In 2013, Penguin released in the UK a series of new covers for five works by George Orwell, including a particularly bold cover design for Orwell’s best-known work, 1984. According to Creative Review, the designer, David Pearson, made it so that the book’s title and Orwell’s name were debossed, then almost completely obscured by black foiling, leaving just “enough of a dent for the title to be determined.” No doubt, the design plays on the whole idea of censorship, “referencing the rewriting of history carried out by the novel’s Ministry of Truth.”
Years later, you’ll have difficulty buying new copies of Pearson’s design. They’re in pretty short supply. But anyone with a well-worn copy of the book might discover what one Redditor has also observed–that the cover design “becomes less censored with wear.” Compare the “before” image above to the “after” image down below. Was this all part of Pearson’s long-range master plan? Or something of a design flaw? We’ll probably never know. But if you’re looking for a book that gets better with age, then this is one to add to your list.
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Artist Jim Sanborn’s massive sculpture Kryptos may inspire various reactions in its viewers, but there’s definitely a single correct interpretation.
But 78-year-old Sanborn isn’t saying what…
He wants someone else to identify it.
Kryptos’ main mystery — more like “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” to quote Winston Churchill — was hand cut into an S‑shaped copper screen using jigsaws.
Image courtesy of the CIA
Professional cryptanalysts, hobbyists, and students have been attempting to crack the code of its 865 letters and 4 question marks since 1990, when it was installed on the grounds of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
The hands-on part fell well within Sanborn’s purview. But a Masters in sculpture from Pratt Institute does not automatically confer cryptography bonafides, so Sanborn enlisted Edward Scheidt, the retired chairman of the CIA’s Cryptographic Center, for a crash course in late 20th-century coding systems.
Sanborn sampled various coding methods for the finished piece, wanting the act of deciphering to feel like “peeling layers off an onion.”
Gillogly arrived at his solution in 1999, using a Pentium II.
Stein reached the same conclusion a year earlier, after chipping away at it for some 400 hours with pencil and paper, though the CIA kept his achievement on the down low until Gillogly went public with his.
The following year the National Security Agency claimed that four of their employees, working collaboratively, had reached an identical solution in 1992, a fact corroborated by documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
This still leaves the 97-character phrase from the final panel up for grabs. Cracking it will be the penultimate step in solving Kryptos’ puzzle. As Sanborn told NPR in 2020, “that phrase is in itself a riddle:”
It’s mysterious. It’s going to lead to something else. It’s not going to be finished when it’s decoded.
The public is welcome to continue making educated guesses.
Sanborn has leaked three clues over the years, all words that can be found in the final passage of decrypted text.
BERLIN, at positions 64 — 69 (2010)
CLOCK, at positions 70 — 74 (2014)
NORTHEAST, at position 26 — 34
Have you solved it, yet?
No?
Don’t feel bad…
Sanborn has been fielding incorrect answers daily for decades, though a rising tide of aggressive and racist messages led him to charge 50 bucks per submission, to which he responds via e‑mail, with absolutely no hope of hints.
Kryptos’ most dedicated fans, like game developer /cryptologist Elonka Dunin, seen plying Sanborn with copious quantities of sushi above in Great Big Story’s video, find value in working together and, sometimes, in person.
Their dream is that Sanborn might inadvertently let slip a valuable tidbit in their presence, though that seems like a long shot.
The artist claims to have gotten very skilled at maintaining a poker face.
(Wait, does that suggest his interlocutors have been getting warmer?)
Dunin has relinquished all fantasies of solving Kryptos solo, and now works to help someone — anyone — solve it.
Sanford has put a contingency plan in place in case no one ever manages to get to the bottom of the Kryptos (ancient Greek for “hidden”) conundrum.
He, or representatives of his estate, will auction off the solution. He is content with letting the winning bidder decide whether or not to share what’s been revealed to them.
“I do realize that the value of Kryptos is unknown and that perhaps this concept will bear little fruit,” he told the New York Times, though if one takes the masses of people desperate to learn the solution and factors in Sanford’s intention to donate all proceeds to climate research, it may well bear quite a healthy amount of fruit.
Join Elonka Dunin’s online community of Kryptos enthusiasts here.
To give you a taste of what you’re in for, here are the first two panels, followed by their solutions, with the artist’s intentional misspellings intact.
1. Encrypted Text
EMUFPHZLRFAXYUSDJKZLDKRNSHGNFIVJ
YQTQUXQBQVYUVLLTREVJYQTMKYRDMFD
Decrypted Text
Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion.
Decrypted Text
It was totally invisible Hows that possible? They used the Earths magnetic field X
The information was gathered and transmitted undergruund to an unknown location X
Does Langley know about this? They should Its buried out there somewhere X
Who knows the exact location? Only WW This was his last message X
Thirty eight degrees fifty seven minutes six point five seconds north
Seventy seven degrees eight minutes forty four seconds west ID by rows
View step by step solutions for the first three of Kryptos’ encrypted panels here.
