internet explorers club | we won! we won! we won! we won!

Just in case you live under a rock, the TONYS were a week (ish) and as expected (warranted, hoped for), Hamilton SWEPT, winning 11 total awards (check out their performance of Yorktown here) That obviously means this TODAY IN HAMILTON is particularly robust:

The WSJ wrote an algorithm to track all the rhymes in Hamilton, BUT what’s even cooler is they compare it to rhyming in different hip-hop (and Broadway) songs and it’s GREAT.

Motherboard looked at the sound design of Hamilton (20 different “zones” in the theatre, each with their own custom sound setup!), but also at the current state of sound design on Broadway, where they recently took away the Tony award category for it.

Finally, Rolling Stone has Lin on the cover and has a delightful behind-the-scenes look AND a massively long interview with Lin, so get on that!

Two deep dives into our Commercial Lives, Ourselves: The first, a history of mannequins, tracking the changing body shapes and messages they sent, and the current field of collectors today. Tienlon Ho interviews Delores Custer, one of the leaders in food styling, and she talks through the changes in that field over the years:

“The first shot I ever saw of melting ice cream was on the cover of Donna Hay’s magazine, which came out nearly fifteen years ago….The cover was a single scoop of vanilla shot in natural light. The food stylists in New York were all, Did you see that cover? It was shocking to us; we weren’t allowed to do anything like that. We’d use fake ice cream and studio lights to completely control the image.”

Miniature treehouses wrapped around houseplants by Jedidiah Corwyn Voltz

On learning and losing languages: I loved this piece Ioan Sharma writes about her experience learning Gaelic - her subtitle is “on language-learning and the decolonization of the mind” which should clue you into its depths.

I found this piece from a while back on different lettering techniques in comics—how to show how Thor is speaking, or someone speaking in a different language—and I got sucked in deep. It includes the really great example here from Hacktivist, showing three languages at once, which I adore.

Finally: a few days ago was the 200th Anniversary of Mary Shelley first telling the story of Frankenstein, which scientists determined by analyzing Shelley’s “waking dream” that inspired the story. Francine Prose wrote a fantastic introduction to a new edition of Frankenstein (here excerpted in New Republic) about the origin of the story, how it works within Gothic tropes, and how the monster allows “a complexity of moral and philosophical reflection that the other characters—spurred by near-diabolic ambition or overwhelmed by tragedy—cannot or will not allow themselves.” Well now.

Etcetera: Doof Warrior iPhone speaker (!!!). Russian Ren Faire knight shoots drone out of the sky with a spear. Star Wars toy design patents are a delight.

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emilyhummel.com | @hummeline