internet explorers club | bespoke internet

The first news is that today is the one year anniversary of Internet Explorers Club! I’m in shock that it’s already been a year, but fortunately, there’s still a lot of internet to share.

The New York Times Magazine takes a look into the Betty Crocker recipe cards of the atomic age (and manages to make a few dishes) and what it means, from creating cooking as a science to a edible representation of the Cold War. Regardless of how you feel, the styling in the photoshoot is amazing.

I keep linking Gretchen McCulloch’s work on modern grammar but I keep being fascinated by it. For Mental Floss, she talks about modern abbreviations (legit, obis, whatevs, etc) including the struggle with words like the abbreviations of “casual” and “usual” (uzh? uj?) and how we don’t really have a sound for “ʒ” in our alphabet. In other linguistic news, there’s been an apparent uptick of olde-tyme words like smitten, bespoke, peruse, dapper, perchance, and amongst, and people aren’t sure why—the current theory is hipsters, but I would only credit that to an uptick in “artisanal.”

Another modern vision of the past is this new bar—excuse me, gin palace—called Whitechapel that just opened in San Francisco. It’s done up like a hidden Underground station slash distillery slash gin pub and it’s just gorgeous. Hopefully the next incarnation will be in the underwater NYC subway cars that were sunk in the Atlantic to become artificial reefs.

Book-themed reasons to travel abroad include this Columbian bookstore that encourages socialization and relaxation (and has these cushy cubbyholes that look amazing), and this bookstore-themed hotel in Japan, which has beds hidden behind communal bookshelves.

Finally, this excerpt from an upcoming book about Ruth Bader Ginsberg about her relationship with her husband is bittersweet but so wonderful.

Etcetera: A video game where you clean up after a violent alien infestation of a space station (no, really)