A running collection of things I’ve found interesting, well-made, or worth spreading—mostly from art, design, tech, photography, and film, with the occasional thought or two of my own.
A fascinating story in New Yorker magazine on redesigning sugar. There's currently two competing approaches to reducing the harmful effects of sugar while keeping the taste benefits as well as the important role sugar plays in baking—artificial sweeteners fail to deliver the crumbling important in certain types of pastries.
One approach is mixing sugar with indigestible, but effectively harmless additives like silica, or changing the make-up of the sugar molecules just enough change how it's metabolised:
"Each silica grain is less than a fiftieth the diameter of human hair—invisible to the eye and undetectable on the tongue. DouxMatok’s production process embeds them throughout each sugar crystal, like blueberries in a muffin. /... / The atoms in a sucrose molecule are usually stacked in a well-ordered lattice, but when this structure becomes what scientists call “amorphous,” its atoms frozen in random chaos, it dissolves on the tongue much more quickly. Incredo’s exponentially more soluble structure rapidly saturates your taste buds, delivering an intense hit of sweetness."
The other is finding a different enough kind of sugar that the human body doesn't quite know how to approach:
"Allulose caramelizes, it fluffs, it stabilizes, and it delivers both mouthfeel and crumb structure in baked goods. “It behaves like a sugar because it is one,” Carr said. Yet, despite the fact that this rare sugar behaves almost exactly like sucrose in the kitchen, it remains sufficiently alien to pass through the human intestine without being digested or fermented."
There might just be another way by simply gradually reducing the amount of it, much like it's been gradually increased for tens of years:
Hampton mentioned that, before he came to Tate & Lyle, he worked at PepsiCo, where he managed to cut salt levels in British potato chips by half during a five-year period, without anyone noticing. “Can you do it with sugar as well? That’d be interesting,” he said.
John Boardley of I Love Typography has collected his favourite typefaces from 2020 and not only are there some sweet typefaces to feast your eyes on, the page itself is all candy as well. Pictured here are some details of Signifier from Klim Type.
Dina Litovsky's photo series of the Amish on vacation.
Glenn Fleishman in a fascinating story for Wired that involves the Prime minister of Pakistan, Justin Timberlake, a rabbi and typography.
The prime minister’s daughter, Maryam Sharif, provided an exculpatory document that had been typeset in Calibri—a Microsoft font that was only released for general distribution nearly a year after the document had allegedly been signed and dated. While Sharif’s supporters waged a Wikipedia war over the Calibri entry, type designer Thomas Phinney quietly dropped some history lessons about the typeface on Quora, and found himself caught in a maelstrom of global reporting. Phinney said that because Calibri has been in use for several years, people have forgotten that it’s a relatively new font.
Greg Girard’s photos from inside the infamous (since demolished) Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong.
The New York Times special about the supertall buildings of NYC, the people who live in them, the people who build them and what happens in, on, and around them. Oh, and some spectacular views.
For Retrace Our Steps French photographers Carlos Ayesta and Guillaume Bressio took residents of Namie, now a ghost town like many others in the region, back to their old settings as if the 2011 Tohoku earthquake never happened.
This is zaku zaku, japanese for the crunching sound that stepping on ice might make. It’s one of a set of chocolates designed to represent japanese words for certain textures, by studio Nendo for the Maison et Objet design show in Paris. Go see the rest of them on Nendo’s site because they’re all fantastic.
Rodeny Mullen invented the flatground ollie in 1982 based on Alan “Ollie” Gelfands no-handed airs on vert. For the uninitiated it looks like magic, the board seemingly glued to the skaters' feet. For the initiated, it feels like magic — successfully popping your first ollie is an endorphin cocktail rivaling the best.
Aathis Batia goes all sciency for Wired and shows the forces at work while popping an ollie.
Peter Merholz writing about how the conversation around (digital) design has increasingly become about the superficial, often neglecting the deeper underlying layers that make up a product:
It plays into the still-prevailing attitude among business and technical types that designers don’t grok the deeper concerns in these complicated systems, and are best to bring in when it’s time to make something look good. Still, we must be vigilant in maintaining similar attention to those deeper layers, precisely because their abstraction makes them more challenging to discuss.
I could try and write a description of what this Adam Magyar guy is doing, but it’s just too awesome and you should do yourself a favor and read the whole story on Medium, then go and marvel at the rest of his work on his website.
Jon Geeting’s photos of snowy Philadelphia very clearly illustrate where to reclaim some of the street space for the public by showing where cars actually don’t drive or drive very little.
An Excerpt from "Some Instructions to the New Guy Concerning the Preparation and Presentation of My French Toast", by Stanley Kubrick.
Chestnut brown crust marks are an indication that great care has gone into preparing the French toast, and above all, this is what concerns me the most: that you care. You must care about the French toast. If you don’t care about the French toast, then perhaps you don’t care about anything is my train of thought on the matter, and if you don’t care about anything, then working for me doesn’t seem feasible, as I have an insatiable desire to be surrounded by people who care as much as I do.
Spend hours at work on a tricky design problem? You’re more likely to stop at Burger King on the drive home. Hold back from saying what you really think during one of those long-ass, painful meetings? You’ll struggle with the code you write later that day. Since both willpower/self-control and cognitive tasks drain the same tank, deplete it over here, pay the price over there. One pool. One pool of scarce, precious, easily-depleted resources. If you spend the day exercising self-control (angry customers, clueless co-workers), by the time you get home your cog resource tank is flashing E.
