“On the older Metro stocks, the voyageur gets to open the door…This is done either by pressing a green button or, on the still older trains, by employing a winding motion to lift a steel latch called a loqueteau, whereupon the double doors spring violently apart as if they’d always hated each other.”

– Andrew Martin, Metropolitan: An Ode to the Paris Metro

“The overwhelming success of ‘hip’ advertising in the 1960s solidified the idea that youth culture possessed the most valuable asset to a successful ad campaign: being cool. Whatever young people were thinking, it needed to be appropriated and capitalized on. If they loathed consumerism, advertising employed anti-advertising tactics. To keep up with the styles of the time ‘typefaces and graphic design reflected new hallucinogenic styles as quickly as they could be invented.’”

– Caps Lock: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape From It

Zoe Leonard

Josef Hartwig's 1924 model chess set

As Nilay Patel observed, the product of a social network is content moderation.

Twitter, Failure Modes, and Your Favorite Bar

Andor S1 (2022)

Varityper #phototypesetting disc #letterlibrary

John George Brown - Reading on the Rocks, Grand Manan (1855)

not the goncharov renaissance curing my art block

The Roaring Season