From Joshua Glenn at Hilobrow, an alternate generational periodization scheme:

1844-53: The Prometheans
1854-63: The Plutonians
1864-73: The Anarcho-Symbolists
1874-83: The Psychonauts
1884-93: The Lost Generation The New Kids
1894-1903: The Lost Generation The Hardboiled Generation
1904-13: The Greatest Generation The Partisans
1914-23: The Greatest Generation The New Gods
1924-33: The Silent Generation The Postmoderns
1934-43: The Silent Generation The Anti-Anti-Utopians
1944-53: The Boom Generation
1954-63: The Boom Generation, or Post-Boomers The OGXers (Original Generation X)
1964-73: Generation X The PC Generation
1974-83: Generations X/Y The Net Generation
1984-93: The Millennials
1994-2003: The Millennials TBA

Tags: Joshua Glenn
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

Tired of retouched women in magazines looking like "objects from Mars", photographer Peter Lindbergh captured eight models without makeup or excessive retouching for Harper's Bazaar's September issue. (via fashionologie)

Tags: Peter Lindbergh   photography
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

Jobless and saddled by debt from student loans, Leah Finnegan checks into becoming a surrogate mother.

I'm 23. I have a fresh liberal arts degree, $50,000 in student loans, and I can't find a job. In the past, I've gotten through money-thin months by subletting my apartment or selling my personal possessions on eBay. But newly homeless and with my car, bike, and dressy trousers under new titles, I've nothing of worth left to proffer. Except, of course, myself.

Tags: Leah Finnegan
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

Life lessons from Ferris Bueller, from the boyhood friend of John Hughes who provided some inspiration for Ferris.

For one of those Chicago adventures, we secretly borrowed a car almost as ridiculously conspicuous as the 1961 Ferrari 250 GT in the movie: my dad's purple Cadillac El Dorado (yes, purple). Put an extra 113 miles on the odometer. Hoping to erase that telltale mileage, we raised the back on a pair of jacks and ran the car in reverse. The Caddy did not fly backward into a ravine, as in the film. What it did do is quickly take off a clean 10,000 miles. Oops. (Yes, you bet he noticed.)

Tags: Ferris Bueller's Day Off   John Hughes   movies
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

Under close scrutiny, hardly any of the things we refer to as fruits actually are.

Strawberries, you will be glad to know, are a 'false fruit'. Which seems reasonable enough. But at this point a small doubt started to grow in my mind... what, actually, then, was a real fruit? Oranges? No, they're a modified berry. Bananas? Leathery berry. Plums? Drupe -- fleshy bit with one stone inside.

(via clusterflock)

Tags: food
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

As a kid, I read many of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books so I was interested to read that Laura's daughter Rose may have co-authored them.

Wilder scholarship is a flourishing industry, particularly at universities in the Midwest, and much of it seeks to sift fiction from history. The best book among many good, if more pedestrian, ones, "The Ghost in the Little House," by William Holtz, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Missouri, explores a controversy that first arose after Wilder bequeathed her original manuscripts to libraries in Detroit and California. It is the work of a fastidious stylist, and, in its way, a minor masterpiece of insight and research. Holtz's subject, however, isn't Laura Ingalls Wilder. It is her daughter and, he argues, her unacknowledged "ghost," Rose Wilder Lane.

Rose was an interesting character; she escaped the prairie life of her parents and transformed into a "a stylish cosmopolite who acquired several languages, enjoyed smoking and fornication, and dined at La Rotonde when she wasn't motoring around Europe in her Model T".

Tags: books   Laura Ingalls Wilder   Little House on the Prairie   Rose Wilder
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

There are some fine ideas among the finalists in the ReBurbia competition.

Calling all future-forward architects, urban designers, renegade planners and imaginative engineers: Show us how you would re-invent the suburbs! What would a McMansion become if it weren't a single-family dwelling? How could a vacant big box store be retrofitted for agriculture? What sort of design solutions can you come up with to facilitate car-free mobility, 'burb-grown food, and local, renewable energy generation? We want to see how you'd design future-proof spaces and systems using the suburban structures of the present, from small-scale retrofits to large-scale restoration--the wilder the better!

Tags: architecture
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

There are some fine ideas among the finalists in the ReBurbia competition.

Calling all future-forward architects, urban designers, renegade planners and imaginative engineers: Show us how you would re-invent the suburbs! What would a McMansion become if it weren't a single-family dwelling? How could a vacant big box store be retrofitted for agriculture? What sort of design solutions can you come up with to facilitate car-free mobility, 'burb-grown food, and local, renewable energy generation? We want to see how you'd design future-proof spaces and systems using the suburban structures of the present, from small-scale retrofits to large-scale restoration--the wilder the better!

Tags: architecture
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

Google is developing their next-generation search engine and needs your help in testing it out.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results.

(via waxy)

Tags: Google   search
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

Google is developing their next-generation search engine and needs your help in testing it out.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results.

