For the fourth year running, here are some of my favorite articles, videos, games, photography, discussions, and design pieces that I linked to in 2007. After you're done with these, try the lists from 2004, 2005, and 2006.
The streets of Portland are an ice skating rink for cars in this video.
Reconsidering the original three Star Wars movies in light of the prequels. R2D2 = top rebel spy.
Adam Gadahn's journey from rural California teen and death metal fan to a trusted member of Osama bin Laden's team of operatives.
Chris Jordan's photo series, Running the Numbers.
Michael Poliza's aerial photos of Africa. More here.
Malcolm Gladwell on Enron and the difference between puzzles and mysteries, investigationally speaking.
Smashing Telly, a collection of TV on the web, with an emphasis on documentaries and factual programs. I liked David's post on Zeitgeist and FEBLs.
Video of an autistic person describing the language she uses to communicate with her surroundings.
Good People, a short story by David Foster Wallace.
Nicholas Felton's personal annual report for 2006.
A pair of posts from Neatorama on photography: 13 Photographs That Changed the World and The Wonderful World of Early Photography.
The 51 Smartest, Prettiest, Coolest, Funniest, Most Influential, Most Necessary, Most Important, Most Essential Magazines Ever.
Susan Orlean on Robert Lang, former physicist and current world-class origami master. Here's my post on Lang.
A Line Rider masterpiece. (Line Rider?)
Kremlin Inc., a story of Vladimir Putin's de facto dictatorship of Russia.
2007 was the year of book art: Thomas Allen's pulp cutouts, Cara Barer's water-crumpled books, Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Books whose spines tell small stories, and Brian Dettmer's book sculptures.
Joel Johnson's great post on Gizmodo scolding the site's writers, gadget makers, and the site's readers "for supporting the disgusting cycle of gadget whoring".
Denis Darzacq's photographs of people seemingly floating above the pavement.
Panoramic photos from the Apollo missions. These are stunning.
Michael Pollan on the rise of nutritionism. His advice for healthy eating: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
Desktop Tower Defense. This would top my Ten Best Games of the Year list if I'd done one.
On Conscientious, several photographers answer the question "What makes a great photo?"
Shorpy, a photoblog of old photographs, and FFFFOUND!, an image bookmarking site. Neither is probably legal in the strict sense, but they're both great online curated galleries.
Alberto Forero has collected a staggering amount of photography and design imagery and posted it to his Flickr account.
Social Explorer, interactive demographic maps.
Hypermilers try to wring as many miles per gallon out of their cars as they can. (My post.)
Darwin's God. Are humans biologically wired to believe in God?
Dan Hill reviews Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, a film that follows soccer star Zinedine Zidane through a single game.
Minority Kart, possibly the GAGOAT (greatest animated gif of all time).
Miranda July's wonderful handcrafted web site for her book No One Belongs Here More Than You.
An article on commuting, this crazy thing that most Americans do too much of.
The graph of US home prices from 1890 to the present as a rollercoaster.
As a social experiment, the Washington Post arranged for internationally acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell to play outside a DC subway station. Would anyone notice?
The New Yorker on David Belle and parkour, the sport he invented.
Maciej Ceglowski reports on the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel.
NB: Studio's map of London constructed entirely out of type.
Trulia Hindsight, a map of property development through time.
Movies showing a closeup view of the Sun's surface.
Video footage of Joseph Kittenger's record jump from 102,800 feet up. Photo from Life magazine and a Boards of Canada music video that uses the footage.
Alex Reisner's site, especially the baseball section. (My post.)
Interview with journalist Jonathan Rauch.
The greatest long tracking shots in cinema, including those in Touch of Evil and Children of Men.
Meg Hourihan took a bunch of different chocolate chip recipes, averaged the ingredients, and made cookies from the resulting meta-recipe.
The infamous four guys humping an ottoman video.
Does the Piraha language upend the theory of universal grammar?
Vimeo's sign in page is lovely.
Tim Knowles' drawings by trees. (My post. And more.)
