LEGO, Death, and Whatever Lives Between Them
A few days of airport sprints and I end up with a rucksack full of English-language magazines. The German press didn’t survive the journey—only the ones about Silicon Valley and whatever it thinks it’s currently inventing. Three magazines. A long flight. Opinions nobody asked for.
WIRED UK’s October issue had no business being as good as it was, given that I grabbed it in a last-minute dash through the wrong terminal. The standout was David Robertson’s long piece on LEGO—its origin story, its near-collapses, the products that should never have existed, the market research that turned a beloved toy into a branding exercise stretched to breaking point. Big factory photographs, nostalgic detours, and enough honest corporate history to feel like journalism rather than PR. The rest of the issue is very British in a way that occasionally loses me—there’s a version of the tech world that exists between San Francisco and London that I’m not sure maps onto anything real—but the LEGO piece alone justified the impulse buy.
Then there’s Time, which I maintain is the last truly important print product left on earth, even as it continues to be printed on paper so cheap it wrinkles when you breathe near it. Half the pages are watch advertisements. The other half, this issue, included "Can Google Solve Death?"—a sprawling piece on the company, its founders, and the arc from Android to Google Glass to Project Loon, which wants to beam internet to poor and rural areas via balloon. The whole thing ends at Google’s new venture Calico, whose stated goal is to extend human life and, eventually, defeat death itself. Equal parts terrifying and genuinely fascinating. Time can’t afford bad journalism—if the writing slips, the watch companies go elsewhere.
The real discovery was Offscreen, issue six, which Kai Brach edits from Collingwood, Australia, with backing from Dropbox, GitHub, and Behance. A hundred and fifty-odd pages of long-form interviews with people who’ve actually shaped the web, threaded through with photo essays of workspaces and diary entries from designers and product people. Two interviews stood out: one with Joshua Topolsky, who built The Verge into something serious, talking about his childhood, his process, and what the digital world means to him on a human level; and another with Jenna Brinning from Tumblr, based in Berlin, whose path was quieter but no less interesting. If you want to understand the internet rather than just use it, Offscreen belongs on your shelf next to the American WIRED.