This is an old edition of Meanwhile from an inferior, more simian newsletter platform that has unhelpfully severed all the hyperlinks. It’s included here in the archive simply for sake of completion.
Consider the physics of hell
“Ever since its 1314 publication, scholars had toiled to map the physical features of Dante’s Inferno—the blasted valleys and caverns, the roiling rivers of fire. What Galileo said, put simply, is that many commonly accepted dimensions did not stand up to mathematical scrutiny. Using complex geometrical analysis, he attacked a leading scholar’s version of the Inferno’s structure, pointing out that his description of the infernal architecture—such as the massive cylinders descending to the center of the Earth—would, in real life, collapse under their own weight.”
On design, disability and empathy
“Perhaps you’re sitting here, reading this on your phone, absently checking your email whenever your attention drifts, tapping text messages to the friend you’re meeting tonight for dinner. You stand at the end of a long line of inventions, which might have never existed, but for the disabled. The keyboard on your phone, the telecommunications lines it connects with, the inner workings of email: In 1808, Pellegrino Turri built the first typewriter, so that his blind lover, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, could write letters more legibly. In 1872, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone to support his work helping the deaf. And, in 1972, Vint Cerf programmed the first email protocols for the nascent Internet. He believed fervently in the power of electronic letters. His proof was his own experience: Electronic messaging was the only seamless way to communicate with his wife, who was deaf, while he was at work.”
Somewhere in publishing
An exceedingly accurate comic about book design by Evan Johnston.
Amazon's big data is big
“I kept looking and looking but finally I had to admit: I can’t climb this particular mountain. There’s no obvious path through this data. I could claim that it’s a mirror of capitalism, or the global marketplace, but I can’t prove that. The broad claims of the essayist are no match for the digital reality of a global megastructure. … We can rank and sort and massage, let people rate the reviews of each other, and hope that order emerges. And then we old book-type people tend to show up and tut when people prefer The Alchemist to The Man Without Qualities, but if you take a breath, who wouldn’t? People like big, simple things with wizards. Wouldn’t you? It’s just that now we have proof.”
Kill your ego
In a week when one person attempted to monopolise the very essence of ego, Reed Words' Tom Coleman gets his out of the way so he can get some work done.
How to win Monopoly
Basically, don't play to win the way the game wants you to win. It's quite profound.
Where do you draw the line between commercial and literary fiction?
Is there a line? Should there be a line? Who wants a line? What good is a line? Who decided there should be a line anyway, and how are they benefiting from the existence of the line? Has the line always been there? What does the line want from me? #line
Is everything architecture?
“In April 1968 the Austrian architect Hans Hollein published his seminal polemic text ‘Everything is Architecture’ in the avant-garde magazine Bau. Predominantly through captioned images, the article attempted to redefine architecture beyond the conventional discipline. In reaction to the suffocating po-faced pragmatism of postwar planning and policy, Hollein pushed the boat all the way out: illustrated with such diverse objects as lipstick, pill capsules, space suits and photographs of Che Guevera, Hollein labelled everything as architecture.”
That is all.