comments without having to share that information with the entire internet (in the form of a full-blown social media profile). As a member, you’re in control of what you share in your bio and selecting a profile pic. So here’s how it works right now (i.e. who can see what and where):

• Your member profile pic & display name are fully public…they’re shown next to comments you’ve made on the site (which are also fully public). Profile pics are optional. Display names can be changed from your full name used in your Memberful account — you don’t even need to use your real name (again, see the the community guidelines for more info on this).
• Your bio can only be viewed by other members with active memberships. As a member, you can view another member’s bio by hovering over their name or profile pic in a comment thread or in the comment lists on your profile page. Bios are not public on the internet.
• Your profile page can only be viewed by you. Other members cannot see the posts or comments you’ve faved or the list of comments you’ve made. They also cannot see your email address, your real name (only your display name), membership level, the date you joined, whether you’ll renew, or your member renewal date.
• Inactive members can modify their bios & profile pics, see their own profile pages (with faves & comments), but can’t see other members’ bios.

This level of detail about something that’s existed on the internet since the dawn of time (message board profiles, essentially) might seem tedious, but I’m being clear and straightforward about how this works because I want people to feel comfortable connecting with each other here as much or little as each person wants. Many of you will probably share things like your personal website, job, hobbies, or social media accounts in your bios. Put your Signal handle or email address in there if you want. Gregarious types: put your phone number in your profile if you feel comfortable with that (not recommending that tbh). Or you can be super private or deliberately vague — on KDO, no one knows you’re a dog. Ditto for the profile pic: anything from your headshot to a pet photo of your pet to a Mark Rothko abstract goes — totally up to you.

The comments, the Rolodex, and now member profiles all operate under the same principle: Just Enough Social. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are too overwhelming and stand-alone blogs (like KDO circa 2 years ago) don’t offer much in the way of community. I’m vectoring toward the lightweight Baby Bear option of getting readers talking with each other in the easiest possible way & exploring the larger web community that KDO is a part of. There’s more work to do, but I’m happy with the direction it’s going.

One last thing before I go. I hope this goes without saying with this fine crew but I will say it anyway: if you are going to reach out to someone using the info in their KDO profile/bio, do not be a dick. Someone putting their website address or email in their bio is not an invitation for inappropriate behavior or taking a disagreement outside the bounds of the community guidelines. Enough said about that, I hope.

Ok, I’ll let you go freshen up your profile if you’d like. Lemme know if you have any feedback, questions, concerns, or even attaboys.

Here’s a gem from the archive of the NY Times. One day in September 1976, NY Times food critic Mimi Sheraton and Colonel Harland Sanders stopped into a Manhattan Kentucky Fried Chicken. The Colonel, then estranged from the company he founded, strolled into the kitchen after glad-handing some patrons and proceeded to tear into the quality of the food:

Once in the kitchen, the colonel walked over to a vat full of frying chicken pieces and announced, ‘That’s much too black. It should be golden brown. You’re frying for 12 minutes — that’s six minutes too long. What’s more, your frying fat should have been changed a week ago. That’s the worst fried chicken I’ve ever seen. Let me see your mashed potatoes with gravy, and how do you make them?”

When Mr. Singleton explained that he first mixed boiling water into the instant powdered potatoes, the colonel interrupted. “And then you have wallpaper paste,” he said. “Next suppose you add some of this brown gravy stuff and then you have sludge.” “There’s no way anyone can get me to swallow those potatoes,” he said after tasting some. “And this cole slaw. This cole slaw! They just won’t listen to me. It should he chopped, not shredded, and it should be made with Miracle Whip. Anything else turns gray. And there should be nothing in it but cabbage. No carrots!”

Sanders sold his company to an investment group in 1964, which took the company public two years later and eventually sold to a company called Heublein. After selling, Sanders officially still worked for the company as an advisor but grew more and more dissatisfied with it, as evidenced by the story above. When the company HQ moved to Tennessee, the Colonel was quoted as saying:

This ain’t no goddam Tennessee Fried Chicken, no matter what some slick, silk-suited son-of-a-bitch says.

And he got sued by a KFC franchisee after he commented:

My God, that gravy is horrible. They buy tap water for 15 to 20 cents a thousand gallons and then mix it with flour and starch and end up with pure wallpaper paste. And I know wallpaper paste, by God, because I’ve seen my mother make it.

To the “wallpaper paste” they add some sludge and sell it for 65 or 75 cents a pint. There’s no nutrition in it and the ought not to be allowed to sell it.

And another thing. That new crispy chicken is nothing in the world but a damn fried doughball stuck on some chicken.

Colonel Sanders: serving up chicken and sick burns with equal spiciness. (via @mccanner)

I didn’t even know big tuskers were a thing — and they may not be for much longer:

The term “Big Tusker” refers to an elephant with tusks so large they scrape the floor. Unfortunately, the opportunities for witnessing a big tusker in its natural habitat are slim. As of today, there are approximately 25 individuals left in the world, most of which reside in the Tsavo Conservation Area. It is vital that we make every effort to protect what is arguably the last viable gene pool of “Big Tuskers” remaining.

