A newsletter for the terminally curious
“High quality esoterica, quirky inner musings, and one of the best advice columns on the internet. McKinley always digs up interesting content I can’t find anywhere else.”
— Angus Hervey, Future Crunch
“It’s eclectic and personal in a way that kind of reminds me of the glory days of blogging — a delightful cabinet of curiosities. McKinley is an interesting thinker who spots interesting facts and occurrences, and says interesting things about them.”
— Rob Walker, The Art of Noticing
“I never know what I’m going to get in an issue of The Whippet, but I know it’s going to be good because McKinley is an excellent writer and curator.”
— Mark Frauenfelder, BoingBoing / The Magnet
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The Whippet #177: The key to lasting happiness is cdeispnili
I am increasingly of the belief that your brain doesn't really understand that you have taken an action unless you move your body and/or other objects around in physical space.
The Whippet #176: Smeared across time
Most predators sneak up on their prey and surprise them, because most prey is fast and if you don't catch it by surprise, you don't catch it. But cheetahs are the fastest (land) animals in the world. They can outrun anything.
The Whippet #175: Buttery soft conspiracy
Hello, so I've started noticing something that's driving me crazy, and I bequeath this curse to you, dear readers. It's the term "buttery soft".
The Whippet #174: Extending my physical influence
I'm very interested in ghosts, as a cultural phenomenon and metaphor. I don't spend much time thinking about whether they're 'real' or not, that is not so interesting to me – as the priest says in the excerpt, "what matters is that people are seeing them"
The Whippet #173: Heavy Business Pigeon
For this project, scientists attached weights to some scrawny pigeons as a social experiment. Those pigeons became more aggressive and shot up the pecking order
The Whippet #172: Skeuomorphic Ghosts
It occurred to me the other day that a ghost is a skeumorph. Specifically, the reason they look like this in pop culture, is because Europeans used to bury their dead in white shrouds.
A newsletter for the terminally curious
Arrives in your inbox every second Thursday.