I’ve been interacting with the world pretty much only through my iPhone for the past several days; it really is a little brick of magic, but it also starts to feel like a porthole after a while. I’m happy to be looking into the wide-open window of my laptop screen again. (So yeah, basically the same story as Tim, except he was in the hospital and I was in the south of France. Get better soon, Tim!)

Anyway, here are some things that just caught my eye on this panoramic 1200-pixel wide internet:

• The Pencil Factory’s 15 uses for newsprint. Fifteen newsprint posters for $10! How cool is that? More newsprint posters, please. Make them totally zeitgeisty, totally of-the-moment. Do full CMYK so they can be as lush as Wednesday Comics—but make ‘em disposable.
• Origin of Mass, a video by Aleksandar Rodic. “It was inspired by demoscene, ‘3D pipes’ screensaver and sub-atomic particle collision images.” I really like the look of this video; it has a surprising softness. (Via Design Tools.)
• Here’s a cogent take on America’s fifth war—the war in Afghanistan—by Hendrik Hertzberg. I like the way he put it into context with the other four major wars of post-WWII American history: Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and Iraq.
• Necrophiliac bookporn from Rachel Leow. You really feel the whole books-as-bodies, corpus/corpse thing here.
• The most notable thing about the blissed-out text editor Ommwriter is the way it uses audio—key-clicks echo into an ambient background. I actually like this a lot; I think one of the things the iPhone does so right, and so subtly, is give audio feedback. The clicks and whooshes tell you, at every step, “you just made something happen” or “you just did something right.” More apps, iPhone and otherwise, ought to have great sound design like that. (Via @couch.)
• Tim releases an unstoppable alien organism, and now we see it, lurking in the shadows… the tension builds. The day of the bookfuturist is nigh.