How a woman randomly bumped into the person that stole her identity and chased her around until the police showed up to apprehend her.
Portraits of breaking sculpture by Martin Klimas.
Photo gallery that shows families from around the world and the amount of food they eat in the course of a week.
Errol Morris' investigation of a pair of Roger Fenton photographs in three wonderful parts.
Roger Federer's conservation of energy and attention helps him perform when it counts.
Jay Parkinson M.D. makes house calls, visits with patients via IM, and is generally trying to find new ways of doctoring.
Anthony Lane's appreciation of the Leica.
Kohei Yoshiyuki's photos of voyeurs watching lovers in a Japanese park. (My post.)
A restaurant review from the NY Times, circa 1859. My post about the review and lots more from the archives of the Times.
The story of Oscar the Cat, who comforts the dying at a Rhode Island nursing home.
Portraits of bears by Jill Greenberg. More photos at Greenberg's site.
Long New Yorker profile of David Simon and The Wire.
Elizabeth Kolbert on bees and colony collapse disorder. And bee space.
Photoshopped pictures of people's faces combined.
A video round (turn on the sound).
Optical illusion: is the woman rotating clockwise or counterclockwise?
From the excellent xkcd web comic: Little Bobby Tables.
Aicuña is a small secluded town in Argentina with an extremely high percentage of albino residents.
David Foster Wallace's wonderful introduction to The Best American Essays 2007.
Video depicting several ways to melt a chocolate bunny.
Tyler Cowen on some of the opportunity costs of the war in Iraq.
Beautifully terrifying photos of nuclear tests in French Polynesia.
Standing witness to a Guitar Hero wunderkind playing the game's most difficult song on expert level.
How America Lost the War on Drugs.
God's Eye View is an art project by The Glue Society depicting four Biblical scenes as they would have been captured by Google Earth.
The best way to deflect an asteroid turns out to be reflecting sunlight on it with a swarm of mirror bees.
Paul Otlet presages the web in 1934, calling it the "radiated library" or "televised book". (More context.)
This was my favorite post of the year. I hope you'll excuse the self-link.
Oh, and maybe the best thing I didn't link to this year: Daft Hands.
Thanks for reading kottke.org for the past year. Happy new year to you and yours.
Almost a year late, Roger Ebert shares his top movies of 2006 with us.
Yes, I know it's a year late, but a funny thing happened to me on the way to compiling a list of the best films of 2006. I checked into the hospital in late June 2006 and didn't get out again until spring of 2007. For a long while, I just didn't feel like watching movies. Then something revolved within me, and I was engaged in life again.
I've never met Ebert, but his love of movies resounds so emphatically from his writing that if he didn't feel like watching them, he must have been closer than I thought to shuffling off the ol' mortal coil. It's nice to hear his enthusiasm again. (via crazymonk)
Top 50 photo series from the 2006 Critical Mass competition. Some good stuff in there if you poke around a bit...2005 and 2004 too. (via ffffound!)
Metacritic's aggregated view of the film critics' top 10 lists is always worth a look, both for the information and the information design. United 93 appeared on the most lists and tied with Army of Shadows for most #1 rankings.
Compiling a list of the best things I've linked to from kottke.org seems to get harder each year. I estimate posting about 2400 links to kottke.org in 2006, which is roughly one link every 2.5 hours on weekdays. Which is insane...I don't know how you guys read all of that. Last year I managed to whittle down the best-of list to ~65 links (2004's list had ~40 links), but I couldn't manage less than 100 this year. (Hell, the overflow list contains another 100 links that didn't quite make the cut...hopefully I'll be posting those in a few days.)
But enough with the statistics. Besides containing some really entertaining, informative, and provoking reading/viewing material, this list also functions as kottke.org's year in ideas for 2006, akin to the annual list in the NY Times Magazine. Climate change, the industrialization of childbirth, race & class in college & professional sports, the inherent messiness of science, adults who don't want to grow up, the role of journalism in the age of information abundance, and how creative work gets done are all ideas represented in the links below. Even the funny YouTube videos signal the arrival in 2006 of online video, especially if you throw Ze Frank in the mix. Enjoy.
