Love this Letterboxd movie list title: “Definitely there was love, oh but the circumstances”. Films include Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Past Lives, Normal People, Brokeback Mountain, Titanic, and Lost in Translation.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Moira Donegan: “OJ Simpson died the comfortable death in old age that Nicole Brown should have had.” He abused, stalked, terrorized, and then killed Nicole Brown & Ronald Goldman. Finally, a truthful obit of OJ.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

This is quite a paragraph from Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker review (titled The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers (subhead: “The Nazi leader didn’t seize power; he was given it.”)) of Timothy Ryback’s new book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power:

Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power. The corporate bosses thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money. Communist ideologues thought that, if you peered deeply enough into the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you could spy the pattern of a popular revolution. The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader. In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.

I got this via Clayton Cubitt, who says “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”

Tags: Adam Gopnik · Adolf Hitler · books · Germany · Nazis · politics · Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power · Timothy Ryback

Haha, Hank Green discovers the automobile industry’s wet putty paint job and, dare I say it, gets a little unhinged about it.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Oh man, I really enjoyed this “infuriating” list of things that don’t seem like they are named after people, including:

• Price Club (Sol Price)
• MySQL (My Widenius)
• Shrapnel (Henry Shrapnel)
• PageRank (Larry Page)
• German chocolate cake (Samuel German)
• Baker’s Chocolate (Walter Baker)

It reminds me of trademarked names that have become generic words, including:

• heroin
• escalator
• aspirin
• trampoline
• videotape
• dry ice
• flip phone
• laundromat
• dumpster
• onesies

Tags: language · lists

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Hurricanes Are Too Fast for Category 5. Climate change might necessitate a 6th category of hurricanes to warn against the much higher risks of wind speeds above 192 mph. “Adding a category better describes these rather unprecedented storms.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →