Another One Bites the Dust

Not that we’re ones to oppose technological advancement (OK, yes, we are), and we better than anyone are intimately familiar with the economics of magazine publishing, but it still very sad to see a publishing legend quit print—or any kind of magazine at all. In this case, the venerable 151-year-old Popular Science. Says The Verge:

After 151 years, Popular Science will no longer be available to purchase as a magazine. In a statement to The Verge, Cathy Hebert, the communications director for PopSci owner Recurrent Ventures, says the outlet needs to “evolve” beyond its magazine product, which published its first all-digital issue in 2021.

PopSci, which covers a whole range of stories related to the fields of science, technology, and nature, published its first issue in 1872. Things have changed a lot over the years, with the magazine switching to a quarterly publication schedule in 2018 and doing away with the physical copies altogether after 2020.

It could have been handled better.

In a post on LinkedIn, former PopSci editor Purbita Saha commented on the magazine’s discontinuation, stating she’s “frustrated, incensed, and appalled that the owners shut down a pioneering publication that’s adapted to 151 years worth of changes in the space of a five-minute Zoom call.”

Still, it will continue in some form.

PopSci will continue to offer articles on its website, along with its PopSci Plus subscription, which offers access to exclusive content and the magazine’s archive. However, its discontinuation marks the end of an era, and the other cuts across the science journalism field won’t make it easier to stay up to date on the state of our climate or dive into fascinating stories that you might not otherwise come across without the media outlets that bring them to our attention.

…But Another One Rides the Bus

But then for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows. Or something like that. Nylon magazine, which shut down its print edition in 2017, is relaunching it in April 2024.

The relaunch will coincide with NYLON’s 25th anniversary; with Coachella also turning 25 in 2024, what better time to celebrate than with our yearly Music Issue? The bi-annual print magazine will debut in April to coincide with the festival and our annual NYLON House party in the desert, with a second issue to come later in the year.

If you are unfamiliar with Nylon, here’s what you missed and can potentially un-miss:

Here’s what to expect: a revival of beloved print franchises, original reported stories, great fashion, and your favorite global music artists, all with an emphasis on new and emerging culture. The magazine itself will be available for purchase on newsstands and online come spring.

What is this… “newsstand” of which you speak?

Trashion Statement

Here’s a phrase Cary Sherburne may want to appropriate: “fast trashion.” Via Boing Boing, Benjamin Von Wong is an artist who specializes in turning the detritus generated by “fast fashion” into art.

Putting together this installation was like a thrifting adventure, never knowing what we would discover next.

Even organic clothing has a huge footprint. A single organic cotton t-shirt uses 2500L of water. Re-using is the most sustainable thing we can do, and it can be fun too!

To help us sort through the massive volume of clothing – we needed the help of local students.

Dozens of teenagers from various schools came to help us sort, organize and place the clothing on the installation while also taking the chance to learn about the fashion industry’s impact on the environment.

It’s not just fast fashion waste; he and his team have also created various installations and campaigns centered around plastics, e-waste, straws, and so on. Check out his case studies here.

Unabridge Too Far

They say that it’s not hoarding if you own a museum, although, to be honest, the line is a very fine one. In fact, you could easily look up the definition of “hoarder” thousands of times over at Madeline Kripke’s “dictionary museum.” Or, basically, a bunch (well, 20,000) of dictionaries. Says Atlas Obscura:

Madeline Kripke’s first dictionary was a copy of Webster’s Collegiate that her parents gave her when she was a fifth grader in Omaha in the early 1950s. By the time of her death in 2020, at age 76, she had amassed a collection of dictionaries that occupied every flat surface of her two-bedroom Manhattan apartment—and overflowed into several warehouse spaces. Many believe that this chaotic, personal library is the world’s largest compendium of words and their usage.

…More than 1,500 boxes, with vague labels such as “Kripke documents” or “Kripke: 17 books,” arrived at the school’s Lilly Library on two tractor-trailers in late 2021. The delivery was accompanied by a nearly 2,000-page catalog detailing some 6,000 volumes. But that’s only a fraction of the total. In summer 2023, the library hired a group of students to simply open each box and list its contents. By the fall, their count stood at about 9,700. “And they’ve got a long way to go,” says Adams. “20,000 sounds like a pretty good estimate.”

It's a lot more than just basic lexicons.

