So two years ago, after their own strange and painful travails with Taylor’s devices, 34-year-old O’Sullivan and his partner, 33-year-old Melissa Nelson, began selling a gadget about the size of a small paperback book, which they call Kytch. Install it inside your Taylor ice cream machine and connect it to your Wi-Fi, and it essentially hacks your hostile dairy extrusion appliance and offers access to its forbidden secrets. Kytch acts as a surveillance bug inside the machine, intercepting and eavesdropping on communications between its components and sending them to a far friendlier user interface than the one Taylor intended. The device not only displays all of the machine’s hidden internal data but logs it over time and even suggests troubleshooting solutions, all via the web or an app.
The result, once McDonald’s and Taylor became aware of Kytch’s early success, has been a two-year-long cold war—one that is only now turning hot.
I’m walking along a sandy path through a forest high above the flashing kingfisher-coloured coast. It smells of hot pine and wild rosemary. The sound of bells deep in the wood stops me in my tracks. Have I finally lost my mind, after months of piloting solo through the pandemic on this small island far from home?
Although the fictional archipelago of Popisho in Leone Ross’s third novel is imbued with a Caribbean sensibility, it is an entirely original place. Here, clouds rain down torrents of physalises. Houses morph, stretch, bend over backwards to accommodate their inhabitants’ whims. The citizens of Popisho are just as remarkable: each possesses a special power, or “cors”. Some islanders can converse with cats. Others walk through walls. Some have prehensile tails that fluff up in response to injustice. While the despotic Governor Intiasar ostensibly presides over the state, it is the Fatidique, an esoteric council of female visionaries, who really hold the reins of power.
DeSilva is a genial companion on this stroll through the deep origins of walking. Sometimes we amble along listening to fieldwork yarns, other times the way is steeper, requiring more concentration to absorb complex ideas. But always the view from the top is illuminating. Next time you crest a rise, take a moment to look down at your legs and ponder what it really took to get you there.
The brainchild of a pair of editorial refugees from glossy-land and a Rolling Stone photographer, Rags was the first publication to identify street style as a discrete fashion sector and call out the establishment for trying to manufacture trends. You can draw a direct line from its birth to the work of Bill Cunningham (Rags had an “On the Street” photo section eight years before “On the Street” appeared in The New York Times) and such Instagram sensations as The Sartorialist and Tommy Ton.