Kickoff For January 6, 2025
Another year rolls around. They seem to do that faster and faster, don't they? Regardless, welcome to 2025. To help you get the first Monday of the year started, here are some links:
The Pen Hospital in Kolkata will nurse your broken fountain pen back to full health — Wherein we get a glimpse into a seemingly anachronistic, hole-in-the-wall establishment dedicated to repairing (and selling) writing instruments from a bygone age, an establishment that continues to thrive in the digital age.
From the article:
There was a time when fountain pens were ubiquitous writing instruments, used by everyone from businessmen and students to professors and shopkeepers. “In the past, people purchased fountain pens out of necessity,” recalls Imtiaz. “That changed in the early ’2000s when ball pens and roller pens took over the market. Eventually, all the big companies like Pilot, Caravan, Doctor, Artist and Wilson shut down their factories in India.” If the Pen Hospital has managed to survive it is by the grace of a dedicated customer base.
No one’s ready for this — Wherein Sarah Jeong examines the implication of AI photo editing features in newer smartphones and some of the scary consequences of people using those features to manipulate photographic reality to fit their needs and beliefs.
From the article:
No one on Earth today has ever lived in a world where photographs were not the linchpin of social consensus — for as long as any of us has been here, photographs proved something happened. Consider all the ways in which the assumed veracity of a photograph has, previously, validated the truth of your experiences.
Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era — Wherein we learn the (modern) history of the wildly popular and seemingly ubiquitous notebook, how and why it's been embraced by certain audiences, and about the enduring appeal of that piece of stationery.
From the article:
At the same time, the Moleskine became a potent status symbol. Tech CEOs toted them, as did the designers, journalists, and writers whom Sebregondi had envisaged—and even more people whose aspirations perhaps outran their actual creativity. Spotted in your local Starbucks, these characters were easily mocked: the satirical website Stuff White People Like made hay with their accessorizing, as did the right-wing politician Karl Rove, who once told his audience at Yale that he knew them to be pretentious by their Moleskines. The mockery did nothing to hurt sales.
You Are The Product — Wherein Lillian Fishman looks at the read receipt and how it's gone full circle from being reviled to an indication of transparency to being reviled again.
From the article:
[R]ead receipts are a subtle, vicious form of emotional information: even if we only want to hear from our friend when she addresses us directly, still we can’t help but glimpse that little ‘read’ annotation or that blue tick, the record of some momentary dismissal. What is being extracted from us is our ignorance and equanimity – our good faith in our friends.
Scott Fitzgerald’s Last Act — Wherein Jonathan Clarke recounts the writer's struggle in his last days to try to craft what would be his final (though unfinished) novel, and looks at the unexpected depth of The Last Tycoon.
From the article:
Tycoon is a Hollywood novel in that it is set in the movie industry and draws directly from Fitzgerald’s work as a screenwriter. Fitzgerald saw how the industry manipulated symbols to forge the American unconscious. He also saw the studio system that divided and conquered its workers in the service of capital as broadly representative of contending forces in American life generally.
The Rip in the World — Wherein Jonah Walters explores our fascination with nature's destructive side — not just from the standpoint of science, but also awe of the beauty of the power that can cause the destruction.
From the article:
In every life, I suspect, there come moments when what we want is disruption. We can’t help but long for something mighty to come along, some incontestable force that will shake up all that is familiar and deposit us some place new. We want to experience a big, cataclysmic, comprehensive change—a rip in the world—but we don’t want to be the reason for it. We can handle the challenge. What we can’t handle is the blame.