Blocks, Balloons, Death
I’ve been running through airports the last few days, grabbing whatever magazines are sitting at the kiosks. Most of them didn’t survive the trip, but the ones that did are all English-language tech stuff—you know, the Silicon Valley startup obsession—because that’s what you pick up when you’re tired and bored and the magazine rack is right there.
WIRED UK, October 2013. You shouldn’t really buy the British edition unless you live there, but that’s what happens when you’re sprinting toward the gate at the last possible second. WIRED is the voice from Silicon Valley, the actual creative class—not the MacBook café people you see everywhere in Berlin. David Robertson had this long piece on LEGO, going through the whole history of the company, all the bad decisions, the products that never should have existed, the way they’d softened every edge to hit market segments. Lots of factory photos, nostalgia, the kind of thing that reminds you of being eight and just making whatever you wanted with plastic blocks. The rest of it didn’t grab me. Some pieces on British tech that I have zero interest in. Other articles about machines and architecture that seemed fine, but I was too tired to actually focus. So I slept.
TIME, September 30, 2013. It’s supposedly the last real magazine left, and the writing is genuinely good, but the paper is so cheap it crinkles the second you touch it. Half the pages are watch ads. The main story was Can Google Solve Death?
which sounds ridiculous until you read it. They’re profiling Google and this new company called Calico that’s basically about extending human life—talking about all the moonshots, Android, Google Glass, Project Loon, which is balloons that deliver internet to remote and poor places. The whole thing builds to this question of whether Google can actually beat death. It’s fascinating and deeply unsettling. Everything else in there was either topics I knew nothing about or people I’d never heard of. TIME can’t afford bad articles—their whole model depends on those watch ads keeping them alive.
Offscreen, issue 6. Kai Brach is this guy in Australia who started the magazine because he’s obsessed with technology. It’s funded by Dropbox, GitHub, Behance. About 150 pages of interviews with people actually doing things in the industry. One with Joshua Topolsky, talking about his childhood and his vision for digital culture, before and after starting The Verge. Another with Jenna Brinn from Tumblr, who was in Berlin at the time. Real people, interesting lives. The whole thing is made with obvious care—you feel it in every page. Photos of famous startup desks, diary entries from designers and writers. Essential reading if you’re thinking about technology and where it’s going, same level as WIRED.