For Bike to Work Day, a lovely illustrated vintage bicycle safety manual from 1969.
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We live today not in the digital, not in the physical, but in the kind of minestrone that our mind makes of the two.
MoMA’s Paola Antonelli, mastermind of Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects, at a recent TED salon titled “Design Is Everywhere.”
Mark Twain on “sponsored content” and “native advertising,” 1873.
We’ve entered what some scientists are calling the Anthropocene — a new geologic epoch in which human activity, more than any other force, steers change on the planet. Just as we’re now causing the vast majority of extinctions, the vast majority of endangered species will only survive if we keep actively rigging the world around them in their favor. … We are gardening the wilderness. The line between conservation and domestication has blurred.
In his fantastic SVA commencement address on the false division between “high” and “low” culture, critic Greil Marcus adds to history’s finest definitions of art.
Ah, yes. The Cocktail Chart of Film & Literature from Pop Chart Lab, who have previously charted the varieties of coffee, the history of Apple, America’s bike lanes, the composition of classic cocktails, the wonders of serif fonts, Gotham’s villains, and the 64 guitars that defined rock history.
Serve with recipes form The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook.
There are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press.
Mark Twain’s prescient 1873 critique of the press.
I knew my limitations at a young age. I was very aware of my inability to multitask by age five. I admitted this to my mother when I came in from playing, spit out my chewing gum, handed it to her, and said, “Mom please hold my gum, I’m going to the bathroom right now, and I can’t handle both.
Jennifer Coolidge and other women writers and entertainers on bypassing motherhood.
Babies scare me more than anything. They’re tiny and fragile and impressionable—and someone else’s! As much as I hate borrowing stuff, that is how much I hate holding other people’s babies. It’s too much responsibility. Of course they are lovely and warm and adorable, and it’s so funny when they decide they like you and hold you in return, but I am frightened of doing something wrong that will alter them forever. Give them a weird look and they might be talking to their therapist about me fifty years later.
[…]
It might not be a fear of kids themselves, as in truth I usually get along with them pretty well. They like my tattoos and my uncomplicated child/adult face. They identify with my orange shoes. I look like I would let them get away with stuff, and I do. My fear of having children is that, frankly, I just don’t want to love anyone that much. I have my own problems with love, and I have processed and played the same games for a lifetime, but what if I had to do that with someone I actually MADE?! (Or went all the way to China and adopted. This is not a joke—I have long thought I would adopt one of those baby girls from China, because really, who’s going to know the difference?)
Comedian Margaret Cho on (not) parenting.
For Children’s Book Week, the best illustrations from 130 years of Brothers Grimm fairy tales.
Maybe you have to believe in the value of everything to believe in the value of anything.
A beautiful read by Jon Mooallem.
This is how humor works: It’s a conflict of synergies — we mashup these things that don’t belong together that temporarily exist in out minds.
A TED salon curated by Helen Walters, titled “Design Is Everywhere,” New Yorker cartoons editor Bob Mankoff illustrates his theory of humor with his most famous cartoon, which juxtaposes the syntax of politeness with the content of rudeness.
He also notes that the magazine calls cartoons “idea drawings” because an idea drawing “it requires thinking on behalf of cartoonish and thinking on behalf of reader to make it work.”
For more illustrative epitomes in action, see The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs.
So great: If Stanley Kubrick had directed Game of Thrones and Saul Bass had designed the poster.
Pair with the legacy in film and design Saul Bass did leave.
