poll position

Via Everlasting Blört, we are directed to a gallery of outstanding photographs from the US elections as captured by the Reuters wire services, like this one of Little Ti Ti accompanying their human to the polling station to cast his ballot in Louisville, Kentucky. More interesting and arresting images to explore at the links above.

egress and exeunt

Via Super Punch we are reminded of the obsession with optics and the lengths that some politicians—particularly UK leaders—have gone to avoid unfortunate juxtapositions with exit signs. In order to assuage the concerns of host building and venue coordinators saying this PR anti-stunt could cause a hazard in case of a fire or other emergency, some handlers have produced bespoke, fitted sign-coverings to keep on hand for the range of signage standards.

iww

Marking the heightening tension between labour organisers and business executives in the US Pacific Northwest, the Everett Massacre, occurring on this day in 1916 was a flashpoint exacerbated by global economic downturn and depression. Dock workers and police authorities in service of commercial interests regularly clashed, and International Workers of the World members (Wobblies) were dispatched in support of an ongoing strike action and rally for fairer pay and better working conditions. In response to these demonstrations, local business enlisted and deputised more union-busting mercenaries and the standoff quickly escalated into armed conflict. The culpability for the violence and death is yet questioned, with some describing the IWW as a radicalised and over-zealous advocate for political and labour reform with other scholars and historians placing the blame on agents provocateur and corporate spies infiltrating the union members’ ranks.

tendencies for everybody

Via Strange Company, we learn that our preoccupation with royal births and impatience for the latest (or perhaps yet to come) gossip has informed the daily horoscope column.

As one shrewd editor found himself short on reporting with the birth of another grandchild of the monarch, the Sunday Express decided to engage celebrated astrologer R.H. Naylor (their second-choice after a mystic called Cheiro, after cheiromancy—that is palmistry—had to turn down the newspaper) to do a forecast for the yet-unborn Princess Margaret (†2002, appearing in print three days after her birth in August 1930—I surmise she was a Leo) and as it were tell her adventurous (the Queen’s younger sister lived up to these predictions vague and universally applicable as they were) life backwards and let her age into her fortune. Using the commission to develop his nascent technique of solar signs—that is a simplified method based on one’s birth and the house of the zodiac that the sun was in, Naylor was able to offer readers both a general personality assessment and a daily prognostication. After having predicted the crash of an airship, Naylor was criticised for failing to forecast World War II. His column nonetheless remained popular and spawned many imitators.

a journalistic backronym

Like the invented term for a supplement covering trifles and “The Talk of the Town” feuilleton—from the French diminutive little leaf and since in circulation for periodicals, it’s a little unmooring but expected in the parlance of jargon and general wonkiness to learn that Op-Ed did not refer to the Opinions and Editorial page as is the general convention but rather the pagination—that is, the verso, opposite of the editorials. The facing section landing typically opinions of authors not affiliated with the publication’s board of editors, distinct from their opinion pieces and letters to the editor submitted by readers. First formalised in the pages of The New York Evening World by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope Senior, member of the Algonquin Round Table and first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for reporting, realising the page was sort of a catchall for society coverage and obituaries, specifically reserving the space for salacious solicitations, though confined to employees of the paper. The first Op-Ed page occurred in the 21 September 1970 edition of The New York Times.

font specimen

Boing Boing brings us a nice retrospective appreciation of the life and work of the recently departed typographer Ephram Edward (Ed) Benguiat (*1927), whose expansive family of fonts every one of us has surely encountered and used—Bookman, ITC Avant Garde, Panache, Souvenir—plus his formatting, layout and logotype for periodicals including Esquire, Playboy, Reader’s Digest, the San Diego Tribune newspaper and Sport Illustrated.

Beginning his work in graphic design just after World War II as a so called “cleavage retoucher,” Benguiat was part of a team assigned to airbrush out nudity or otherwise suggestive images in film and magazines to comply with Hays Code impositions, however by the 1970s his signature aesthetic for display typefaces and titles was in the kerning—regarded as “sexy spacing” between letters, flirtatiously not quite touching. Aside from movie posters and corporate campaigns for Super Fly (1972), Planet of the Apes (1968) and Foxy Brown (1974, ITC Caslon, № 224), Benguiat also was responsible for the opening credits sequence for the prestige television series Stranger Things. Learn more at the links above.

catch me when you can mishter lusk

Post-marked on this date in 1888 along with a parcel reportedly containing a preserved human kidney and addressed to chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee (return address “From Hell”), the letter ostensibly from the individual responsible for a series of gruesome mutilations that terrorised London identified only as Jack the Ripper is one of the few pieces of correspondence surrounding the unsolved killings that are considered authentic—with the same reservations that it might be an attention-seeking hoax like the thousands of communications received by newspapers and the police.

