Google’s announcement that they’re going to stop censoring their Chinese search results in response to a cyberattack targeting Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents is big news, but I wanted to look* at some older instances of political attempts to control information (and of users to hide it).

Samuel Pepys, the only person more famous for writing a diary than Anne Frank, had a problem. He’d bought this book, Mare Clausum by John Selden, in a 1652 translation that included a lavish dedication “To the Supreme Autoritie of the Nation: The Parliament of the Commonwealth of England.” The trouble is that in 1660, Charles II was restored as king of England. Whoops.

In 1663 a new edition – keeping Nedham’s translation, but changing the title page – had been published by two booksellers called Andrew Kembe and Edward Thomas… For readers who already owned the 1652 edition, and who didn’t want the shame of the old title page but were reluctant to shell out for a new one, there was another option. The bookseller Robert Walton was offering a new title page that could be bound or pasted into the old edition, restoring the dedication to Charles I.

Pepys was nothing if not politic and practical, so on 17 April 1663, he visited Walton to paste the new title page into his book. Pepys also burned books that he thought might incriminate him, either with the government or his wife, as in the case of a French book Pepys found pornographic:

Friday 7 February 1668. We sang till almost night, and drank my good store of wine; and then they parted and I to my chamber, where I did read through L’Escholle des Filles; a lewd book, but what doth me no wrong to read for imagination’s sake (but it did hazer my prick para stand all the while, and una vez to decharger); and after I had done it, I burned it, that it might not be among my books to my shame.

As Nick Poyntz (who blogged about this at Mercurius Politicus) wrote: “This is the seventeenth-century equivalent of wiping your browser history.” Awesome.

* Actually, I was going to write about Pepys anyway. But Google! China! Crazees.

Geoff Manaugh at Bldgblog argues that Die Hard is “one of the best architectural films of the past 25 years.” After a short but revealing look at the urban tactics of Israeli soldiers, he lays out his case:

Die Hard asks naive but powerful questions: If you have to get from A to B—that is, from the 31st floor to the lobby, or from the 26th floor to the roof—why not blast, carve, shoot, lockpick, and climb your way there, hitchhiking rides atop elevator cars and meandering through the labyrinthine, previously unexposed back-corridors of the built environment?

Why not personally infest the spaces around you?

The only problem, Manaugh notes, is that Die Hard‘s sequels didn’t live up to the promise of the original — not just as a well-played action movie, but in continuing this exploration of urban space. “An alternative-history plot for a much better Die Hard 2 could thus perhaps include a scene in which the rescuing squad of John McClane-led police officers does not even know what building they are in, a suitably bewildering encapsulation of this method of moving undetected through the city… ‘Walking through walls’ thus becomes a kind of militarized parkour.”

I think Manaugh (like most fans) is a little too hard on the Die Hard franchise here, particularly Die Hard: With A Vengeance, which actually did try to make the McClane magic work across NYC. What’s motoring across Central Park (sending picnicers scrambling) or driving along the NYC aqueduct other than extending this “move at at all costs” to the city? That movie’s fine; people just didn’t like the title.

Manaugh points out a number of other action films — say, The Bourne Ultimatum — pick up this challenge. But in a way, the real sequel to Die Hard was The Fugitive. I caught The Fugitive on cable recently, and was surprised how enjoyable it is. Watch that movie again, and watch how Harrison Ford as Dr Richard Kimble pulls every McClane trick and uses the entire city of Chicago in the second half of the film — hospitals, jails, underpasses, elevated trains, parades — impersonating one character after another at the margins of the city’s infrastructure, simultaneously fleeing capture and performing his own investigation. It’s even more impressive, in some ways, because Kimble almost never has a gun, and can’t pull off the same physical acrobatics as an NYC cop who’s probably 10-15 years younger.

It’s actually really good. And Chicago looks great in that movie; totally like itself.

Three posts, all essential, presented (almost) without comment.

1. How Books Got Their Titles, “Timber by Ben Jonson“:

Timber, or Discoveries, is a posthumous work of 1640 by Ben Jonson. It is a loose volume of literary reflections and observations, and is notable for containing one of the few contemporary accounts of Shakespeare, including the famous words: ‘I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any.’ ‘Timber’ is a pun, one that Jonson worked almost to death in the rest of his literary output. The Latin for ‘wood’ or ‘forest’ is silva, and silva can also mean ‘a collection’ (as in the Silvae of the Roman poet Statius). ‘Timber’ thus signifies a collection of useful, consumable offerings. Other works of Jonson that played on the same idea were The Forest (1616) and The Underwood (1640).