(via waxy)

Tags: Google   search
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

Apple is finally offering the 15" MacBook Pro with an anti-glare screen. I bought a new MBP about a week before Marco but don't want to pay $250 for the exchange even though the glossy screen bugs the shit out of me and ranks right up there with Apple's worst design decisions ever (e.g. the Mighty Mouse and the puck mouse). Irritating.

Tags: Apple   macbookpro
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

Apple is finally offering the 15" MacBook Pro with an anti-glare screen. I bought a new MBP about a week before Marco but don't want to pay $250 for the exchange even though the glossy screen bugs the shit out of me and ranks right up there with Apple's worst design decisions ever (e.g. the Mighty Mouse and the puck mouse). Irritating.

Tags: Apple   macbookpro
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

Serious Eats made a short documentary (~9 min.) about the Union Square Greenmarket and one of the farmers who brings his goods to the market every week.

Tags: Ed Levine   food   NYC
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

Serious Eats made a short documentary (~9 min.) about the Union Square Greenmarket and one of the farmers who brings his goods to the market every week.

Tags: Ed Levine   food   NYC
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

Rick Webb on all the recent bitching about the iPhone, Apple, and the App Store.

They made a mobile browser light years better than any previous browser & you promptly took it for granted & bitched about it lacking Flash.

And on cut and paste:

You whined for 2 years about cut and paste. They invented a brand new user interface means to implement it. You never even used it.

There's a bunch more. (thx, david)

Tags: Apple   iPhone   Rick Webb
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

Rick Webb on all the recent bitching about the iPhone, Apple, and the App Store.

They made a mobile browser light years better than any previous browser & you promptly took it for granted & bitched about it lacking Flash.

And on cut and paste:

You whined for 2 years about cut and paste. They invented a brand new user interface means to implement it. You never even used it.

There's a bunch more. (thx, david)

Tags: Apple   iPhone   Rick Webb
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

Those of you still plugging away at Infinite Summer may not want to read this (i.e. spoilers!), but Brian Barone finished early and found some interesting mathematical themes in the book.

Now, here's the part that really boggled me: the Consumption/Waste idea is a 1:1 correspondence (something in yields something out), what mathematicians call a linear function. The Parabola idea connects, pretty obviously, with parabolas -- now we're looking at x raised to the power of two. Annular Systems are modeled by circles which are given in analytic geometry by equations with both x^2 and y^2. Limits and Infinity, of course, become necessary in order to find the area of shapes under curves like parabolas and three-dimensional projections of circles.

Whoa. That is a tiny bit mind-blowing...do I really have time for a reread right now? (thx, nick)

Tags: books   Brian Barone   David Foster Wallace   Infinite Jest   mathematics
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

Those of you still plugging away at Infinite Summer may not want to read this (i.e. spoilers!), but Brian Barone finished early and found some interesting mathematical themes in the book.

Now, here's the part that really boggled me: the Consumption/Waste idea is a 1:1 correspondence (something in yields something out), what mathematicians call a linear function. The Parabola idea connects, pretty obviously, with parabolas -- now we're looking at x raised to the power of two. Annular Systems are modeled by circles which are given in analytic geometry by equations with both x^2 and y^2. Limits and Infinity, of course, become necessary in order to find the area of shapes under curves like parabolas and three-dimensional projections of circles.

Whoa. That is a tiny bit mind-blowing...do I really have time for a reread right now? (thx, nick)

Tags: books   Brian Barone   David Foster Wallace   Infinite Jest   mathematics
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

Thom Yorke says that there will be no more Radiohead albums.

"None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again," he said. "Not straight off ... It worked with In Rainbows because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we've all said that we can't possibly dive into that again. It'll kill us."

No!! (via @davidfg)

Tags: music   Radiohead   thomyorke
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

Thom Yorke says that there will be no more Radiohead albums.

"None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again," he said. "Not straight off ... It worked with In Rainbows because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we've all said that we can't possibly dive into that again. It'll kill us."

No!! (via @davidfg)

Tags: music   Radiohead   thomyorke
Have something to add?   You can be the first to comment!

Today's Active Threads


About Kottke Komments

WHAT IS THIS? Kottke.org is one of the Web's most popular blogs. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, Jason does not allow readers to leave comments. Kottke Komments contains the same stuff as Kottke.org, but with comments turned on!

HOW DOES IT WORK? We suck down the RSS feeds from Kottke.org (published under a Creative Commons license that allows us to create derivative works) and republish them here, then use our own software to manage the comments. We use TypeKey for comment authentication to minimize spam.

BUT WHY? There are a lot of people reading Jason's blog, and we're pretty sure they've got something to add to the conversation. We want to give them a place to do that. Plus, we think Jason is cute.

WHO ARE YOU? This site is powered by People Make It Better. We make stuff.

Need help? Just ask!