Author, educator and book restoration expert Sophia Bogle is in a constant race against time. Her mission: to rescue and restore ill-treated books before their lamentable conditions can consign them to the landfill.
To the untrained eye, many of these volumes appear beyond repair, but Bogle has nerves of steel, preternatural patience, surgical precision, and over thirty years of experience.
In the Wired video above, she uses a 106-year-old first edition of Frank L. Baum’s The Lost Princess of Ozto demonstrate some of the steps of her craft — from cutting open an old book’s spine and washing dirty pages to repairing tears and recoloring illustrations.
Prior to taking the final step, she scrawls a hidden message on the backing material of the spine:
I do love the fact that there’s the story in the book, there’s the story of the restoration of the book, there’s the story of who has owned the book and now, I’m just in there just a little bit more.
This playful bit of hard-won license is a far cry from some shady restoration practices she mentions in an interview on the Welcome to Literary Ashland blog, in an attempt to arm the general public with tools for spotting potential fraud:
I am not sure that there is anything in the world that cannot be twisted with evil intent…Swapping out pages with publishers information in order to make the book appear to be a more valuable edition. Scratching out/removing numbers or words for the same purpose. And lastly, swapping out pages to insert the author’s signature. None of those things can be done without intent to defraud and it is the intent that matters most.
Book lovers who have both the time and the temperament for bookbinding, as well as Bogle’s passion for preserving culture one book at a time, might consider applying for a Save Your Books scholarship.
Or, they may be left wishing you’d given them a vastly more huggable machine-made plushie version, especially if you can’t help sucking in your breath every time they start fumbling with that exquisitely crafted ￥330,000 yen heirloom-to-be. (That’s $2341.81 in US dollars.)
Of course, director Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 animated feature My Neighbor Totorohas legions of fans of all ages, and some will consider themselves quite lucky if they win the lottery that grants them the ability to purchase such a treasure.
They’re not only carved by skilled artisans in Inami, the city of woodcarving, but the wood is also that of a camphor tree — the natural habitat of the mysterious, magical Totoro! (It’s also considered holy by practitioners of the Shinto religion.)
Still, if it’s unclear that the recipient will truly appreciate such thoughtfulness, you’re probably better off going with another offering from Studio Ghibli’s Totoro-themed collaboration with Nakagawa Masashichi Shoten, a purveyor of traditional Japanese crafts.
Perhaps a￥4180 bud vase fired in Ureshino City’s Edo-period Yozan Kiln, featuring Totoro or a cluster of susuwatari, the pom pom-like soot sprites infesting the Kusakabe family’s new home, who also play a part in Spirited Away.
Maybe a tiny Totoro bell amulet, molded by craftsmen in Odawara, celebrated for the quality of their metalwork since the early 1500s, when they outfitted samurai with weapons, armor and helmets?
As one of the leading towns along the trunk road, Yatuso flourished through … production of wrapping paper for the nation-wide famous “Toyama Medicine”. At its golden age, from the Edo Era to the beginning of the Meiji Era in the 19th century, many people were engaged in papermaking by handwork in their homes. Yatsuo Japanese paper was expected to be unbreakable because it was used as package for expensive medicine and at the same time it should look brilliant. It had to be thick and stout so that it could be impervious to water and the label printed on the surface would not be smeared.
The list of Totoro-inspired traditional crafts is impressive. A representative sampling:
Dishtowels made from five layers of Kayaori fabric that “was introduced to Japan during the Nara period and is said to allow wind to pass through but keep mosquitoes out”…
Pantone has declared “Peach Fuzz” the Color of the Year. This selection, however, raises the question: How did Pantone become the global authority on color? Above, the Wall Street Journal describes how Pantone began as a commercial printing company during the 1950s. Then, in the early 60s, it evolved into something quite different. Recognizing that its clients (and other companies) need to print materials with consistent colors, Pantone created a universal color language, the Pantone Matching System (PMS), where each color is assigned a specific number. For instance, “Peach Fuzz” corresponds to #FFBE98. As Slate points out, this system ensured that “printers and clients would have a shared reference when they talk to one another—an industry standard, so that a color would mean the same thing all the way from a designer’s vision to the printed item.” Over the next 60 years, Pantone continued to nurture the Pantone Matching System, undoubtedly generating significant revenue along the way and, more importantly, making itself the arbiter of color worldwide.
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Participants in these studies were assigned to play one of two parts — teacher or learner. Partner pairs were seated in separate rooms, accessible to each other by microphones. The teacher read the learner a list of matched words they’d expected to remember shortly thereafter. If the learner flubbed up, the teacher was to administer an electric shock via a series of labelled switches, upping it by 15-volts for each successive error. The microphones ensured that the teacher was privy to the learner’s increasingly distressed reactions — screams, desperate protestation, and — at the highest voltage — radio silence.
