worth reading: august 14-27, 2024

link bonanza -- it's been a busy two weeks! sorry in advance for how many New York Times pieces are in here (use archive.today to unpaywall them as usual).

two pieces about Costco for some reason:

“Costco in Cancún” by Simon Wu
“How Costco Hacked the American Shopping Psyche” by Ben Ryder Howe

the first piece is a really interesting meditation on how we imagine the future via architecture, but it links to the second piece at the end, which is all about an object of my personal fascination, ~the Sphere~:

“The Concrete Oasis” by Noah Putnam
“The Sphere” by Elena Saavedra Buckley

a pair of urgent and essential pieces on AI-powered image manipulation from The Verge:

"No One's Ready for This" by Sarah Jeong
"Hello, you’re here because you said AI image editing was just like Photoshop" by Jess Weatherbed

cool visuals, photography, and/or web design to scroll through:

“Lost Highway” by William Poor
“The Disciples” by James Mollison
"Heralding the ancient and otherworldly charm of Future Medieval graphics" by Elizabeth Goodspeed

a pair of random but kind of heartwarming visual-heavy human-interest pieces from the Times:

“A Shoe That Goes 65 M.P.H.” by Steven Kurtz and T.J. Kirkpatrick
“A 12-Minute Show, Played Only Once, Just Might Live Forever” by Chris Almeida and Jon Cherry

the funniest thing I read all month, written 41 years ago by the guy who would go on to become the founder and CEO of Audible.com (??!?):

“The King of the Ferret Leggers” by Don Katz

obligatory piece of food writing because I like reading it:

“The Katsufication of Britain” by Tim Anderson and Sinjin Li

for anyone else who is consistently tickled by the fact that there's a fax machine emoji and occasionally likes to read Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery (anyone? anyone?? *cricket noises*):

"Alive and Well, As a Matter of Fax" by Jake Widman

and finally, three tweets that I liked that have thematic resonance with each other (click the last two open because they've got photos):

"Alien is the best horror movie because most of the first half of the movie is the crew pressing buttons and flicking switches. But they’re fantastic buttons, they look very clicky and chunky and fun to press" by @laserboat999
- quote-tweeting the above: "ALIEN conceptual artist Ron Cobb deserves another massive shout-out, in particular for his semiotic standard. Just look at this thing of beauty." by @NOTGH_Holly
"why do we keep doing superfluous rework instead of pushing the boundaries of knowledge" by @provisionalidea