British police consulted a warlock in regards to mysterious horse mane braiding. Honestly, I don’t know what’s weirder: seemingly random horse braiding, or the fact that the police consulted a warlock.
Catching the pest
How China won and Russia lost. An interesting read on the driving factors behind China’s apparent economic success and Russia’s failure, while implementing seemingly similar policies. The gist of it is that many of China’s reforms came bottom-up, gradually making their evolving from rural agrarian practices, while Russia’s reforms used a top-down government mandated approach.
Bookstore stupidity
Stupid Quotes from BookMine. You can only wonder what goes on in the heads of some people.
Bike lanes are the devil’s work
Hipsters repaint bike lanes. This made me laugh, it had to have been fun to write.
Scantily clad hipster cyclists attracted to the Brooklyn neighborhood made it difficult, the Hasids said, to obey religious laws forbidding them from staring at members of the opposite sex in various states of undress.
Mario couldn’t jump
Satoru Iwata discusses the Mario brothers with Shigeru Miyamoto. The interview is quite revealing — many of Mario’s trademark characteristics were due to design and programming restraints at the time, including the moustache, the hat and the overalls.
Playboy type
Ministry of Type takes a look at the typography and layouts of Playboy, particularly those from the 50s and 60s. The magazine has put about fifty years of archives online, although the interface is a bit kludgey.
World changing science
Trailblazing is an interactive science exhibit from the Royal Society. It showcases sixty articles from the last 350 years, allowing you to place them in their historical context and read the papers in entirety. My productivity will be going out the window this afternoon, enjoy.
Notes from a midlist author
The confessions of a semi-successful author. The article is a few years old, but I can’t imagine the conditions have become much better.
If you don’t want to hear about the noir underside of publishing — if you’re a writer longing for a literary career, or a reader who’s happier not knowing that producing and marketing a book these days involves about as much moral purity as producing and marketing a pair of Nikes — I suggest you stop reading now.
Dead Caulfields
The uncollected works of JD Salinger. Twenty two stories from various publications that have never been available in one place.
Typographic purists
Mistakes in typography grate the purists from the NYT.
“I think sometimes that being overly type-sensitive is like an allergy,†said Michael Bierut, a partner in the Pentagram design group in New York. “My font nerdiness makes me have bad reactions to things that spoil otherwise pleasant moments.â€
I’m not at the anaphylactic stage of typographic allergy yet — more the sniffly, dry and itchy eyes sort of thing.