As Trump became the Republicans’ presumptive nominee, lots more people, pretty much every day, said to me, “SPY really needs to be rebooted, if only just for the election. SPY really needs to be rebooted, if only just for the election.”
I guess maybe they’re right, so I’m very pleased that Esquire has decided to produce an online pop-up SPY during the last thirty days of the presidential campaign. It has my whole-hearted best wishes. And it’s also a nice serendipity that this October will mark the magazine’s thirtieth anniversary. It’s as if SPY, a retired superhero, is making a brief but necessary comeback.
I have written about Avant Garde magazine before. It’s one of the great 60s magazines, and the beginning of the modern magazine.
Had I known there were no bookstores in Turkmenistan maybe I would have said, ‘No way,’ when my wife told me she’d been offered a job there. Any nation that bans bookstores is no place for a writer.
There were other signs that the Central Asian petro state was not going to embrace me as a comrade: I am an anarchist (funarchist, actually) – whereas Turkmen authorities once jailed a young man, for a year, for organizing a flash-mob dance party. The ultra authoritarian police state, known to expats who reside there as North Korea Lite, is a vast desert where the summer temperature usually hovers around 45 degrees – whereas as I am a tree-hugging, snow-loving Canadian whose genetic roots are buried in the Finnish permafrost.
Brian Salmi’s story on how he hoped to arrange the first Turkmenistanly Cup just gets weirder from there.
Textpattern has been my goto CMS since 2004, which is prehistoric in CMS years. Wordpress people love the zillion of templates out there, Textpatterners love that TXP lets you essentially turn regular webpages into CMS’s. This new release is a significant upgrade and lead developer Stef Dawson should be proud of his team.
This Politico oral history of the passengers of Air Force One on 9/11 is fascinating. What is mind blowing is that George W. Bush and company were getting most of their information via rabbit ears from broadcast stations that faded in and out as they cruised for hours.
Cards against humanity has opened a new service for creators of things to do proper distribution and package mailouts. Looks perfect for people who successfully pull off Kickstarters then must deliver the damn pledges.
But the header gif by Paul Robertson is something else.
Keach Hagey writing in the Wall Street Journal
[Vice co-founder Shane] Smith says he really got to know the younger Mr. Murdoch when Vice tried to buy News Corp’s News of the World tabloid at the height of its phone-hacking scandal, arguing he could use the paper’s notoriety to turn it into a new kind of international news outlet. The idea didn’t fly, but Mr. Murdoch “liked our cockiness,” Mr. Smith said.
Joe Pompeo, writing for Politico
Morning Media has learned that the next two places The New York Times is targeting for expansion are Canada and Australia. The company has already dispatched research teams to lay the groundwork and has begun recruiting journalists to build out small newsrooms in both countries, similar to the Mexico City-based, digital Spanish-language operation for Latin America that the Times launched earlier this year.
I have actually noticed a lot of Canadian stories lately in the New York Times, beyond Justin. It’s a good plan: Postmedia has been cutting back its reporters, particularly on culture. Sure, the Canadian market is only 10 per cent the size of the US market, but what newspaper would turn down possible 10 per cent growth now?
This story reminded me of the a 1990 article in Spy Magazine after they noticed that the Globe & Mail had placed 29 boxes in New York City.
Last November, illustrator Rick Meyerowitz, former editor Tony Hendra, and former art director Peter Kleinman discussed the National Lampoon, moderated by graphic design historian Steve Heller. It’s a great session.
I need to watch the doc, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead on iTunes soon.
Patrick Radden Keefe, writing in the New Yorker
Prosopagnosics often have strange stories about how they cope with their condition. The subjects had their own curious tales about being on the other end of the spectrum. They not only recognized character actors in movies—they recognized the extras, too. In social situations, prosopagnosics often smiled blandly and behaved as if they had previously encountered everyone they met, rather than risk offending acquaintances. Russell’s subjects described the opposite adaptation: they often pretended that they were meeting for the first time people whom they knew they’d met before. After all, if you’re introduced to someone at a party and you remind him, in pointillist detail, about the circumstances of a brief meeting years earlier, he might reasonably conclude that you are a stalker. One of the subjects described an ex-boyfriend’s referring to her as a “freak of nature.”
As someone who has a terrible time recognising faces — self-diagnosed prosopagnosia — I find this fascinating.
You can take the test that the Met puts its face recognition applicants through here.