Dryden and Cowley, amongst others, also wrote Silvae, but the genre has no real modern equivalent. Is the art of disconnected literary ramblings dying out?

2. Teleread, “The strange case of academic libraries and e-books nobody reads“:

Instead of focusing on books downloadable to e-readers or smart phones, academic libraries have created enormous databases of e-books that students and faculty members can be read only on computer screens. The result, as shown by studies like the JISC national ebooks observatory project, is that these collections are used almost exclusively for searching for information—scanning rather than reading…

How did it come to this? In order to explain it’s first necessary to understand that the world of academic publishing and academic libraries, probably the single biggest sector of the current e-book market, is a strange parallel universe in relation to the rest of the e-book world.

And the best for last:

3. Hilobrow, “The Parnassus of Titon du Tillet“:

At Pazzo Books, the shop my brother Brian and I keep in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, I’ve learned that old books are funny things. Often you catch them looking at you sideways, across a room, and it occurs to you to wonder what they’ve seen; where they’ve been; what odd parade of owners they’ve survived; or on what forgotten, dusty, shelf they were left to deteriorate over the centuries. Typically you can only imagine, but once in a very long while a book wanders through with enough information stored in it, in bookplates, inscriptions, and ephemera, that you can piece together a narrative.

For the narrative (and it’s a doozy), you’ll have to read Tom Nealon’s whole story for yourself. (Great pictures, too.)

It’s Mycenae, the city of Agamemnon:

Though Greek in language, the civilization of Mycenaean Greece was in most other, basic respects a provincial outpost of a Middle Eastern culture whose epicentres lay in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. The imposing Lion Gate entrance to the citadel recalls Hattusas of the Hittites or even Babylon; and the beehive, corbelled, drystone tombs known as the Treasury of Atreus (Agamemnon’s father) and the Tomb of Aegisthus (lover of Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra) betray an almost Egyptian lust for imposing posthumous longevity.

Palace-frescoes suggest that the buildings rang to the chants of court-musicians, and so, conceivably, there may have been Mycenaean court-poets or at any rate court-lyricists. But the Linear B texts deciphered thus far at least (from Thebes, Tiryns, Ayios Vasilios, and Pylus as well as Mycenae on the mainland, and from Cnossos and Khania, ancient Cydonia, on Crete) contain not a shred of poetry nor any other kind of literature, and, given their documentary, bureaucratic function as temporary records of economic data mainly for tax-purposes, are hardly likely to yield such in the future.

(It is, not incidentally, by accident not design that the Linear B tablets were preserved: the fires that consumed the palaces at Mycenae and elsewhere in c. 1200 BCE baked them to an imperishable hardness).

In short, Mycenaean culture and society represented, in Hellenic retrospect, a false start.

This Sports Illustrated article on NFL punters is well-worth reading. Two things that the article alludes to but doesn’t make a big deal about:

• Punters, in addition to booting the ball away and trying to pin down the other team’s defense on fourth down, also often hold for the placekicker on extra points and field goals. Not only can a dropped or bad hold lose games (more high-pressure stakes for already high-pressure players) but an athletic punter gives you a lot more options for fake kicks. (Another reason why a lot of punters were high-school or college quarterbacks.)
• For NFL players, punters have amazing longevity. I was amazed that Ray Guy, a legendary punter I remember watching in the mid-80s, when I first started watching football as a kid, is now 60 years old, and that Giants punter Jeff Feagles is still one of the best in the league at 43.

This last point, though, made me think about this point Malcolm Gladwell made in his exchange with Bill Simmons, about concussions, other head impacts, and the reduction in life expectancy for most other NFL players:

Early in the 20th century, there was a big movement to ban college football because of a rash of deaths on the field, and one of the innovations that saved the game was the legalization of the forward pass. What people realized was the more you open the game up, and make the principal point of physical contact the one-on-one tackle in the open field, the safer the game becomes. Keep in mind, the forward pass at the time was a radical step. Lots of diehard types stood up at the time to say that passing would ruin football. But it happened anyway. So there’s a precedent for dramatic reforms in football, even those that change the spirit of the game. I think football has to have that same kind of radical conversation again. What if we made all tackles eligible receivers? What if we allowed all offensive players to move prior to the snap? What if we banned punt and kickoff returns, where a disproportionate number of head impacts happen? [emphasis mine]

In SI, Feagles talks about how punting has changed over his career:

Just 10 years ago there were probably only a handful of returners who could take a punt and run it back; the athletes covering the kicks were much better than the returners. But the tide has turned. Nowadays the returners are much better than the guys covering. What does that do to the punter? It puts more pressure on him to directional kick and to keep the ball out of the returners’ hands.

