The success of the polio vaccine was threatened in the 1950s by "vaccine hesitancy." In 1957, as many as 30% of people still had no inoculations, and a third of all new cases were in teens. Elvis Presley became the answer "in what might be the first,
For the children in your house, or perhaps just for you, a year in the life of a Christmas tree, from “teeny two-year-old saplings to ten-year-old giants.” Via TKSST See also: "Christmas trees are a multibillion-dollar business. But who’s making the money?"
For your lockdown wanderlust, "To Live and Ride in L.A.," a brief clip in which cyclist Andrew Jackson rides the cement and mountains of Southern California. Via The Radavist
A beginner's guide to "the heaviest music ever made." Via things
A beautiful, papercut-art ode to classic video games.
For your weekly lockdown wanderlust: a Swiss ski movie that involves more than the usual fair share of philosophizing about awareness while hiking through the mountains.
From two weeks ago, but still interesting to see how people in Beijing respond to Biden's win.
Glenn Gould winningly explains, with plenty of performances for illustration, why Mozart was not a very good composer.
From the creators of South Park, a deepfakes show about deepfakes. From Open Culture: This first episode also provides a glimpse of the surely enormous all-deepfake cast to come. Uncanny versions of Al Gore, Mark Zuckerberg (now a dialysis-center magnate), and Julie Andrews (as computer technician “Lou Xiang,
In contemporary chess, the frontier is speed: one-minute bullet (one minute for all your moves), hyperbullet (30 seconds), or ultrabullet, (15 seconds for the entire game without increment). All of which are way too fast for the vast majority of regular players, but not the current world champion, Magnus