Pruned found art in petri dishes. More.
The M.C. Escher-inspired art of Rob Gonsalves.
David Remnick's review of An Inconvenient Truth (and short biography of post-2000 Al Gore).
A collection of color photographs of WWII-era America from the Library of Congress. (I color-corrected some of the photos.)
New Yorker piece about the possible solving of the Poincare conjecture by Grigory Perelman.
NY Times Magazine piece by Michael Lewis on Michael Oher, excerpted from his book, The Blind Side.
The Smoking Gun's takedown of James Frey was fair, accurate, and devastating.
Line Rider. Not quite a game, not quite a toy, but hours of fun.
Tetris documentary, From Russia With Love.
Stabilized version of the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy's assassination.
Matthew Barney and Bjork on the phone with Ikea.
The Omarosa Experiment reveals the inner workings of reality TV.
Dorodango: shiny balls of mud.
Olivo Barbieri's aerial photographs taken with a tilt-shift lens spawned some amazing Photoshopped fakes on Flickr.
Details on how to speak to a live customer support person for hundreds of companies. Indispensable.
The story of how Pixar came to be.
Wasp creates zombie cockroaches.
Falling sand, another not-a-game game.
Tap out a rhythm and Song Tapper will tell you what song it's from.
London Tube map where all the stations are sponsored by companies.
The Simpsons intro done with live actors.
Interview with Jonathan Rauch about his popular piece about introverts for The Atlantic Monthly.
Rotation Of Earth Plunges Entire North American Continent Into Darkness.
Pregnancy is a tug of war between mother and fetus over nutrients.
Extensive primers for more than three dozen film genres.
A story about 40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old.
It's a bad time to start a company.
Horrible Segues, With Local Anchorman Clive Rutledge.
American Express commercial directed by Wes Anderson.
Photo essay of female Israeli soldiers.
The four different types of explanations.
The language of The Simpsons.
Pictures I Like For a Variety of Reasons.
David Copperfield thwarts would-be robbers with slight of hand. Hands down, the link of the year.
Magnum photographer Paul Fusco's photo essay of Chernobyl survivors.
In Praise of Loopholes.
Dozens of old Sesame Street clips on YouTube.
How to cure your asthma or hayfever using hookworm.
How one man fell for a Nigerian email scam.
Is serendipity dead?
Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner tell us that expert performers -- in math, football, ballet, chess -- are made, not born.
Michael Wolf's 100x100, 100 photos of Hong Kong apartments each 100 square feet in size.
1989 New Yorker profile of Errol Morris.
A history of the lowrider.
Dozens of historical sounds in mp3 format.
10,000 sheep created by people hired online through Amazon's Mechanical Turk program.
Web 2.OH, YEAAHH!! t-shirts. Pun of the year.
Extensive gallery of Russian/Soviet propaganda and advertising posters.
Implanting magnets in your fingertips gives you a sixth magnetic sense.
The Press' New Paradigm.
A history of Manhattan's diamond district and its informal historian, Stephen Kilnisan.
Photographs of a flock of more than a million European starlings.
Photographs of burn victims by John Brownlow.
What if great photographers posted their work on the web?
Why play "what if"? Here's an Henri Cartier-Bresson being rubbished on Flickr.
An image of human eyes placed above an honesty pay box results in more people paying for their food/drinks. More.
Russian movie illustrations.
A blue-skinned family in the hills of Kentucky. More.
Daniel Raeburn writes about his stillborn daughter Irene. About two years later, her sister Willa is born.
Easily mispronounced domain names.
The Oil We Eat.
Turning innocuous video clips into naughty scenes with selective bleeping. Hilarious.
Kristoffer Garin follows a group of American men on a bride-hunting trip to the Ukraine.
MotherLoad, an extremely addictive online game.