Much of what Adams has unpacked has a far less storied (and pricey) past, but, he says, the quirky and unexpected volumes in Kripke’s collection might be the most valuable to future lexicographers and historians. A bright red pamphlet with a doodle of heart on the cover might seem disposable, but it is an artifact of a particular place and time, Adams says. “Dictionaries are made by people, so they’re not just language books,” he says, “they’re culture books.”

The weirdest item in the collection?

Printed in 1962 as a marketing tool for a CBS sitcom, that slim pamphlet featuring a big heart around the faces of two 20-something actors is Dobie Gillis: Teenage Slanguage Dictionary, filled with “teen-age antics and terms.” It’s the type of thing that might have been stuffed into a cereal box or inserted in a teen magazine, says Adams. “I’m pretty sure that most people threw the copy they had away, and so this one is a fairly rare item that says something important about the representation of teen language and culture in the 1950s and 1960s.” Thanks to Kripke’s copy we know that this, at least according to the marketers behind The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, was the era of the “keen teen” (“well-liked person”), the “cream puff” (“conceited person”), the “meatball” (“a dull guy”), and the “mathematician” (“teen who can put two and two together and get SEX”).

Troy Story

Next month—December 23, to be exact—marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of one of the most beloved Christmas poems ever.

The city of Troy, N.Y., is part of the Capital District of New York near Albany and home to home to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). The Troy Sentinel was a short-lived semi-weekly newspaper published between 1823–1832, but on December 23, 1823, it published a poem called “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” aka “The Night Before Christmas,” originally published anonymously, but eventually credited to Clement Clark Moore. It was this poem more than anything that created the modern image of Santa Claus.  

The old Sentinel newspaper building still stands, and that issue in particular is well-preserved. The Albany Times-Union takes up the story:

The Troy Public Library has an original copy of the Sentinel’s most famous edition.  It may be just one of four surviving copies, said Paul Hicok, the library’s executive director, who recited the first few lines of the poem while turning to the original poem, headlined “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas” on the four-page edition.

“We carefully kept this newspaper. It’s important for local history. It’s important that a library can store this for future readers and research. We have almost every newspaper in Troy published in 200 years,” Hicok said.

The Dec. 23, 1823, edition of the Troy Sentinel receives extra security, Hicok said.  It’s kept under lock and key in a part of the library that most people don’t have access to on a regular basis.

The poem has since become a Christmas tradition for millions of children.

“A lot of people have this tradition of having it read to them on Christmas Eve, including Teddy Roosevelt. He was reading it as a 4-year-old and he went on to read it to his grandchildren, which is what I’ve done,” said Pamela McColl, author of “ ’Twas the Night: The Art and History of the Classic Christmas Poem.” She is promoting the book on tour for the bicentennial.

Troy, N.Y., also takes credit for the origin of the character of “Uncle Sam,” but that’s an AtW item for another time… July, perhaps.

The Crux of the Biscuit

Is the apostrophe.

Do you use apostrophes correctly? Do you confuse it’s and its? Do your teeth grind like tectonic plates when you see an apostrophe misused? Well, if so, here’s an association for you: the Apostrophe Protection Society. No, really.

Since 2001, the Apostrophe Protection Society has had a mission to preserve the correct use of this important, though much misused, item of punctuation. After a short closure at the end of 2019, the Apostrophe Protection Society has been revived by its new chairman, Bob McCalden, to continue its mission to champion the use of the apostrophe.

Their site offers usage tips, examples, a blog, and stories “ripped from the headlines,” such as this one from the Times:

Residents of Twyford, Hampshire, have had particularly just grounds to feel dispossessed of their apostrophes lately, after their local council’s adoption of a “no apostrophes” policy for new street signs. To widespread horror, “St Mary’s ­Terrace” became “St Marys Terrace”. Local authorities argued that omitting apostrophes was an innovation designed to make life easier for delivery drivers and emergency services. Apparently, apostrophes can confuse computer systems, and can be more tricky to input, not ideal when time is short.

Although, we rather like the alternate definition of “apostrophe”: “the addressing of a usually absent person or a usually personified thing rhetorically,” as in John Milton’s “Apostrophe to Light” (and all apostrophes are correctly used).

Purple Prose

We all have color management problems at some point, but nothing like the situation with Tyrian purple. It was once the most expensive product on Earth, worth more than three times its weight in gold. And then…by the 15th century, the “recipe” for making it was lost, such that no one today knows how to make Tyrian purple. It involved shellfish, and that’s all most anyone knows. However, via the BBC, one researcher has been exploring how to bring this lost dye back.