You can see just how large these elephants’ tusks are compared to those of other elephants in this photo. A great find via Colossal.

Siggesson’s Instagram is worth a look as well…the starkness of the stripes in this zebra photo!

• The Manhole, from the developers of Myst
• A bird identification quiz
• The 1991 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference Presentation (“Contains session info, presentations, and attendee list”)
• The “expanded book” version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• A guide to the first season of Twin Peaks
• The Electronic Whole Earth Catalog from Stewart Brand & Kevin Kelly

I also found this version of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies:

You can see why people call HyperCard “the web before the web”…it’s all right there.

Also, don’t miss this comment from Keith Dawson (who you may remember from the pioneering tech newsletter Tasty Bits From the Technology Front) on how HyperCard was almost called Wildcard.

Soon after, I took a call from Apple. Would we be willing to give up the name Wildcard, or at least license it for their use on a new product? We discussed it. No.

Wild.

In 2017, city planner Jeff Speck gave a talk on the four ways to make a city more walkable:

In the typical American city, in which most people own cars and the temptation is to drive them all the time, if you’re going to get them to walk, then you have to offer a walk that’s as good as a drive or better. What does that mean? It means you need to offer four things simultaneously: there needs to be a proper reason to walk, the walk has to be safe and feel safe, the walk has to be comfortable, and the walk has to be interesting.

I know Speck is talking about cities here, but these four rules — useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting — get at something about living in rural Vermont that I’ve always had trouble articulating: for a place that’s so outdoors-oriented with so many trails and places to hike, a good walk can be difficult to find. I can walk out my door to take a walk that’s sorta safe (walking against traffic on the side of the road — some assholes don’t slow down or move over that much). Comfort is variable: cars kick up dust and my house is surrounded by pretty steep hills. I can’t really walk to anywhere useful, and there aren’t too many possible routes so the interest of the scenery, though beautiful in the summer, gets stale. So then I’m left with driving somewhere to walk, which always just bums me out.

Anyway, this explains why every time I get to walkable city (Tokyo, Rome, NYC, Paris), I am instantly like, yes!! This! This is a walk.

Related reading: Speck is the author of Walkable City (Amazon) and Walkable City Rules (Amazon). (via paul stout)

Ok, you know this is going to be a good one: De La Soul plays a Tiny Desk Concert.

The humor of De La Soul has always been one of its calling cards. When DJ Maseo tells the Tiny Desk crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a new group called De La Soul,” he means it as a joke. But, in so many ways, one of the most influential groups in hip-hop is new: the duties have been reassessed, the focus has shifted and the newness of The Plugs is laid plain here at the Tiny Desk.

Here’s the setlist:

YUHDONTSTOP
Will Be
Much More
Stakes is High
Sunny Storms
Different World
Breakadawn
Pony Ride
A Quick 16 for Mama
Me Myself and I

Feel free to dance at your desk or in your kitchen or wherever you’re listening.

A new book by Rebecca Solnit came out yesterday; it’s called The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change (Amazon). The synopsis:

Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.

In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability.

The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation is obscured within a longer arc of history, its scale is seldom recognized.

While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.

I feel like maybe I should read this. I need some hope about the world.

See also Solnit’s recent Longreads Questionnaire.

When I launched the KDO Rolodex last July, it was a simple list of five recommended sites on the front page of the site. You could refresh to see more sites, but you couldn’t see the whole list all at once. Fun, but lots of room for improvement.

Over the weekend, I launched the full list of sites (186 at the moment) for your perusal. Any visitor to the site can see the sites & people I read to help make KDO. I’ve written before about why this is important to me:

I love linking out to other sites. The strength of the open web is in its many connections between nodes…the more, the better. Links are the whole goddamned point of the web! I want to send people away from kottke.org to learn something new or have a chuckle and then come back the next day for more. The goal is connection, knowledge, and sharing — I proudly have no competitors in this endeavor, only collaborators.

I loved seeing the whole list. So I kept pushing made something I’ve had on my todo list for awhile: I turned the Rolodex into a tiny RSS feed reader. Which I love even more. The feed reader feature is a bit rough around the edges, so I’m making available only to members while we beta test it. Here’s what it looks like:

The three latest posts from each site or person are listed below their name; clicking on a post title will open the post in a new tab. You can obviously click on the name of the site/person to open that in a new tab too. Sites are sorted by most recently updated (this is true of the public listing as well). If you’re a member, please check it out and kick the tires.

