Welcome to this week’s edition of our Friday Quality Linkage column. Please enjoy this week’s collection of interesting and entertaining links. Brew a fresh cup of coffee, find a comfortable place, and relax.
Photo: J. Kenji López-Alt, Serious Eats / The Food Lab
Detroit-Style Pizza is the Best Thing You’re Gonna Make This Year »
Another week, another excuse for me to link to some Serious Eats food nerdery by J. Kenji López-Alt. This time, he’s sold me on the idea of making Detroit-style pizza:
To be frank, I don’t know why it didn’t blow up earlier. The stuff is freaking delicious. Let’s start from the bottom and work our way up: The crust comes out crisp and golden on the bottom, with a lightly fried texture that it gets from sizzling in the rendered fat that drips down from the cheese. Next, we move on to the crumb, which is chewy, with a medium-fine bubble structure. Not so rustic as, say, a focaccia, but not quite as soft and fluffy as a New York–style Sicilian slice.
*droooooooool* 🍕
- On Twitter, J. Kenji linked a nice article by David Lebovitz, who had what sounds like an incredible experience eating souffléed omelettes (yes, you read that right) at La Mère Poulard in Normandy, France.
Vector portraits by artist Electra Sinclair
Humans of the Year »
With all of the terrible news being spat into the world at literally all times anymore, it’s nice to cleanse the palate with something positive to read now and again. The folks at Motherboard are creating a series of profiles about clever people who are out there doing amazing, interesting work.
From a blog post about the project:
But there are plenty of people working on projects to make the future more wonderful, especially in science and technology, and who don’t make the news nearly as often as they should. These people include scientists researching Mars missions and the human brain, security researchers teaching kids how to code, open-source programmers writing free software used by millions, spies fighting wildlife poachers, and many, many, others.
Here are just a few of the profiles they’ve already done:
- Mari Copeny — A nine-year-old from Flint, Michigan who’s valiantly fighting for clean water in her hometown.
- Laura Stark — A former Googler currently devoting eight months of her life to living, working, and experimenting in a replica Mars habitat.
- David Nott — A British surgeon who’s spent more than two decades risking his life to bring healthcare to warzones around the world (currently Syria).
Photos: Christian Åslund
Pictures Show Climate Change’s Dramatic Arctic Impact »
Speaking of depressing things, Rachel Brown of National Geographic interviewed Swedish photojournalist Christian Åslund about his work with Greenpeace over the course of nearly twenty years, photographing places in the Arctic that were once…well, arctic:
What’s happening in the Arctic is spreading around the whole globe. I have also been visiting countries directly affected by climate change—floods, natural disasters, and drought. It is the biggest challenge we face and we must act now before it’s too late.
[…]
I’ve been visiting the Arctic for 20 years and have seen firsthand how climate change has affected it, with the decline of the sea ice and the retreating glaciers.
A Warning from Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking About the Future of Job Automation »
Quincy Larson of freeCodeCamp is (rightfully) concerned about the increasing trend of robots taking over human jobs:
Jobs are vanishing much faster than anyone ever imagined.
[…]
The answer to the automation challenge may involve some combination of these three approaches. But we need to take action now, before we face the worst unemployment disaster since the Great Depression. […] If we act now, we can still rise to the automation challenge and save millions of Americans from hardship.
The article quotes Elon Musk, who in February attended the World Government Summit 2017 in Dubai:
What to do about mass unemployment? This is going to be a massive social challenge. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better [than a human]. These are not things that I wish will happen. These are simply things that I think probably will happen.
I often wonder what a “post-job” world might look like. The answer will probably hit all of us faster than we will be ready for.
Towards a True Children’s Cinema: on ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ »
Lauren Wilford of Bright Wall/Dark Room wrote quite an essay about the Studio Ghibli film My Neighbor Totoro:
Current children’s cinema is composed predominately of flashy adventure-comedies (to name some recent hits: The Lego Batman Movie, Finding Dory, The Secret Life of Pets, Zootopia). Structurally and tonally, they feel almost exactly like blockbusters made for adults, minus any potentially offensive content. They aren’t so much made for children as they’re made to be not not for children. Perhaps this is why the genre is generally called “Family,’ rather than “Children’s.” The films are designed to be pleasant enough to a broad, age-diverse audience, but they’re not necessarily made specifically for young hearts and brains.
My Neighbor Totoro is a genuine children’s film, attuned to child psychology.
I found this article via Tony Zhou, who also linked an incredibly succinct review of the film:
No plot.
No central character.
No antagonist.
No defined purpose for side characters.
No threat.
No three acts.
No jokes.
No punchlines.
No explanations.
No internal references.
No catchphrases.
No political polemical voice.
No melodrama.
No lessons.
No beginning.
No end.
One of the best films ever made.
Illustrations: Jake Parker
Disney Robot Artwork by Jake Parker »
Jake Parker is an artist whose work you’ve maybe seen around the web:
- In multiple volumes of the Flight graphic novel series
- On YouTube
- In the 2000 film Titan A.E. (man, this one takes me back; I listened to the soundtrack a lot when it first came out)
- In Rocket Racoon, Volume 1: A Chasing Tale (in collaboration with another favorite artist of mine, Skottie Young)
- …and much more.
Anyway, the other day he posted on Reddit with an awesome series of “Disney Bot” illustrations, which can be viewed in this Imgur album or on the “Fan Art” page of his site. I hope he makes more of these.
Got any suggestions for articles, videos, stories, photographs, and any other links you think we should be posting in our weekly Quality Linkage? Please do let us know on Twitter.