Though seemingly of the same provenance and style as two previous missives, the “Dear Boss” letter—which established the by-line—and the Saucy Jack postcard which a journalist later recanted, having confessed to a colleague as having made them up to solidify the narrative and place it all under one heading, directed towards The Star of London and Central News Agency, this penultimate letter was never fully repudiated and subject to on going study and public fascination. The writer notes, “I send you half the Kidne I took from one women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nice.  I may send you the bloody knife that took it out if you only wate a while longer.”

$750

Whilst specifically reporting that Trump’s tax-filings did not reveal any insights into previously unknown connections to Russia, the leaked documents to the New York Times do reveal how broken the US tax code is in allowing the wealthy and powerful to engage in tax avoidance and the industry that that activity has created plus perhaps most importantly that the fake billionaire and impeached phoney president has hundreds of millions of loans coming due in the coming years—what could potentially be during his second-term in the White House.

Much of this credit was extended to Trump by a particular bursar at Deutsche Bank (see previously here and here). Sadly even if the characterisation of Trump’s desire for re-election as an unpleasantry to be stomached for the sake of turning country into a theocracy that upholds the status quo and undermines any real or perceived threat to it is only a cover for Trump to continue his career as grifter-in-chief and support welfare programmes and executive socialism that benefit his himself and his cronies with rugged, unforgiving capitalism for the rest is shown to be the sham it’s been all along, it won’t matter to his persecuted throngs of supporters nor change any minds, so long as their demagogue hates and punishes the same people that they have been emboldened to hate and punish.

7x7

more than meets the eye: introducing the Ephemera Society of America through Hunt’s Remedy—via Everlasting Blört

cheesemongers: a tour of London’s venerable Leadenhall Market  

divergent media narratives: a battle designer wargames the upcoming US presidential election to terrifying, bleak ends  

more than means the eye: transforming everyday objects from the studio of Max Siedentopf  

try this at home: a demonstration of the allassonic phenomenon—also known as the hot chocolate effect  

non-canon: among the three hundred known apocryphal books of the Bible includes epic wizard and demon battles and a border guard that tried to help Jesus from Strange Company  

parfumez vu: an antique, coin-op scent dispenser

subtype h1n1

Via Miss Cellania’s Links, we are directed to a retrospective article that speaks to the halo effect and hindsight bias that we explored recently through the heuristic of 1976 Swine Flu outbreak and subsequent fiasco that shows how important robust journalism and science communication and accounts for what preconceptions might inform decisions and direction. The close dissection of this immunisation campaign, which saw about a quarter of the US population vaccinated, buffeted by particularly lethal seasonal outbreaks and a deadly cluster of Legionnaire’s Disease (first thought to be the uncontrolled spread people were fraught over) earlier that same summer had primed the public and health care professionals for action, ready to combat a pandemic that did not ultimately materialise. The advances in epidemiology that we enjoy today would have resulted in different responses back then but miscommunication and disinformation mangled the public health response and while not singularly sowing distrust and giving rise to anti-expert and sceptical movements that have plagued societies for decades (possibly also influencing the much more lax response to the AIDS crisis), missteps in execution gave agitators and detractors enough material to line their sophistical quivers and continue with the de-substantiation.

In January of that year, several soldiers stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey came down with a respiratory illness—with one new recruit unfortunately dying whilst trying to power through an endurance test while sick—and authorities including the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organisation were alerted. Fearful of a repeat of the 1918 Influenza pandemic, a mass-immunisation programme was recommended by an expert panel that included Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin and put into implementation by President Gerald Ford. Practised as they were with developing and manufacturing seasonal flu vaccines, there is always some element of risk and the pharmaceutical companies wanted protection from liability during this rush to roll out millions of doses and refused to produce the immunisation when at first the government withheld indemnity protection. This news, telegraphed to the public, planted a seed of doubt to attribute every medical coincidence and co-morbidity to the novel disease and cure. As happens every year, a small percentage of those vaccinated have adverse reactions, ranging from mild side-effects to death and the scope of the campaign magnified the frequency for the public and press. Hopefully we have drawn some lessons from this incident that better equip us to protect ourselves and one another and filter out the noise that stokes fear and chaos and only further defers our pulling through.

ok looter

Via Pluralistic, we are familiarised with the latest development in a series of leaks over the past few years since the Great Recession that have served to expose the endemic financial crime and money laundering and through such accommodation and facilitation have negated efforts to stop bad actors through sanction and freezing accounts.