So the “golden age of punting” coincides with the golden age of concussions; punters and returners have both gotten better, which puts more pressure on coverage guys on both sides of the ball; and those are the guys getting dinged, injuries that contribute to disproportionately shorter lives and careers for non-punters — for a part of the game that even fans and sportswriters don’t fully appreciate. (As the SI article explains, no pure punter has ever been voted into the Hall of Fame).

I hate to say it, but maybe that Canadian is right.

I woke up this morning intending to get an early start. As always, I pulled out my phone before I’d even put on my glasses, and thumb-flipped through my RSS reader a bit. Then, just as my attention span was about to hit its limit, someone casually dropped a link to James Fallows’ cover story in the new Atlantic, titled “How America Can Rise Again.” Hook, line, sinker.

This might be the first Fallows story I’ve read that over-promises and under-delivers. Reading it doesn’t really give you anything in the way of insight about how America can rise again. This is about as close as Fallows gets to future-pointed pep talkery:

Our government is old and broken and dysfunctional, and may even be beyond repair. But Starr is right. Our only sane choice is to muddle through. As human beings, we ultimately become old and broken and dysfunctional—but in the meantime it makes a difference if we try. Our American republic may prove to be doomed, but it will make a difference if we improvise and strive to make the best of the path through our time—and our children’s, and their grandchildren’s—rather than succumb.

It doesn’t get much cheerier than that. The piece feels as though Fallows is trying – and failing – to convince himself he’s worrying too much about America’s decline. He brings up several reasons to discount pessimism about the country’s future, and then winds up delivering the most pessimistic argument of all. “Most of the things that worry Americans aren’t really that serious, especially those that involve ‘falling behind’ anyone else,” he says, by way of setup, and then continues: “But there is a deeper problem almost too alarming to worry about, since it is so hard to see a solution. Let’s start with the good news.”

When I finished it, my feelings were somewhat akin to those I felt after I read his September 2009 cover story declaring victory in Iraq. I’d been lured in by a bombastic cover treatment proclaiming, “We won!” At the end, the most resonant message to emerge from the piece was, “Let’s cut our losses.”

There’s a wealth of ideas threaded through Fallows’ latest – the worthy tradition of the American jeremiad, the “innocence” of Mancur Olson, the power of young, unproven scholars in American academia. I thought the most provocative invocation in the piece was his assertion that the situation in California is giving us a first taste of an impending public-private divorce. But there’s not really a big idea or a thesis statement. I didn’t really know what to do with it, so I brought it here.

PS: Sorry I’ve been so quiet lately. I’m somehow supposed to be moving to DC in three weeks. A post about that is forthcoming.

This story about NYC’s Murray’s Cheese Shop‘s Cheese 101 program is pretty good, but I took note of one phrase in particular:

We sampled six cheeses, drank wine and champagne, and learned that cheese was invented in Mesopotamia around 3000 B.C., when travelers carrying milk around in the sun in dried-out sheep stomachs noticed that it had begun to curdle and become delicious (this story sounded suspiciously Wiki to me, and indeed here it is, given as one possible explanation).

“This story sounded suspiciously wiki.” The obvious colloquial analogue would be “the story seemed fishy.” But note the distinction. A “fishy” story, like a “fish story,” is a farfetched story that is probably a lie or exaggeration that in some way redounds to the teller’s benefit. A “wiki” story, on the other hand, is a story, perhaps farfetched, that is probably backed up by no authority other than a Wikipedia article, or perhaps just a random web site. The only advantage it yields to the user is that one appears knowledgeable while having done only the absolute minimum amount of research.

While a fishy story is pseudo-reportage, a wiki story is usually either pseudo-scientific or pseudo-historical. Otherwise, wiki-ness is characterized by unverifiable details, back-of-the-envelope calculations, and/or conclusions that seem wildly incomensurate with the so-called facts presented.