For the curious, some details about the implementation. I use Feedbin as my feed reader and they have a pretty good API. So I built a sync system that adds the URLs of the sites in the Rolodex (if they have associated feeds) to Feedbin and tags them with “Rolodex”. Once the feeds are associated with sites, I can just retrieve new entries from those Rolodex-tagged feeds (every 30 min currently). There are a few sites causing problems — for instance, Beehiiv newsletters don’t appear to have RSS feeds by default?¹ — and there are some other bugs, but I’m working on it. I’m not including posts from social sites (Bluesky, Mastodon) for now because that’s another level of velocity.

But like I said, I am loving this casual wee feed reader so far. No read/unread statuses, no counts, no folders, no pressure to catch up, no 3-pane view. I’d say 90-95% of the sites on the list work fine — and it doesn’t need to be 100%. Try it out, lemme know what you think.

Thanks to KDO members for helping to fund new features like this. If you’d like to help support the site, check out your membership options here. ✌️

1. If you try adding Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter (hosted by Beehiiv) to Feedbin, it can’t find an RSS feed because there’s no link tag for it. The front page of the site doesn’t link to the feed anywhere. But if you dig around in the source code… ah, there it is. Same deal with Bobby Solomon’s new Horstman newsletter, except the RSS feed address isn’t anywhere in the source. 🤷‍♂️ So posts for those sites won’t show for now. ↩

The Library of Congress houses an online collection of 48 color photographs of Rome taken in the 1890s. The prints were created using the photochrom process:

The prints look deceptively like color photographs. But when viewed with a magnifying glass the small dots that comprise the ink-based photomechanical image are visible. The photomechanical process permitted mass production of the vivid color prints. Each color in the final print required a separate asphalt-coated lithographic stone, usually a minimum of six stones and often more than ten stones.

If you look at the individual items from the collection (like the shot of the Colosseum), you’ll notice that the photographers were uncredited:

The names of individual photographers are rarely identified on the photochrom prints. Initials on the original negatives and entries in the Detroit Publishing Company ledgers at the Colorado Historical Society sometimes reveal the image creator.

(via open culture)

This video traces the history of Apple’s HyperCard from Vannevar Bush’s idea of the Memex to the Mother of All Demos to the Xerox PARC Alto to Bill Atkinson, the inventor of HyperCard, who said:

HyperCard is a software erector set. It lets people put things together without having to know how to solder.

There’s a ton of information about HyperCard at hypercard.org, including this HyperCard simulator that runs in your browser.

As part of his show called Hark Back to Ukiyo-e: Tracing Superflat to Japonisme’s Genesis, currently on display in LA, Takashi Murakami painted his own version of Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son. The painting is paired with Murakami’s copies of woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) that influenced the work of Monet and other abstract & impressionist artists.

Here Murakami pairs a copy of Monet’s portrait with twelve enlarged versions of ukiyo-e prints by Kikukawa Eizan and his teacher, Utamaro. Through these examples Murakami shapes a narrative of Monet’s encounter with bijinga. They suggest the elements that Monet absorbed in his study of prints: statuesque three-quarter figures; sensual outlines; parasols viewed from below; cloud-like masses of cherry blossoms; windswept skirts. Another selection, Utamaro’s Yamauba and Kintarō, is an example of a bijinga sub-genre in which women are shown with young children.

As noted by Greg Allen, Murakami used an unusual process for his reproductions:

Copying the originals, Murakami had his own intimate encounter with these features, recognizing in the process the meticulous care taken in pursuit of delicate effects. He interprets them in his signature style, composed of layer upon layer of silkscreened acrylic paint, applied with a special squeegee work application method and coated in a glossy finish.

A painting from 1633 called Vision of Zacharias in the Temple has been newly identified by Rijksmuseum researchers as an authentic Rembrandt van Rijn. It had been decades since the painting was examined — art historians have access to all kinds of new techniques and information about Rembrandt’s methods and materials.

Vision of Zacharias in the Temple was shown at the major Rembrandt exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1898. In 1960, however, it was excluded from Rembrandt’s oeuvre. A year later, a private collector purchased the work, after which it disappeared from public view. Only recently did the current owner contact the Rijksmuseum, allowing the painting to be examined again after 65 years.

The two-year investigation shows that all the pigments used also appear in other paintings by Rembrandt from the same period. The build-up of the paint layers and the handling are likewise consistent with his early work.

The painting is executed on two oak panels from trees grown in the south-east of Lithuania, a common wood source in the seventeenth century. The dimensions and construction correspond to panels Rembrandt frequently used. Dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) confirms that the inscribed date “1633” is plausible.

Here’s the back of the painting (the whole analysis is interesting):

Vision of Zacharias in the Temple goes on display at the Rijksmuseum tomorrow. (via the history blog)

Per Betteridge’s law of headlines and also the map above, my answer is clearly no. You can try it yourself here…you draw them one at a time and it adds them to the map automagically. I’m going to blame my trackpad use a little, but I’m not sure I would have done much better had I drawn with a pencil and looked a map beforehand.

Update: Your periodic reminder that Senator Al Franken can draw all 50 US states from memory with astonishing accuracy.

(thx, eric)