Tyrian purple was paraded by the most privileged in society for millennia – a symbol of strength, sovereignty and money. Ancient authors are particular about the precise hue that was worthy of the name: a deep reddish-purple, like that of coagulated blood, tinged with black. Pliny the Elder described it as having a “shining appearance when held up to the light”.

It didn’t have a very regal origin: it was a clear fluid—aka mucus—produced by sea snails. 

Once snails had been collected, either by hand along rocky coastlines or with traps baited with other snails – Murex sea snails are predators – it was time to harvest the slime. In some places, the mucous gland was sliced it out using a specialised knife. One Roman author explained how the snail's gore would then ooze out of its wounds, “flowing out like tears”, before being collected into mortars for grinding. Alternatively, smaller species could be crushed whole.

And that’s pretty much where the recipe ends. Accounts of how that mucousy muck became an expensive dye contradict each other and/or just don’t work. The practitioners who made it never wrote down the recipe, so it fell out of institutional memory.

Scientists are working on reviving it, turning to chemistry for help.

Scientists now know that to jolt the chemicals in Murex snails out of their colourless state, they need to be exposed to visible light. Initially their secretions will turn yellow, then green, turquoise, blue and eventually a shade of purple, depending on the snail species. "If you do this process on a sunny day, it takes something like less than five minutes to have this transformation," says Karapanagiotis.

But this isn't instant Tyrian purple. The shade is actually made up of many different pigment molecules, all working together. Melo explains that there's indigo, which is blue, “brominated” indigo, which is purple, and indirubin, which is red. “Depending on the treatment of your extract, and on the dying, you can have very different colours,” she says. Even once the desired colour has been achieved, there is still yet more processing to do to turn the pigments into a dye, such as converting them into forms that will stick to fabric.

So the trick is to keep a dyeing art from becoming a dying art.

Graphene In Spa-a-a-a-ace!

Was it a good week for graphene news? It’s always a good week for graphene news! The U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) and NASA are collaborating to develop a graphene-enhanced water treatment system for space missions. From (who else?) Graphene-Info:

Researchers at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) are developing a water treatment system based on a mix of graphene oxide and a byproduct made from shrimp shells.

It helps that researchers often partake of Red Lobster’s Endless Shrimp special. We continue.

Recently, ERDC’s graphene research attracted the attention of NASA, leading to a collaboration with the agency to investigate the use of novel graphene materials as high-capacity absorbents for the removal of spacecraft water contaminants.

They Won’t Stand for It

If you have ever lived in a tiny apartment—or even house—you know that floor space is limited, and some items are simply not practical. Like, say, nightstands. But there is no denying that the nightstand is highly useful. Could there be a small-footprint alternative? Yes! Via Core77, Klippa is a concept developed for IKEA by industrial designer Chris Pearce, who knows from small rooms: he’s based in Tokyo, where bedrooms are tiny and space is limited.

“KLIPPA replaces the functionality of a typical bedside table, offering storage space for books, phones and other objects while also supplying a lamp for pre-sleep reading. With the functions separated, accessories can be arranged in any unused wall-space around the bedside - a versatile solution for even the most challenging of small bedroom spaces.”

The four elements comprise a phone holder, a book holder, a tray for random items like glasses, and a reading lamp. They all attach to the wall without damaging it. (We can think of some NYC apartments where this would have been ideal.) No indication of whether IKEA has greenlit it or not.

Hangers-On

Consider the lowly coat hanger. It’s a hard design to improve upon (although we are firmly in the Joan Crawford camp when it comes to wire hangers). And yet, via Boing Boing, Swedish maker Simone Giertz has spent the past three years designing a better coat hanger. Like the space-saving alternative to a nightstand, her “coat hinger” is designed to save space by folding in on itself.

“Coat Hingers are coat hangers that save space by folding in half,” she explains. “If your closet is too shallow or if a clothes rack just won't fit – welcome into the fold.”

She has launched a Kickstarter campaign to help her develop it—and it has already drawn $422,000+ (from an initial goal of $50,000).

Even Joan Crawford would approve of this.

Just a Prawn in Their Game

Let’s hope the ERDC/NASA graphene collaboration isn’t compromised by this. Via Food & Wine, apparently Red Lobster’s “Endless Shrimp” deal is (quel surprise!) turning out to be financially ruinous.

