“The story goes that if Prince were to leave the world tomorrow, he has enough unreleased material to put out an album a year. I’ve been chasing his PR people for months to talk about these songs, before Prince’s lawyer gets in touch to tell me Prince ‘is the only person qualified to talk about his music’. When I suggest this the perfect opportunity for him to show us all just how qualified he is, she laughs an ‘it’s never going to happen’ kind of laugh.”
Polar explorer Ben Saunders on new adventuring magazine, Avaunt.
“An enduring memory from my childhood is the huge faded yellow shelf of National Geographics my uncle had, and I used to spend hours picking them out at random, and reading them cover to cover. Then, as a teenager, I discovered titles like GQ and Esquire. Until that point, as a kid growing up in rural England who wore clothes my mum bought me, and who loved riding my bike and playing computer games with my mates, fashion and style were totally abstract concepts, so magazines have always been both escapism and education to me, little doorways into parallel worlds that I never knew existed.”
New York times review of the new Whitney Museum of American Art.
“The new museum isn’t a masterpiece. But it is a deft, serious achievement, a signal contribution to downtown and the city’s changing cultural landscape. Unlike so much big-name architecture, it’s not some weirdly shaped trophy building into which all the practical stuff of a working museum must be fitted. It clearly evolved from the inside out, a servant to pragmatism and a few zoning anomalies.”
Steve Watson (Stack) in conversation with Danny Miller (Human After All).
“I think there’s something in the ease with which people can express themselves these days. Everyone takes it for granted that they should be able to communicate with a mass audience, whether through blogging, tweeting, Instagramming, etc, but that has led to a lot of noise and the concern that digital doesn’t last. If you’re spending a lot of time creating beautiful photography, lovely illustration or thoughtful writing, it makes sense that you want that content to live somewhere that will last for a long time. Print magazines are the ideal vessel for all that content, so I think that, perversely, the digital tools that have made it possible to bypass print have actually contributed to making print more attractive than ever.”
The devil's rope – a history of barbed wire.
“Right around the same time that barbed wire was invented, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. At first, telephone companies were laying telephone wire in cities, but they weren’t interested in the rural market. Still, farmers also needed phones, which meant that they needed a network of wires to connect the farms. Barbed wire fences could serve this purpose. The barbed wire couldn’t transmit a signal quite as clearly as a nice insulated copper wire, but for many years, they did the trick. A dozen or so farms might be connected on one system and for about 25 dollars, farmers could buy a kit to rig themselves into the network. In 1907 there were 18,000 independent telephone cooperative serving nearly a million and half people. Because of this, farmers were some of the earliest adopters of telephone technology.”
That is all .