The physics of hell
The hotels were ignored.
“Ever since its 1314 publication, scholars had toiled to map the physical features of Dante’s Inferno—the blasted valleys and caverns, the roiling rivers of fire. What Galileo said, put simply, is that many commonly accepted dimensions did not stand up to mathematical scrutiny. Using complex geometrical analysis, he attacked a leading scholar’s version of the Inferno’s structure, pointing out that his description of the infernal architecture—such as the massive cylinders descending to the center of the Earth—would, in real life, collapse under their own weight.”
On design, disability and empathy
“Perhaps you’re sitting here, reading this on your phone, absently checking your email whenever your attention drifts, tapping text messages to the friend you’re meeting tonight for dinner. You stand at the end of a long line of inventions, which might have never existed, but for the disabled. The keyboard on your phone, the telecommunications lines it connects with, the inner workings of email: In 1808, Pellegrino Turri built the first typewriter, so that his blind lover, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, could write letters more legibly. In 1872, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone to support his work helping the deaf. And, in 1972, Vint Cerf programmed the first email protocols for the nascent Internet. He believed fervently in the power of electronic letters. His proof was his own experience: Electronic messaging was the only seamless way to communicate with his wife, who was deaf, while he was at work.”
Somewhere in publishing – an exceedingly accurate comic about book design by Evan Johnston.
“I kept looking and looking but finally I had to admit: I can’t climb this particular mountain. There’s no obvious path through this data. I could claim that it’s a mirror of capitalism, or the global marketplace, but I can’t prove that. The broad claims of the essayist are no match for the digital reality of a global megastructure. … We can rank and sort and massage, let people rate the reviews of each other, and hope that order emerges. And then we old book-type people tend to show up and tut when people prefer The Alchemist to The Man Without Qualities, but if you take a breath, who wouldn’t? People like big, simple things with wizards. Wouldn’t you? It’s just that now we have proof.”
Kill your ego – In a week when one person attempted to monopolise the very essence of ego, Reed Words' Tom Coleman gets his out of the way so he can get some work done.
How to win Monopoly – Basically, don't play to win the way the game wants you to win. It's quite profound.
Where do you draw the line between commercial and literary fiction? – Is there a line? Should there be a line? Who wants a line? What good is a line? Who decided there should be a line anyway, and how are they benefiting from the existence of the line? Has the line always been there? What does the line want from me?
“In April 1968 the Austrian architect Hans Hollein published his seminal polemic text ‘Everything is Architecture’ in the avant-garde magazine Bau. Predominantly through captioned images, the article attempted to redefine architecture beyond the conventional discipline. In reaction to the suffocating po-faced pragmatism of postwar planning and policy, Hollein pushed the boat all the way out: illustrated with such diverse objects as lipstick, pill capsules, space suits and photographs of Che Guevera, Hollein labelled everything as architecture.”
Cathedrals, libraries, labyrinths and lunatics – Geoff Manaugh remembers Umberto Eco.
“Eco excelled at allegorical details: rooms that served to mask the presence of other rooms, a town built atop a subterranean twin of itself, a library that conceals a parallel, clandestine collection of books, another library somehow tucked inside its very walls, even an island lost on the precise border between today and yesterday. … Eco’s books are perfect for people who are too willing to believe that truth can be found in reading—even if the stories they return to again and again are published not with words at all, but on the façade of a cathedral, in a theological sci-fi of intertwined saints, symbols, and landscapes.”
Through design, images and words – six decades of art directing The Paris Review.
“It’s very rare that an acclaimed literary magazine goes through as many style revolutions as The Paris Review has. The masthead has shape-shifted from serif to sans and back again; its size has gone from pamphlet, to book, to magazine, to somewhere in-between. And alongside timeless contributions from writers like Joan Didion, William Faulkner, and Truman Capote, design and artwork from the likes of Keith Haring, David Hockney, Leanne Sharpton, and Chip Kidd have been just as crucial to establishing the magazine’s revered place in the canon. Great content matched by great style makes a great magazine.”
Boys could enjoy stories about girls, and vice versa – if only we'd let them.
“Ever since my first book was published, adults have been asking me whether my books can be read by boys, or whether they are exclusively for girls. On the face of it, this question is simply bewildering. Why should the gender of my detectives affect who can read them? It’s like suggesting that men shouldn’t read Miss Marple or women shouldn’t read Sherlock Holmes. About isn’t the same as for – we should never limit readers to books featuring characters identical to themselves. Part of the greatest joy of reading is in stepping into the mind of someone entirely other, and experiencing the world through their eyes. As a child, I was Dennis the Menace or Just William as often as I was Matilda or Sophie, and I think I’m a more compassionate, more imaginative adult because of it.”
Dads and Design review Chip Kidd's GO.
Historically, design (art & design) has been an education underdog, it is accustomed to having to justify its status and worth. But in 2016 it has an array of talented professionals who do champion its worth, and with good reason, as design is everywhere. A good place to start on the home school education of design is Chip Kidd’s brilliant book GO: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design. Pitched at children aged 10 and upwards, with a simple message that everything is designed! GO invites them to take a look around and in Kidd’s words ‘behold the design they take for granted every day. Deconstructing it and encouraging them to embark on projects using typography and perhaps some nifty word play’. Bringing design to curious minds. The book takes you on a journey of what Graphic design is and its origins, then breaking into detailed chapters on form, typography, content and concept, addressing the use of techniques and combinations in design.
Do teens read seriously anymore?
“It’s very likely that teen-agers, attached to screens of one sort or another, read more words than they ever have in the past. But they often read scraps, excerpts, articles, parts of articles, messages, pieces of information from everywhere and from nowhere. It’s likely that they are reading fewer books. Yes, millions of kids have read Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, and other fantasy and dystopian fictions; also vampire romance, graphic novels (some very good), young-adult novels (ditto), and convulsively exciting street lit. Yet what happens as they move toward adolescence? When they become twelve or thirteen, kids often stop reading seriously. The boys veer off into sports or computer games, the girls into friendship in all its wrenching mysteries and satisfactions of favor and exclusion. Much of their social life, for boys as well as girls, is now conducted on smartphones, where teen-agers don’t have to confront one another. The terror of eye contact!”
That is all.
