Knopf has only had three editors in chief in a century. Sonny kept a firm hand on the tiller. I hope the next leader will be guided by the instincts of the great editors who went before. https://t.co/mmK7zLI8UB
Today, Knopf is one of the most venerable literary publishers in the country. In its 100-year history, the company, which is now part of Penguin Random House, has had only three people at the helm—Knopf himself, Robert Gottlieb, and current editor-in-chief Sonny Mehta.
Sonny Mehta, a literary tastemaker and kingmaker who spent more than three decades at the helm of the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house, where he courted critical acclaim, profits and sometimes both at once with a lineup of books that included works by a stable of Nobel laureates, the memoirs of presidents and prime ministers, and page-turning crime and love stories, died Dec. 30 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 77.
The cause was complications from pneumonia, according to a statement from Knopf, where Mr. Mehta served as editor in chief and chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
From the winding of twine around the rubbery-core, to the wrapping of the stretched leather, to the hand-sewn red stitching — it’s a miraculous process to behold. Kind of romantic that they’re still hand-sewn nowadays:
“Always restless, even daring when he had to be, Shaughnessy worked hard to get in and around the railroad, in all conditions, in all settings,” writes Kevin P. Keefe, former editor-in-chief of Trains magazine, in a book essay. “If the life of a crossing watchman was important, then Shaughnessy shuddered through a subzero night until the perfect moment when his subject dashed back into the warmth of a shanty. If the guts of a steam locomotive were interesting, then he’d insert himself into the depths of roundhouses and sidle up next to the hostlers in order to record the oily intricacies of valve gear and side rods.”
Born in Troy, New York, in 1933, Shaughnessy published his first photograph in Trains in 1952. While the detailed captions in Essential Witness are those of a true rail enthusiast (the “Pennsylvania Railroad 11-class 2-10-0” is identified as chugging over an elevated bridge), his images have a broader appreciation for how people exist with the railroads in North America, and how these systems altered the landscape. The silhouette of a tunnel in Canaan, New York, in 1989 reveals its jagged edges, framing the train with this rock that was blasted through for progress. Sometimes the trains are tiny against the mountains or waterfalls, sometimes the focus is elsewhere, like a 1953 photograph that concentrates on the cows in a Vermont pasture, unperturbed by the freight train zooming behind.
Jim Shaughnessy, “Pennsylvania Railroad operator hoops up train orders to crew of a northbound coal train, Trout Run, Pennsylvania” (1956) (source: the artist and Thames & Hudson)
I love this photo. Train orders, are largely obsolete here in North America. But sometimes, it still happens. Traditionally orders get hooped to the conductor at the front, and the operator(s) at the caboose. Nowadays, operations are radioed or even downloaded.
Between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct, according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Today, a third of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left. Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, 50 to 90 percent of them are predicted to disappear by the next century.
In rare cases, political will and a thorough written record can resurrect a lost language. Hebrew was extinct from the fourth century BC to the 1800s, and Catalan only bloomed during a government transition in the 1970s. In 2001, more than 40 years after the last native speaker died, the language of Oklahoma’s Miami tribe started being learned by students at Miami University in Ohio. The internet has connected rare language speakers with each other and with researchers. Even texting has helped formalize languages that don’t have a set writing system.
Other languages have not been so lucky in a post-internet world. Many, will never return from extinction. But it’s true that being more connected, we have more opportunities to connect and preserve our ancestral dialects and languages. In National Geographic’s article, they share a video of two surviving speakers of Gottscheerish:
For more information, check out WikiTongues, the seed bank of the world’s languages.
In 1979, responding to complaints from riders that the subway map was difficult to use, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority hired the Manhattan design firm Michael Hertz and Associates to create a new map.
That map. The problematic Massimo Vignelli (RIP) subway map designed in 1972, and it was cool-looking but wow, was it unusable:
No wonder Vignelli’s map only lived 7 years. It’s pretty difficult to find these lying around anymore, but you can find them for sale on eBay. You used to be able to even find them at old subway stations, still plastered up on waypoints or platform corkboards.
Portis and de Luca did an outstanding job on this interactive Times story. If you enjoy trains or even New York history, you’ll love this story. Read it here.
I have a deep love for The Lone Star State. Every inch of Texas feels like home to me. I was born in Texas, and I would prefer to be buried there.