Watch as Lake Peigner drains entirely into a hole created by an errant oil drill. More info.
The Art of the Shiv, a photo essay of prison weapons.
The Show with Ze Frank. The most consistently entertaining and informative online media in 2006.
Journalist Claire Hoffman was physically assaulted by Joe Francis while doing a piece on him and his Girls Gone Wild empire.
The physical impossibility of gigantic and microscopic movie creatures.
Argentina on Two Steaks a Day.
Bijou's Bag of Tricks. This photo makes me laugh until I cry.
Geoffrey Chaucer gets an Xbox 360.
Six years of daily photographs compiled into a movie.
The Voyager spacecraft escapes from the solar system.
David Foster Wallace writes about Roger Federer as Religious Experience.
The vast majority of the decisions in the Senate are made for economic reasons, not social ones.
1964 New Yorker profile of Bob Dylan.
How to Write a Fugue, featuring a fugue of Britney Spears' "Oops, I Did It Again".
State of Emergency, a surprisingly political fashion shoot from Vogue Italia.
What if the inflight announcement you heard while traveling was honest?
The photography of Corey Arnold, particularly of the Bering Sea crabbers.
Billionaire Steve Wynn pokes a hole in one of his Picassos with an errant elbow.
Malcolm Gladwell talks about the myth of prodigy.
Atul Gawande tells us how childbirth became industrialized.
Great list of insults.
2003 New Yorker profile of the late R.W. Apple by Calvin Trillin.
Time lapse video of a man putting on 155 t-shirts, one over the other.
Diary of a Sex Slave.
The world's best worst movie pitches.
Why There Almost Certainly Is No God by Richard Dawkins.
Scott Adams cures himself of losing his voice.
Phil Gyford's beginner's guide to freelancing.
Amateur cyclist Stuart Stevens takes performance-enhancing drugs and writes about it for Outside magazine.
New Yorker profile of Will Wright.
Maureen Gibson finds a picture of her rapist on the Engagements page of her hometown newspaper.
Comedian Aries Spears does great impressions of rappers Snoop Dogg, DMX, and Jay-Z.
A cognitive neuroscience grad student games Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
How to talk to a climate skeptic.
NPR piece with Jason Simmons, professional rock, paper, scissors player.
Lasse Gjertsen's Amateur music video.
What NFL games are going to be on in your part of the country?
Photo of young homeless man Beavis shooting up in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.
NPR interview with Ed Burns, creator of The Wire.
Hans van der Meer's photos of European soccer fields.
Giant magazine's list of the 50 greatest commercials of the 80s (with accompanying videos).
Slate interview with Ed Burns, creator of The Wire.
Writers Dreamtools History by Decades...facts, figures, styles, language, and goings-on for fiction writers.
Seminal experimental film La Jetée online in its entirety.
Last.fm keeps track of what music I like so I don't have to. Here's a list of my favorite artists from 2006, apparently:
1. Boards of Canada
2. Ladytron
3. Cloud Cult
4. Marumari
5. Gnarls Barkley
6. Metric
7. John Digweed (good coding/writing music)
8. Röyksopp
9. I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness
10. Alexandre Desplat (Syriana soundtrack, haven't listened to this in six months)
11. Mogwai
12. Sigur Ros
13. Mint Royale (I didn't even like this)
14. Daft Punk
15. The Smashing Pumpkins (golden oldies)
16. Fischerspooner
17. Coldplay
18. Broken Social Scene
19. Sound Advice (Gnarls/Biggie mashup)
20. Bloc Party
21. Ulrich Schnauss
22. Sasha (good coding/writing music)
23. Wolf Parade (didn't like this either)
24. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
25. Arctic Monkeys (nor this)
Not sure this is such an accurate representation of the music that I enjoyed this year. And where's CSS? I've been listening to them a ton in the last couple of weeks and they're not even on the list. Upon closer inspection, it looks like last.fm doesn't include the current month in their "rolling year charts".
