They seem like they’ll spread to everyone and stick around forever. This almost never happens. In order to spread to everyone, they need to move beyond the people who are looking for a new idea. And that happens when existing users have a powerful reason to tell their friends.
One can hardly consider the Christmas season for long, at least in the English-speaking world, without the work of Charles Dickens coming to mind. That owes for the most part, of course, to A Christmas Carol, the novella that revived the public culture of a holiday that had
Hyperallergic’s annual antidote to the lists of wealthy collectors, royals, and so-called tastemakers that pervade the art media.
For finding a good book, there is no substitute for going into your local independent bookstore and browsing what’s on the front tables, the bestsellers shelf, and the staff picks. But bookshop.org is an amalgam of online sales some of the best indie bookstores in the country
The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore . “To truly understand living systems as self-organized, autonomous agents, physicists need to abandon their ‘just the particles, ma’am’ mentality.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Through her creative lives as author, illustrator, painter, quilter, sculptor, and activist, Ringgold spoke to the urgency and vulnerability of life.
Allspice is a single spice?! “Allspice is the dried fruit of the Pimenta dioica plant.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
We Asked Four AI Coding Agents to Rebuild Minesweeper… “Cloning Minesweeper isn’t a trivial task that can be done in just a handful of lines of code, but it’s also not an incredibly complex system that requires many interlocking moving parts.” 💬 Join the discussion on
The whimsical filmmaker recreated the Queens artist's home studio at Gagosian Gallery in Paris, the city Cornell longed for but never visited.
A letter to Mayor Mamdani, medieval psalms at the Morgan, and divine chaos at The Met.
The Case for a Public Social Media Platform . “What if the United States government decided to, overnight, nationalize Facebook and make it a digital division of the post office. What would that look like?” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
After a long period of feeling frozen, the new year hints at signs of thaw and forward movement.
Watch Jonas Wolf and three friends sing a choral arrangement of the Bee Gee’s Stayin’ Alive in the style of a madrigal . Just in case (like the me of 1 minute ago) you don’t know what that is (although you will recognize it from just a few seconds of listening to the video),
Finland uses a progressive scale for speeding tickets; the fine amount is based in part on income. In 2023, a businessman got hit with a €121,000 fine . 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
In 'In·Formation,' out-of-date reference books are troves of imagery and data. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Meticulously Sculpted Books by Brian
Die Hard is a Christmas movie. That once-contrarian categorization has increasingly been accepted over the past couple of decades, at least since an editor with whom I’ve often worked first declared it in a Slate roundup. As a result, John McTiernan’s sturdy piece of
“White Christmas” is one of the world’s best-selling tunes and continues to be in rotation more than eight decades later
"Standing in the wreckage of these spaces unlocks a sensation people often crave, but can’t name."
Also: Messy Egyptian gods at The Met, the moral weight of nativity scenes, and the British Museum’s latest “decolonizing” stunt.