This story about an extinct race of genius-level hominids turns out to be decidedly wiki.

Have folks heard this phrase in the wild? Is it unfair to Wikipedia, or to those who use it as a research source? Do we already have a better word to describe this phenomenon? (And: this phenomenon is all too real, and deserves a name, doesn’t it?)

I just posted this as part of a comment at Bookfuturism, and am curious to know what the Snarkmatrix makes of it. Partly because I’m not entirely sure myself!

(Short context: it was responding to a post and commenter who took issue with the idea that reading, especially literary reading, was just “a method of digesting information.”)

You could say that certain kinds of information work better in some media than others, likewise certain kinds of entertainment, or for intellectual reasons, like working through a philosophical or literary text, or for that matter a self-help book. (These might not be your thing, but I’d contend that the mix of aesthetic and psychological intent is about the same.)

But it starts to become hard to say things like “information belongs to the web, literature to print,” because it’s all about what kind of information, what kind of literature. Every genre finds different ways to work a medium to its advantage.

Maybe this is a different way of addressing the question; is it inevitable that certain media become dominant, even if they’re not as well-suited for the purpose at hand? For instance, you could say that it’s better in the abstract to read a magazine or shop with a clothing catalog in print, rather than on the web. (For the sake of argument, let’s grant this.) But once the web becomes the source of most of our information, in the form of news, search results, or references, and the most effective way for advertisers to target and reach their customers, print loses anyway; its inherent advantages don’t matter, because both readers’ behavior and sellers’ incentives have moved somewhere else.

This is essentially what defenders of newspapers have argued; journalism is best suited to the specific culture and medium of print newspapers (rather than TV or blogs), and so we need to find some way to offset that it’s no longer best-suited for full-page or classified ads. If the newspaper goes, investigative journalism goes with it. That, at least, is the argument.

Ditto booksellers. It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to buy a Moleskin notebook, wrapping paper, or a copy of the Sarah Palin autobiography; maybe it belongs at Wal-Mart or Best Buy. The fact is, if your bookstore can’t sell at least a fistful of those hardcovers at cover price, they stop being able to function as a going concern — so all of those things that your bookstore IS really well-suited for (seller of literary fiction, community center, whatever) get lost for reasons that have nothing to do with them.

So, is publishing like this? If Dan Brown and Malcolm Gladwell publish only in ebook, does the next Joyce or Hamsun get the chance to publish widely in print? If Joyce can publish a little run of Ulysses on Lulu in 19/2022, does it get published in a fat edition by Random House ten years later? (I don’t think Joyce ever gets published by Random House unless his book was banned for over a decade.)

I’d like to think that we live in a world where we can have everything and give up nothing, where every act of reading can at least in principle find the medium, presentation, and audience most appropriate to it — but that assumption still remains to be shown.

Yesterday, I wrote:

Apple might be the only technology company that inspires its own fan fiction.

This was in response to this article in Macworld, “Four reasons Apple will launch a tablet in 2010,” where tech analyst Brian Marshall got to speculate that Apple was REALLY launching a tablet so that it could LATER launch a new Apple TV that included a built-in high-def screen and cost $5000. A “real” Apple TV.

I mean, sure, why not?

A lot of the “journalism” about the new tablet has been total fantasy league stuff. I’ve been there. It’s fitting that the mythical Apple tablet device has been nicknamed “the unicorn”: in Naming and Necessity, the philosopher Saul Kripke points out that while we all think we know what we mean when we say “unicorn,” in different possible worlds a unicorn could have wildly varying physiologies. A unicorn could have gills. It could photosynthesize. It doesn’t make sense to say “unicorns are possible,” because nobody could know from that statement alone what that might mean. Ditto the Apple tablet.

But Nick Bilton appears to have some actual sources on this, so the thing might very well be real. You might very well be riding a unicorn by the end of this year. I believe in the rumors enough that I cancelled my Nook pre-order to wait this thing out and see what happens. (How many customers has B&N lost by not getting that thing shipped out by Christmas? Eh — maybe the initial software would have been even more sluggish.)