In an earnings report call in early November, Ludovic Regis Henri Garnier, the CFO of Thai Union Group, which owns Red Lobster, announced that its Ultimate Endless Shrimp deal, which is normally a limited-time offer but was added to the daily menu in June, was exceedingly popular — so popular that it caused the restaurant chain to post an operating loss of more than $11 million in the third quarter of 2023. 

Huh. Giving people unlimited food for $20 was a bad business move. Go figure.

To be fair, according to the earnings call, the chain of 670 restaurants did experience a 4% year-over-year growth in its number of customers thanks to the deal, but the deal's $20 price tag for patrons to get two different types of shrimp was just too little to make up the difference. 

They increased the price to $25 to hopefully make up the difference. So perhaps Sizzler should avoid considering a $25 “Endless Porterhouse” deal.

Pop Will Eat Itself

There was a time when college bowl games had relatively dignified names, like the Orange Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, etc . Now we get things like the Avocados from Mexico Cure Bowl, the Union Home Mortgage Gasparilla Bowl, the Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl, the Cheez-It Citrus Bowl (huh?!), and…the Pop-Tarts Bowl. A unique aspect of the latter bowl is that it will (presumably) be the first bowl game with an edible mascot. Says USA Today:

The Pop-Tarts mascot is an extension of the company's “Agents of Crazy Good” campaign, which created characters based off classic flavors like Frosted Strawberry and Brown Sugar Cinnamon. They appear in television commercials, social media content and at events.

“For sixty years, Pop-Tarts has sacrificed everything in the name of Crazy Good flavor, so why wouldn’t that include our beloved football mascot, too?” Heidi Ray, Pop-Tarts senior director of marketing, said in a statement. “Since we announced our title sponsorship of the Pop-Tarts Bowl, fans have been speculating on the larger-than-life game day experiences we will be tackling, and this is the first of many traditions that fans can expect Pop-Tarts to upend on game day.”

Have they? Have they really? At any rate, at the culmination of the game…

The winner of the matchup will revel in celebration by eating a very large toaster treat.

And there will be no dignity to be found anywhere.

We’d hate to be the guy inside the costume.

The teams who get to compete for the Pop-Tarts feast will be revealed Dec. 3 when all bowl game selections are announced.

Syracuse University just unexpectedly qualified for a bowl game…let’s hope it’s not this one. People might get carried away and force Otto the Orange into a large juicer.

This Week in Printing, Publishing, and Media History

November 27

8 BC: Roman soldier and poet Horace dies (b. 65 BC).

1809: The Berners Street hoax was perpetrated by Theodore Hook in the City of Westminster, London.

1839: In Boston, Massachusetts, the American Statistical Association is founded, against all odds.

1852: English mathematician and computer scientist Ada Lovelace dies (b. 1815).

1924: In New York City, the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is held.

1942: Guitarist Jimi Hendrix born.

November 28

1628: English preacher, theologian, and author (Pilgrim’s Progress) John Bunyan born.

1814: The Times of London becomes the first newspaper to be produced on a steam-powered printing press, built by the German team of Koenig & Bauer.

1859: American short story writer, essayist, biographer, historian Washington Irving dies (b. 1783).

November 29

1832: American novelist and poet Louisa May Alcott born.

1877: Thomas Edison demonstrates his phonograph for the first time.

1972: Atari releases Pong, the first commercially successful video game.

2001: English singer-songwriter, guitarist, and music producer George Harrison dies (b. 1943).

November 30

1667: Irish satirist and essayist Jonathan Swift born.

1835: American novelist, humorist, and critic Mark Twain (né Samuel Clemens) born.

1900: “Either that wallpaper goes or I do”: Irish playwright, novelist, and poet Oscar Wilde dies (b. 1854).

1947: American playwright, screenwriter, and director David Mamet born.

1979: Pink Floyd’s The Wall is released.

1982: Michael Jackson’s Thriller is released. It will become the best-selling record album in history.

December 1

1913: Ford Motor Company introduces the first moving assembly line.

December 2

1939: New York City's LaGuardia Airport opens.

1971: The Soviet space program's Mars 3 orbiter releases a descent module. It lands successfully but loses contact. It is the first man-made object to land softly on the surface of Mars.

December 3

1857: Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad (né Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) born.

1894: Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist Robert Louis Stevenson dies (b. 1850).

1910: Modern neon lighting is first demonstrated by Georges Claude at the Paris Motor Show.

1994: The PlayStation developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment is released in Japan.