The Crackle Before Something Begins

Year nine after the apocalypse. That was how January 2009 felt—blogs declared dead, beloved magazines folding, the best websites going dark, financial markets dissolving, and somewhere in Germany a group of adults voluntarily eating insects on television while the economy quietly came apart at the seams. Not the most auspicious moment to press publish on something new.

And yet. Hannah was coming back on board, which felt like the right call at the right time. The two of us, two cities, two heads full of ideas about design and music and the things that make daily life feel worth paying attention to. The plan was the same as it had always been: cover what we cared about, filtered through the kind of naked subjectivity that respectable outlets couldn’t afford. Not a magazine. Not a brand. Something more embarrassing and more honest than either—personal angles, occasional nudity, pig metaphors where appropriate.

Peter Fox, the Berlin artist who’d released his solo debut the previous year, had a song called Schwarz zu Blau—the city at four in the morning, the black of night shifting to the first cold blue over the rooftops before anyone else is awake. It soundtracked that particular week better than anything else I could find. Some things end, some things start, and in the gap between them you can just make out the shape of what’s coming. That crackle you feel might be a loose wire. Or it might be the beginning of something worth doing.