There are sprouts of life, even profitability, on the landscape of print media and magazines, cratered by the pixilated bombardment of the digital age. High-end niche periodicals are popping up, but the trend might be most evident in a burst of small-batch, independent outdoors magazines like Adventure Journal, Mountain Gazette, Summit Journal and Ori. They are crowding into quiet spaces of narrow lanes — climbing, surfing, skiing, running and the like — where quality is key, advertising is minimal and subscribers are faithful. Most do not put their content online; this is journalism meant to be thumbed through, not swiped past.
The magazines are sometimes oversized and increasingly matte finished, filled with edge-to-edge photographs and literary heaves. They can cost $25 or more per issue. They are meant as much for the coffee table as the shoulder bag — designed to be collectible, not disposable.
Behind the mystery of the first ascent of Earth’s tallest peak lurks another conundrum, one to which Mallory’s own answer still echoes through the decades. Beyond vainglory, what was drawing these men toward the roof of the world? A year or so before his disappearance, while Mallory was on a fundraising lecture tour in America, a persistent New York Times pressman asked him a question he’d been subjected to many times before: Why climb Everest at all? An antic Mallory answered: “Because it’s there.”
It is strange to consider that a laconic retort should become the most famous explanation for the human urge to climb mountains, if not for all exploration. However, wittingly or not, Mallory’s words captured an enigmatic allure which, in the decades after his disappearance, would only grow. The summit pyramid that was once Mallory and Irvine’s alone is today a lodestar for modern thrill-seekers, some of whom pay tens of thousands of dollars to endure the annual traffic jam beneath the Hillary Step, even though cold probability suggests that some of them will never return.
Christopher Isherwood spent much of the first half of his life writing fiction that was based closely on his own experiences in England and Germany, and much of the second half expanding, revising, and interrogating those original accounts. On the face of it, the whole endeavour looks like solipsism on a grand scale; for Isherwood, it was an attempt to rid himself of false impressions and distorting influences so that he could discover and then accurately represent his authentic self, in particular, his identity as a gay man. Parents, friends, lovers, sex-chums and spiritual advisers were all subjected to his objectivising gaze (“I am a camera”), and all were enlisted in his process of self-discovery – something that was evidently rewarding as an end in itself, and which has also turned out to be powerfully influential for younger generations of writers.
As of now, the world still generally favors those who stay silent, who shut up and eat. Pass me the listán negro, let me drink to a better world, one where the righteous fight at dinner parties and everywhere else, with ever-increasing imagination and force.
If you feel like everything keeps getting worse and your quality of life is increasingly compromised by annoyances great and small, I’ll wager that started in the early 2000s, around the time retailers introduced self-checkouts on a wide scale.
On the other hand, DRILL is a deeply upsetting and freakishly humane piece of literature, especially for anyone who has survived religious trauma. It’s as if Scott takes the ominously stridulating intensity of William S. Burrough’s curse letter to Truman Capote and transforms it into a primal and very personal work of mourning.
The story of why Mattoo quit her job as an agent to pursue a career in writing has as many twists and turns as her literary debut, the memoir “Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones” — a Kashmiri phrase meaning something “so rare and precious that the listener should question its existence.”
This delightful graphic biography of the writer George Sand originally came out in French in 2021 – and now I’ve read it, I understand completely why SelfMadeHero has finally published an edition in English (the translation is by Edward Gauvin). Deftly written by Séverine Vidal, and wittily illustrated in black and white by Kim Consigny, it’s both a pleasure and an education: until now, Sand has always been a bit of a blind spot for me, a figure whose name is only familiar at all thanks to her appearances in books by other people (in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own she sits alongside Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot as an example of a woman who had “to veil” herself by using a male pseudonym).
This new book about kiosk design exemplifies how the internet transformed interest in ultra-niche aspects of contemporary design into moderate-sized cults. In the hands of a skilled photographer, fading styles, forgotten movements and long-overlooked designers can all be given a second wind in the digital era. Perversely, this has also led to a modest but significant uptick in design publishing, as the market for this kind of imagery becomes algorithmically assisted.