The BBC's annual list of 100 things we didn't know last year. "Barbie's full name is Barbie Millicent Roberts." Here are the 2005 and 2004 editions. The Tampa Tribune has a list of 50 things for 2006.
The top 10 underreported news stories in 2006, including US funds going to the Taliban and Israel & Iran holding secret talks.
Prospect Magazine lists the most overrated and most underrated books of 2006. Top 3 overrated are The God Delusion, The Blunkett Tapes, and Everyman. I so agree about Everyman...it's the only book I read this year where I genuinely wanted my money back at the end of it. (via mr)
Every year, Regret the Error1 publishes a roundup of the year's media errors and corrections. I didn't think anything could beat these corrections from the 2005 list:
Norma Adams-Wade's June 15 column incorrectly called Mary Ann Thompson-Frenk a socialist. She is a socialite.
The Denver Daily News would like to offer a sincere apology for a typo in Wednesday's Town Talk regarding New Jersey's proposal to ban smoking in automobiles. It was not the author's intention to call New Jersey 'Jew Jersey.'
but the 2006 collection is a strong one. Here are some of my favorites:
A correction in this column Thursday about a June 14 Taste section recipe for French coconut pie incorrectly suggested that the recipe called for a pint of vodka.
In Wednesday's Taste section, a Washington Post recipe on Page F7 included an incorrect cooking time for carbonada (braised beef with onions and red wine). The dish should be cooked for 2 1/2 hours, not 10 to 20 minutes.
Because of an editing error, a recipe last Wednesday for meatballs with an article about foods to serve during the Super Bowl misstated the amount of chipotle chilies in adobo to be used. It is one or two canned chilies, not one or two cans.
A story in the July 24 edition of the Sentinel & Enterprise incorrectly spelled Sheri Normandin's name. Also, Bobby Kincaid is not a quadriplegic.
The regional court in Duesseldorf ordered the weekly WirtschaftsWoche to print a correction to an article that claimed Piech wore "garish ties with hunting motifs" and did not know the exact number of his children from various marriages, a court spokesman said. The magazine, owned by the Handelsblatt group, had published a picture of Piech wearing a tie with a picture of a man with a gun and an elephant. It quoted Piech as saying in an interview that he had sired "about a dozen children. The exact number is not known". The court accepted Piech's argument that his comment had been meant ironically and that the motif on his tie was not a hunting motif...
Mr Wakefield is not and never has been a member of the Communist Party. The error is regretted.
In a March 17 story about protests planned against the Iraq war, The Associated Press erroneously identified Jeremy Straughn as a political socialist at Purdue University. He is a political sociologist.
She's got the patent resume of somebody that has serious skill. She loves football. She's African-American, which would kind of be a big coon. A big coon. Oh my God. I am totally, totally, totally, totally, totally sorry for that. [He meant "coup".]
Recent articles in this column may have given the impression that Mr Sven Goran Eriksson was a greedy, useless, incompetent fool. This was a misunderstanding. Mr Eriksson is in fact a footballing genius. We are happy to make this clear.
I especially like the recipe ones...just the thought of some unsuspecting reader eating her meatballs with all those chilies or the fellow debating whether he should serve his obviously raw braised beef to the rest of his family. Be sure to check out the whole list.
[1] When I first posted this, I misspelled "Regret" as "Reget". (No, really!) I deeply regret the error. (thx, mauayan)↩
Top 50 music videos of 2006. Includes inline video so you can watch them all. (via waxy)
The best and worst restaurant trends in NYC for 2006. Among the worst, Mexican: "Zero progress on one of the most misunderstood and untapped cuisines in NYC."
The NY Times Book Review's 100 notable books of 2006. Making the list are several kottke.org notable books: The Ghost Map, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Consider the Lobster, and The Blind Side.
Are you ready? I said, ARE YOU READY? End-of-the-year list season has begun!! Woo! Let's get it started with Information Leafblower's list of the top 40 bands in America as chosen by a bunch of music bloggers. Lots of guitar music that the indie rock kids like so much.