It’s a place that is seemingly boundless in resources, kindness and wholesome kinships (for those unaware, the state motto is simply, friendship). I advise everyone to take a road trip sometime through the heartland of Texas via its highway arteries: I-35, I-30, I-20, I-45 and I-10 and befriend some Texans in far-away places. There are so many treasures that dot the landscape in pretty much any direction. Buc-ee’s, Whataburgers, kolaches, and breweries and all! Texas has thick forests, wide canyons, rocky mountains, wild rivers, deserts, beaches, thousands of gigantic lakes, farms, big cities, sleepy towns, historic sites and BBQ like you wouldn’t believe.
Texas also has a history unlike any other state in the union. One might say that turmoil, drama, oil, entertainment and entrepreneurship are the tenets of Texan culture. Speaking of entertainment — enter Dallas SMU’s G. William Jones Film & Video Collection. It has a remarkable video/film archive. Within its vast collection are film prints, tapes, reels, and television tapes. The archive was originally known as the Southwest Film/Video Archives, but was later renamed after its founder Dr. William Jones. Yesterday, they posted a new video, highlighting Texas treasures and culture from 1952:
Come take a tour of our lovely state with this gorgeous 16mm documentary, TEXAS: THE BIG STATE. https://t.co/TEbQdJarxb
This film in particular is interesting. It was produced by The Dudley Pictures Corporation. The motion picture company takes its name from the esteemed and legendary travelogue producer, Carl Dudley. The company completed a number of remarkable and charming travelogues which have been compiled into a handy YouTube playlist here. The playlist description reads:
Carl Dudley was best known for his 1958 production of Cinerama’s South Seas Adventure, but throughout his career produced more than 300 “travel adventures” as he preferred to call travelogues. Dudley was born in 1910 in Little Rock, Arkansas aboard his father’s Ward & Wade Minstrels Show train. In 1935, inspired by seeing the film Mutiny on the Bounty, he traveled to Tahiti, Australia and India, supporting himself by working on film crews. He landed back in Hollywood in the late 1930’s and worked briefly as a screenwriter. In 1944 he started Dudley Pictures Corp which produced the series This World of Ours and This Land of Ours for theatrical and educational distribution. He died of a heart attack in Hong Kong on September 2, 1973.
Without further distractions, here’s Texas: The Big State (skip to 13:18 for Fort Worth and TCU)
[The Mask of Sorrow] is a monument perched on a hill above Magadan, Russia, commemorating the many prisoners who suffered and died in the Gulag prison camps in the Kolyma region of the Soviet Union during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. […]
It consists of a large concrete statue of a face, with tears coming from the left eye in the form of small masks. The right eye is in the form of a barred window. The back side portrays a weeping young woman and a headless man on a cross. Inside is a replication of a typical Stalin-era prison cell. Below the Mask of Sorrow are stone markers bearing the names of many of the forced-labor camps of the Kolyma, as well as others designating the various religions and political systems of those who suffered there.
What separated Lost from the pack is that it had compelling characters, a great cast, and an enticing mystery that invited fans to solve it. Lost was one of the first shows to embrace AR storytelling, which has now become ubiquitous. Other networks, and even ABC itself, tried to recreate Lost‘s magic formula … and have yet to find a way to recapture that lightning in a bottle.
But all good things come to an end, and that’s the biggest problem some people have with Lost: the ending. It must have been impossible to craft a conclusion that would please everyone, but the Lost finale was unusually divisive. Some even claimed that it retroactively ruined the show for them. We wouldn’t go that far. If the Lost finale had truly been that bad, we wouldn’t still be talking about the show’s beautifully convoluted mythology a decade and a half later.
LOST was monumentally epic (just read through some of the comments on this forum thread at MacRumous, classic). It had a mythology that captivated millions (and continues to do so to this day). It was ahead of its time, inspired countless sci-fi series, horror anthologies, films, and kicked Bad Robot Productions into override to produce sleeper hits such as, 10 Cloverfield Lane. It led Abrams to the directorial helm in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Lastly, until HBO’s Game of Thrones, LOST previously held the contrarian title of worse series finale ever.
LOST was and continues to be so important to me. I think I might be overdue for a re-watch. We have to go back…
Old Harry Rocks are a uniquely gorgeous set of chalk rock formations in Dorset, England. Fun-fact, Dorset and the surrounding Isle of Purbeck are incredibly ancient. Known visitors to Dorset date as back to 8000BCE ????
During the conferences that followed, several resolutions again highlighted the goal of abolishing passports, but concluded that the time was not yet right. In 1924, the International Conference of Emigration and Immigration in Rome maintained that “the necessity of obtaining passports should be abolished as soon as possible” but in the meantime advocated other measures to facilitate travel. These measures included an increase in the number of offices delivering passports, allowing emigrants to save time and money.
