I’m really asking. It looks very much like the whiz-bang-iest device of today’s Apple event — which starts in less than an hour! — will be a new device called either the iPhone 17 Air or just the iPhone Air. Much will be made of its thinness; there might be a manila envelope. Are you psyched to see it? Totally ambivalent? Filled with rage at the whole concept? Our newsroom is all over the place, I want to know what you think.
(Emoji? Emojis? Plurals, how do they work.) The Unicode Consortium just released the latest version of its standard, with 164 new emojis and “several thousand additional non-emoji characters.” As we saw in the preview in July, there’s a lot of good stuff in here. But now comes the fun part: seeing how different platforms interpret, and occasionally totally ruin, the new characters. They better not screw up Fight Cloud.
I was just listening to a podcast, in which the hosts were wondering why all printers are so terrible. (You know, as you do.) That made me re-read this truly wonderful New Yorker story on the subject, which offers as thorough an answer as you’ll ever find. It’s also just a great read:
In building-size paper mills, the fibre is sprayed onto rollers turning thirty-five miles per hour, which press it into fat cylinders of paper forty reams wide... When paper gets too wet, it liquefies; when it gets too dry, it crumbles to dust.
[The New Yorker]
Our friends over at Switched on Pop just did a fun episode about the history of the way podcasts sound. The Grateful Dead is in there, as is the infamous Breakmaster Cylinder, who wrote the theme for every podcast ever. Including ours! It’s fascinating — and a good combo listen with this Vergecast episode from last year. It also might have ruined podcast jingles for me, forever.
[Switched on Pop]
A musician’s dream begins on social media. So what happens next?