Warnings issued and ignored from the international banking system’s own internal watch-dog mechanism for flagging suspicious behaviour, FinCEN (the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) and counterparts, were routinely ignored, thus depriving and de-fanging governments from efforts at enforcement and combatting fraud. Oligarchs, mobsters and criminal cartels are the beneficiaries from such lax oversight.

trykkefrihed or fourth estate

Though de facto liberation of newspapers occurred in Britain a few decades earlier with the abolishment of the mandate for publications to be licensed by Parliament in 1695, the first explicit guarantor of unfettered and inquisitive journalism came on this in 1770 for the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway under the regency of Prussian philosopher and reformer Johann Friedrich, Count Struensee (*1737 – †1772), who made dispatching with censorship of the press his second order of business after the abolition of torture.
Maître des requêtes and personal physician for the mentally-ill King Christian VII, Stuensee pushed forward a raft of legislation for the monarch to sign-off on including getting rid of noble privilege and state-sponsored revenues, subsidies for underperforming businesses, a ban on trade of enslaved persons in the colonies, criminalisation of bribery, reducing the size of the standing army, reallocating farm land for the peasant class and a tax on gambling. The public generally received Stuensee’s radical amendments well but halting censorship also opened up a tumult of pamphlets (mostly anonymous) critical of his regime and his dismissal of many government officials earned him many political enemies—leading to his execution after a palace coup two years later on the charge of lèse-majesté and presuming to rule in the king’s stead.

ibiza on ice

Six months on, the Guardian profiles the resort town of Ischgl and the clientele it attracts and how its party lifestyle and après ski venues became an incubator for COVID-19 and helped the epidemic turn pandemic. There’s lots of scapegoating and finger-pointing to sort through but the consequent spread and back-tracking seem rather incontrovertible. The bar where most of the contagion is traced, Kitzloch, was shut down on 10 March with the entire town quarantined from three days afterwards until 22 April.

i come in peace

Recently the Guardian ran an op-ed piece written entirely by a neural network, namely OpenAI’s powerful new GPT-3, pitched as a position piece to the readership to assuage as many as possible of the fears that robots would be the destroyers of humanity, employing tools of rhetoric and downplaying movie tropes and even the warnings of Stephen Hawking.
I don’t know if such an appeal should be interpreted as reassuring or not but the litany of supervillains that the same autodidactic subroutine conjured up at the behest of Janelle Shane (previously) is really the antithesis and counter-argument and rather betray the insidious plotting of the machines. One of the more telling characters is Flugg—an evil robot-bunny who is powered by a magical bunny tail—the world would be better off if there were more bunny tails. Check out the whole rogue’s gallery and tag yourself. Klaatu barada nikto.

a pox on both your houses

We’ve covered the vain aspirations of Trump to be featured on the cover of Time magazine previously and how that has translated into a lot of press albeit the infamous type, and now with the regular feature, Your Daily Donald (the gratuitous gluttons for punishment we are) Everlasting Blört directs us to the most consequential and clarion one yet—the one for the 17 August edition that illustrates the cover story of how the pandemic has transformed the election and democracy in America.

dateline

Born on this day in 1920, Marguerite Higgins Hall (†1966 having contracted a skin disease spread by the bite of sand flies while on assignment that turned out to be deadly) would go on to attend journalism school at U.C. Berkeley and Columbia and become a reporter and war correspondent.  Covering World War II, Korea and Vietnam for the New York Tribune and the wire services, Higgins advanced equal access for women journalists in combat zones and became the first female to win a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Stationed in Europe early in her career, Higgins was reassigned from the Paris bureau to Germany in March 1945 and was witness to the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp a month later, decorated for her coverage and assistance during the surrender for the SS guards. Afterwards from the German desk, Higgins reported on the Nürnberg Tribunal and the Blockade of Berlin.

unbuilt architecture

We enjoyed leafing through this 1969 issue of New York magazine chocked full of immodest proposals (see also) for redesigning the city including a ‘landliner’ to connect the Eastern Seaboard and eliminate traffic congestion, a glass dome over Manhattan and converting all the superfluous cross-streets into a commons and green-space.
The February edition of the periodical also has classified on how to exercise in the office for optimum fitness and an advertisement for the latest album from Judy Collins, Who Knows Where the Time Goes, with the tagline JC Saves.

video freaks

Hyperallergic directs our attention to the extensive raw footage of the US party conventions of the summer of 1972 as captured by a San Francisco-based collective known as Top Value Television—TVTV. These guerrilla documentarians came together to cover these political events and remained active through 1979 filming a range of projects as a counterpoint to mass media. The archives of UC Berkley (previously) has digitised hundreds of hours of their content and made it available on their website along with curated programmes and profiles of members of the group.

reading the room

In an example of Poe’s Law—the adage that extremist views and satire ultimately converge and make them virtually indistinguishable, we learn that the deplorable couple who trained guns at peaceful protestors (see previously) earlier this summer are slated to speak at the virtual Republican National Convention, scheduled for next week after the DNC concludes. Check out the reporting from CNN above to see who else is lined-up to showcase party values.

it is what it is

Former First Lady Michelle Obama gave one of a number of rousing speeches during the first night of the Democratic National Convention—harnessing the handicaps of having only a virtual audience to appeal to voters at this crucial juncture for the future of America with many impactful take-aways including:
“A president’s words have the power to move markets. They can start wars or broker peace. They can summon our better angels or awaken our worst instincts. You simply cannot fake your way through this job. As I’ve said before, being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are.” Watch the whole of the prepared remarks, read the transcript and find more coverage from NPR at the link above.