In Geneva in 1926, Polish delegate, Franciszek Sokal, opened proceedings by bluntly asking the parties to adopt “as a general rule that all States Members of the League of Nations should abolish passports”.
Back then, it was a very different celery. Native to the Mediterranean and Middle East, wild celery has thin stalks and a bitter flavor. It was only later that farmers bred celery to have sturdy ribs and a sweeter profile. Its strong smell and dark color struck ancient Greeks as positivelychthonic: that is, associated with the Underworld and death.
As a result, celery became an essential part of burials. In ancient Greece, celery covered graves, and the dead were often crowned with it. We know this, writes classicist Robert Garland, because the first-century Greek writer Plutarch referred to celery as the most common plant used for the purpose. Historians have floated various theories as to why the dead needed to be garlanded. Perhaps they had faced life with courage, and deserved to be buried as heroes. Garland rejects this in favor of another theory: that the dead were given heroic crowns “to add dignity and lustre to the proceedings.” Other writers, such as the Roman Pliny the Elder, considered celery off-limits as an everyday food, since it was prominent at funeral banquets.
Wow! Who would’ve thunk? Now I have an elevated level of respect for the unfortunate celery stem that swims in my next Bloody Mary. Here’s to life, death, and to celery ????
The year is currently 2019. This marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved peoples to American soil. The virginal wharfs America’s first slaves arrived on were likely shallow and crude. The ships were packed, grueling and nightmarish. America’s fledgling colony began here, in Virginia on the backs of slave-trading and cotton. The ironic state motto, entombed 150 years later in 1776 by George Mason at the Virginia Convention became (and still unchanged), Sic Semper Tyrannis, roughly meaning, death to tyrants or down to tyrants.
400 years later, and Black Americans are still battling for the equality they deserve. The phenomenon of equality and protected freedoms may have been only ink on paper in 1776. But, Black Americans have fought to make it a reality. We owe Black America gratitude and thanks, and instead they are met with slavery, brutality, whitewashed history and often, violence.
This ideology — that black people belonged to an inferior, subhuman race — did not simply disappear once slavery ended. If the formerly enslaved and their descendants became educated, if we thrived in the jobs white people did, if we excelled in the sciences and arts, then the entire justification for how this nation allowed slavery would collapse. Free black people posed a danger to the country’s idea of itself as exceptional; we held up the mirror in which the nation preferred not to peer. And so the inhumanity visited on black people by every generation of white America justified the inhumanity of the past.
The 1619 Project has a single focus. A mission to arm all Americans with the truth. Reframe America’s textbook-whitewashed history with the truth and honesty they deserve. Add context and proper attribution to the Black Americans who have previously been left out of America’s founding narrative.
The #1619Project published online today and it is my profound hope that we will reframe for our readers the way we understand our nation, the legacy of slavery, and most importantly, the unparalleled role black people have played in this democracy.
The conceit of the magazine is that nothing about modern American life has been left untouched by the colonists’ decision to purchase that first group of enslaved Africans, that the year 1619 is as important to the American story as the year 1776.
The #1619Project is at one one of the most profoundly beautiful things I have ever seen, & also one of the most devastating. The arguments, meticulously researched, powerfully argued, make what to me is an irrefutable case that it’s time to rewrite our narrative & tell the truth.
The contributors page tells a powerful story. Black writers, black poets, black photographers, original works from black artists. We are the descendants who are here to set the record straight.
The 1619 Project is led by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a seasoned reporter at The New York Times. Over the coming weeks and months, The Times will be adding more stories, essays, poems and works to continue the discourse.
An asteroid bigger than the Eiffel Tower hurtled past Earth early on Saturday at a speed of 10,400 miles per hour, missing us by 4.6 million miles — not quite a close shave, but not so far in astronomical terms.
Had the fast-moving space rock, dubbed 2006 QQ23, been following a different trajectory, it could have slammed into our planet with an explosive force of up to 500 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
This isn’t the first time this has happened. To be clear, this happens a lot. Plenty of orbital objects follow a trajectory that is hard to track, and many are invisible until the celestial objects are close, and even more are invisible until they’ve passed. Basically, if an objects geometry is directly in-line or obfuscated by solar activity, it flies invisible. This is because our largest array of telescopes are on Earth. From the ground, we can only track asteroids, and other celestial bodies at night. We are at the whims of third-dimensional space. Space telescopes however, do not have this problem.