Should a teacher hesitate, they’d be reminded that the parameters of the experiment, for which they were earning $4.50, required them to continue. They also received reassurance that the painful shocks caused no permanent tissue damage.
Here’s the thing:
The teachers were innocent as to the experiment’s true nature. They thought the study’s focus was punishment’s effect on learning ability, but in fact, Milgram was studying the limits of obedience to authority.
The learners were all in on the ruse. They received no shocks. Their responses were all feigned.
If our eyes don’t deceive us, the Milgram experiment that the AI imagines is even more extreme than the original. It appears all participants, including those waiting for their turn, are in the same room.
As someone commented on Bluesky, the new social media platform on which Ullman shared his hypothetical playsets, “the subtle details the AI has got wrong here are the stuff of nightmares.”
AI’s take on the Stanford prison experiment seems more benign than the controversial 1971 experiment that recruited 24 student participants for a filmed study of prison life to be staged in Stanford University’s psychology department’s basement, randomly dividing them into prisoners and guards.
AI’s faithful recreation of the LEGO figurines’ physical limitations can’t really capture the faux guards’ brutality — making their prisoners clean out toilets with their bare hands, stripping them naked, and depriving them of food and beds. Their power abuses were so wanton, and the prisoners’ distress so extreme, that the planned duration of two weeks was scrapped six days in.
It’s worth noting that all the student participants came to the study with clean bills of physical and mental health, and no histories of criminal arrest.
Far less upsetting are the cognitive science experiment playsets depicting the delayed gratification of the Stanford Marshmallow Test and the selective attention of the Invisible Gorilla Test (both right above).
No word on whether he has plans to continue experimenting with AI-engineered LEGO playset proposals featuring historic experiments of psychology and cognitive science.
Follow on Bluesky if you’re curious. You’ll need to register for a free account and apply for an invite code, if you haven’t already… wait, are we setting ourselves up to be unwitting participants in another psych experiment?
The invention of siblings Miklós and Étienne Vadász, the world’s first pocket record player caused a stir when it was introduced a century ago, nabbing first prize at an international music exhibition and finding favor with modernist architect Le Corbusier, who hailed it for embodying the “essence of the esprit nouveau.”
Unlike more recent portable audio innovations, some assembly was required.
It’s fair to assume that the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound staffer deftly unpacking antique Mikiphone components from its cunning Sony Discman-sized case, above, has more practice putting the thing together than a nervous young fella eager to woo his gal al fresco with his just purchased, cutting edge 1924 technology.
A period advertisement extols the Mikiphone’s portability …
Fits in a jacket pocket
Goes in a lady’s handbag
Will hang on a cycle frame
Goes in a car door pocket
Ideal for picnics, car jaunts, river trips
…but fails to mention that in order to enjoy it, you’d also have to schlep along a fair amount of 78 RPM records, whose 10-inch diameters aren’t nearly so pocket and purse-compatible.
Maison Paillard produced approximately 180,000 of these hand-cranked wonders over the course of three years. When sales dropped in 1927, the remaining stock was sold off at a discount or given away to contest winners.
These days, an authentic Mikphone can fetch $500 and upward at auction. (Beware of Mikiphonies!)
Even those who remain impervious to disco fever seem willing to acknowledge its cultural significance as evidenced by a recent exchange on the Trouser Press forum:
It was everywhere and could indeed get tiresome. But today I can appreciate how well put-together those records by an artist like the Bee Gees were…
Hearing techno for the first time in the early 90s, and realizing it was just disco in a new, all-electronic package, made me realize how good a lot of it was…
And while the disco explosion eventually saw young straight singles doing the Bump in Indianapolis, Phoenix, and Spokane, Dorothy sticks close to the epicenter by including such legendary New York City clubs as Studio 54, The Gallery, Paradise Garage, The Saint, and The Loft, a private discotheque in DJ David Mancuso’s Lower Manhattan apartment.
There was a mix of sexual orientation, there was a mix of races, mix of economic groups. A real mix, where the common denominator was music.
One can’t mention the music at The Loft without giving props to the innovative and efficient sound system Rosner devised for Mancuso’s 1,850-square-foot space, using a McIntosh amplifier, an AR amplifier, Vega bass bottom speakers, and two Klipschorn Cornwall loudspeakers, whose circuit diagram inspired the Disco Love Blueprint’s layout.
As composer and producer Matt Sommers told The Vinyl Factory, those speakers surrounded dancers with the sort of high volume, undistorted sound they could lose themselves in:
…the Mancuso parties were unique because what he did was take it to a whole other level and created that envelopment experience where you could really get lost and I think that’s what people love about that, because you can just let your troubles go and enjoy it.
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