In anticipation of whatever the heck might happen at the end of January, here I’ve rounded up the best four posts I’ve seen about the maybe/maybe not tablet.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball, “The Tablet“:

Do I think The Tablet is an e-reader? A video player? A web browser? A document viewer? It’s not a matter of or but rather and. I say it is all of these things. It’s a computer.

And so in answer to my central question, regarding why buy The Tablet if you already have an iPhone and a MacBook, my best guess is that ultimately, The Tablet is something you’ll buy instead of a MacBook.

I say they’re swinging big — redefining the experience of personal computing.

It will not be pitched as such by Apple. It will be defined by three or four of its built-in primary apps. But long-term, big-picture? It will be to the MacBook what the Macintosh was to the Apple II.

This is a cool idea, especially insofar as most people don’t really need to do everything current laptops and desktops do. This gets elaborated by Marco Arment, who doesn’t really talk about the tablet as much as map our current ecology, in “‘The Tablet’ and gadget portability theory“:

Desktops can use fast, cheap, power-hungry, high-capacity hardware and present your applications on giant screens. They can have lots of ports, accept lots of peripherals, and perform any possible computing role. Their interface is a keyboard and mouse, a desk, and a chair. They’re always internet-connected, they’re always plugged in, they always have their printers and scanners and other peripherals connected, and their in-use ergonomics can be excellent. But you can only use desktops when you’re at those desks.

iPhones use slow, low-capacity, ultra-low-power hardware on a tiny screen with almost no ports and very few compatible peripherals. They can do only a small (albeit useful) subset of general computing roles. They are poorly suited to text input of significant length, such as writing documents or composing nontrivial emails, or tasks requiring a mix of frequent, precise navigation and typing, such as editing a spreadsheet or writing code. But they’re always in your pocket, ready to be whipped out at any time for quick use, even if you’re standing, walking, riding in a vehicle, eating, or waiting on a line at the bank. You can carry one with you in nearly any circumstances without noticing its size or weight.

Laptops are a strange, inefficient tradeoff between an iPhone’s portability and a desktop’s capabilities. They don’t satisfy either need extremely well, but they’re much closer to desktops than they are to iPhones. The usefulness and portability gap between a laptop and an iPhone is staggeringly vast (1:00). You don’t have them with you most of the time, they’re big and heavy (even the MacBook Air weighs 10 times as much and consumes about 10 times as much space as an iPhone 3GS), and they can only be practically used while sitting down (or standing at a tall ledge). Ergonomics are awful unless you effectively turn them into desktops with stands and external peripherals. But they can do nearly any computing task that desktops can do, and they’re able to replace desktops for many people.

This is something I’ve noticed about my own computer habits. I have a mid-2008 MacBook Pro. I love its portability, but largely just because I can detach from my desk and move it around the house. I really hate lugging my laptop across town to work, on planes for trips, or anywhere that I can’t immediately get myself settled — all the more so since I lost most of the strength in my arm.

My MBP isn’t really a portable computer, but a desktop on casters, if you get my meaning. I’ve thought about getting a MacBook Air, but it’s too expensive, or a cloudbook, but those are too cheap. So I’m actually already in this market.

Whatever the Unicorn is, it will be a genuinely portable computer, like the iPhone. And it won’t make precisely the same tradeoffs in power and functionality as either the iPhone or the MacBook Air in order to do it.

I think my favorite post is by Ars Technica’s John Siracusa, who brings Ockham’s Razor to bear on the rumors and speculation with surprisingly satisfying results:

There’s also the popular notion that Apple has to do something entirely new or totally amazing in order for the tablet to succeed. After all, tablets have been tried before, with dismal results. It seems absurd to some people that Apple can succeed simply by using existing technologies and software techniques in the right combination. And yet that’s exactly what Apple has done with all of its most recent hit products—and what I predict Apple will do with the tablet.

That means no haptic-feedback touchscreen, no folding/dual screens, no VR goggles or mind control. Instead of being all that people can imagine, it’ll just be what people expect: a mostly unadorned color touch screen that’s bigger than an iPhone but smaller than a MacBook. If I’m being generous, I’ll allow that maybe it’ll be something a bit more exotic than a plain LCD display. But there are hard and fast constraints: it must be a touch screen, it must be color, and it must support video. (We’ll see why in a bit.)

So how will an Apple tablet distinguish itself without any headline technological marvels? It’ll do so by leveraging all of Apple’s strategic strengths. Now you’re expecting me to say something about tight hardware/software integration, user experience, or “design,” but I’m talking about even more obvious factors.

