Five Things You Had to See Online This Week

This week in “Thanks, Internet” — An electrician-turned-photographer, an unlikely cover, Pixar’s rainbow, parsing The Simpsons, and the silliest skate video ever made (intentionally).

1. The Curious Case Of Konstantin Petrov

To mark the 13th anniversary of 9/11,The New Yorker‘sNick Paumgartenwrote about one Konstantin Petrov — an electrician who worked at the restaurant atop the north tower of the World Trade Center. In the building’s final year, hespent much of his downtime snapping pictures of its interior. Petrov has since passed (not in the terrorist attacks), but the photos were recently discovered by an assistant to the filmmaker Eric Nelson, who will feature them in his National Geographic documentary,9/10: The Final Hours:

Nelson felt as though he had stumbled on the tomb of King Tut. For whatever reason, this Petrov had turned an archivist’s eye on the banalities of an office building and a sky-top restaurant, which, though destroyed in one of history’s most photographed events, had hardly been photographed at all. The pictures were beautiful, too. Devoid of people, and suffused with premonitory gloom, they made art out of a site that most New Yorkers, at the time, had come to think of as an eyesore. Petrov seemed to be a kind of savant of the commonplace, as though he’d known that all of it would soon disappear down a smoking pit. Inadvertently or not, he left behind a ghostly record, apparently the only one, of this strange twentieth-century aerie, as though he’d been sent here for this purpose alone.

2. Willow Smith vs. King Krule

On paper, none of this makes any sense. Willow Smithis the 13-year-old offspring of Will and Jada, who sings about her hair. King Kruleis a 24-year-old delinquent from London who sings about working class anguish. So how did Smith end up covering Krule’s calling card, “Easy Easy“? We don’t know, but ignorance—at least in this case—is bliss.

3.All The Colors Of The (Pixar) Rainbow

We haven’t seen a new Pixar movie in a minute, but that doesn’t mean its fans have forgotten how good things have been. Take Rishi Kaneria‘s supercutas evidence: in just 60 seconds, the ace editortracks Pixar’s expert, innovative use of color in two decades of animated films, fromToy Story toMonsters University.

4. Parsing Culture Through Our Favorite Cartoon

As you may have heard,The Simpsonshasbeen aroundfor a quarter century. FXX paid tribute to its golden egg with the marathon to end all marathons. Ben Schmidt, a professor of digital humanities at Northeastern University, is taking a slightly more academic approach. The website bookworm: simpsons allows you to search words usedin 25 years of episodes, turning the show into a massive culturaldatabase. It’s the Google Ngram Viewerfor our mostexcellent cartoon.

Thanks, Scott!

5. Satirical Sk8er Boi

Skate videos have two settings: maddeninglysophomoricor questionably epic. Those that take the latter tact really setthemselves up forsatire. This week, Vimeo’s Il David Changgave us the gift of KOKO — a perfect riff on the tropes found in the worst outsider art documentaries. Skate videos of the future take note!