The most notable and well-known photographed object to enter Earth’s atmosphere was last seen in Chelyabinsk, Russia. It was a superbolide, sized at around 20m. It produced a very large flash and vapor trail:
For comparison, the Tunguska Event was likely caused by a 65m meteoroid. The asteroid that missed us is called 2006 QQ23. The diameter of 2006 QQ23 is approximately 250–570m. A collision with that type of orbiter would level a large city and decimate the surrounding area — devastation never before seen.
It and others like it, are called Aten asteroids. To be brief, this means the asteroid follows an arc that crosses Earth’s orbit within close proximity. It is only luck that keeps life afloat on Earth. The universe we live in is very efficient at extinguishing life. We should all be thankful and celebrate this meteoroid missed us… this time.
If you know me personally, you know how much I love The Times. It’s a wonderful newspaper I fell in love with in college. I’ve consistently held a subscription in one form or another since then. It has prestige, integrity and a wide breadth of reporting. From real estate musings, to the incredible science pieces. It’s the standard candle, few papers can emulate. It has growth rings and battle-scars like the great Redwoods in California:
Update:speaking of frontpages of the New York Times, they really missed the opportunity on a proper headline to capture the racist-filled mass murdering that took place over the weekend. A total of 31 were left dead:
FWIW (certainly better to do this than not IMO) they changed their headline between the 1st and 2nd print edition. pic.twitter.com/DOSAMFbvq0
Imagine finding an almost-forgotten portrait of your mother in your family house, doing a Google search on the artist’s name and discovering that what you own is a precursor to the artist’s best-known work that sold in 2018 for $1.6 million. This is exactly what happened very recently to one of the members of the Davis family in Texas.
The portrait, Christine, is the latest remarkable find of work by one of the most revered African artists of the 20th century, Ben Enwonwu. The captivating sitter is Christine Elizabeth Davis, an American hair stylist of West Indian descent.
Christine travelled a lot in her life, working in Ghana before moving to Lagos with her British husband in 1969. There, they befriended Enwonwu and Christine’s husband commissioned the work as a gift for his wife in 1971 before they eventually moved back to the US a few years later.
As the Quartz article points out, the portrait, is of Christine Elizabeth Davis. She moved to Lagos in 1969 and befriended Enwonwu. Later, during the 1975 military coup, the Davis family left Lagos, Nigeria and moved to the States and settled in Texas. The painting had been in the family’s possession since its last exhibition in 1978.
Next, Phil Schiller, invites Jony to talk a bit more in-depth, a bit more candidly about something that they’ve been exploring in the Design Labs at Apple. It really goes the extra mile in providing design context for the coming years, as Apple would release the G3 in 1998, the first Mac produced under Steve Jobs since his return to Apple as CEO. It even further provides context for the engineering feat that Apple undertook to produce the remarkable, love-able iMac G4. But, what I really love about this clip, is how Jony basically unveils the long arc of design iterations at Apple — years of iterating, that ultimately led to the creation of the Pro Display XDR.
I got a real chuckle over the reveal here (timestamp of clip is 37:07–39:03):
https://youtu.be/ekkSkuY1EcI?t=2226
Here’s a transcript of the clip:
One of the things, that if you take a moment, think about your own personal working or computer environment.
Think about how you configured your desk, think about the furniture you use. Think about the way that you work, and I will contend that the issues relating to CRTs sort of size and weight that actually dictated a lot of your use. How would it be different if you had a product like this [Jony lifts CRT monitor up to reveal a flat panel display]. So this is uh, obviously a modular flat panel display, it has the equivalent of a 17inch CRT, sort of active area, depth of viewing. Um, one of the uh, one of the obvious things about it is it’s sort of (light?) to see things move around. The actual base, the stand for this thing actually houses a cunningly designed spring loaded mechanism which means the effective weight of the displays is one pound. So you can actually adjust the height of the product and the angle of the product with one finger. You can also plug-in to the display, uh sorry uh, the base — your keyboards speakers and so on.
One of the other things we designed, was a different stand, a different base for the product, so you can take the same display and clip it onto this [inaudible], this desktop arm. Now this arm, this arm attaches to the side of your desk or table, and really provides the ultimate in sort of zero footprint, um display [inaudible], you know the ultimate in terms of flexibility. And I think if you went back to your original sort of setup, I sense that this may actually sort of fairly fundamentally, sort of liberate the ways we could work potentially in the future.