* Customers – Apple has over 100 million credit-card-bearing customer accounts thanks to the success of iTunes.
* Developers – Over 125,000 developers have put over 100,000 iPhone OS applications up for sale on the App Store. Then there are the Mac OS X developers (though of course there’s some overlap). Apple’s got developers ready and able to come at the tablet from both directions.
* Relationships – Apple has lucrative and successful relationships with the most important content owners in the music and movie businesses.

These are Apple’s most important assets when it comes to the tablet, and you can bet your bottom dollar that Apple will lean heavily on them. This, combined with Apple’s traditional strength in design and user experience, is what will distinguish Apple’s tablet in the market. It will provide an easy way for people to find, purchase, and consume all kinds of media and applications right from the device. It’s that simple.

Kassia Kroszer at Booksquare is even more deflationary, again in a good way, pointing out we can’t just look to a Jesus Device to solve all of our problems:

Apple is an aggressive company. Apple is a tech company. And publishing people don’t necessarily get Apple. Last week’s breathless rumor about a 70/30 split (70% to publishers) was the tip-off. 70/30 is the standard Apple split! What is missed in the fine print (what is it about fine print that makes us always overlook it?) is that this split is on sales price, cash receipts, whatever you want to call it. Apple will not (unless I seriously misjudge their business acumen) be less aggressive on pricing than Amazon and likely won’t subsidize prices. I suspect Apple will not get into bed with book publishers unless book publishers play along.

If anything, the Unicorn will be part of an interesting and diverse digital reading mix. Of course, we already have one of those — you’re using it right now — and very few publishers are exploiting the potential of what already exists. The Unicorn won’t be running an exotic new platform with magical capabilities.

So let’s recap. It’ll be more portable and more fun than the best laptop you’ve ever had. You’ll be able to enjoy more content than you’ve ever been able to on your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV. It’ll be faster, more versatile, and more beautiful than any dedicated reading machine. And while it won’t “save” publishing, it will probably be one of the major catalysts that prod it towards the future.

And this is only if what everyone admits to be true is true.

I think that’s worth waiting three weeks for.

We’ve featured examples of papercraft here before, but Webdesigner Depot just posted “100 Extraordinary Examples of Paper Art” that blew my mind. Here are a few choice examples, with commentary.

First are two by Peter Callesen, who gets the most exposure on the WD page. Not all of his pieces make use of negative space in this way, but I liked these the best:

Peter Callesen

The second is more hopeful:

http://www.petercallesen.com/

This is by Simon Schubert, who somehow generates an MC Escher effect even though there are no actual visual paradoxes in his images. The brain just goes there anyways.

Simon Schubert

Bryan Dettmer calls these “Book Autopsies.” The grandfather of these kind of dada-cut-up-meets-book-art is Tom Phillips’s A Humument, but Dettmer’s got his own sculptural, Joseph Cornell-ish style:

Bryan Dettmer, Book Autopsies

I wonder what tools Bovey Lee uses to make these — an exacto-knife? A scalpel? A laser? The word I keep returning to is filigree:

http://www.boveylee.com/

Ingrid Siliakus threads the needle here — her sculptures suggest futurism, but also cartoons and pop-up books. I like her pieces above all for their exploration of depth — you need just the right kind of photographic angle and lighting to gain a sense of their dimensionality:

http://ingrid-siliakus.exto.org/

Which offers some lessons on both papercraft and (perhaps) the future of paper. First: paper art isn’t just the crafting of these objects; it’s their staging, framing, lighting, and above all their photography. Black-and-white art, in particular (which I gravitate towards) is particularly sensitive to the effects of light, shadow, and differences from one angle to the next.

Last, virtually all of these pieces take advantage of the fact that a sheet of paper is a three-dimensional object posing as a two-dimensional one. It flits and flutters between these two possibilities of shape and surface, flatness and thickness, which is precisely what gives it all of its charm and utility. In a world that (setting aside the UI fantasies of Iron Man, Bones, and Avatar and the experiments of Microsoft) is going to be stuck with two-dimensional digital interfaces for a long time, this most underutilized aspect of paper takes on a new significance.

I hope kids, especially, take notice of these possibilities. A rebellious message is an airplane; a love note is a rhyming game…

via Janneke Adema (@openreflections)