John McPhee, writing in 2015 in The New Yorker, about the process of being edited at Time magazine:

After four days of preparation and writing—after routinely staying up almost all night on the fourth night—and after tailoring your stories past the requests, demands, fine tips, and incomprehensible suggestions of the M.E. and your senior editor, you came in on Day 5 and were greeted by galleys from Makeup with notes on them that said “Green 5” or “Green 8” or “Green 15” or some such, telling you to condense the text by that number of lines or the piece would not fit in the magazine. You were supposed to use a green pencil so Makeup would know what could be put back, if it came to that. I can’t remember it coming to that.

McPhee quotes Calvin Trillin—a colleague at both Time and The New Yorker—on this process of “greening”:

I don’t have any interest in word games—I don’t think I’ve ever done a crossword or played Scrabble—but I found greening a thoroughly enjoyable puzzle. I was surprised that what I had thought of as a tightly constructed seventy-line story—a story so tightly constructed that it had resisted the inclusion of that maddening leftover fact—was unharmed, or even improved, by greening ten per cent of it. The greening I did in Time Edit convinced me that just about any piece I write could be improved if, when it was supposedly ready to hand in, I looked in the mirror and said sternly to myself “Green fourteen” or “Green eight.” And one of these days I’m going to begin doing that.

When I worked in the composing room of the Peterborough Examiner in the early 1990s, the author was cut right out of this process of trimming articles for space: it happened as the newspaper was being made up, in a dialog between an editor and a printer, standing in front of the full page in question, as it was being assembled.

Stories typed by writers into old-style terminals in the newsroom came out of the Compugraphic typesetting machine in the composing room on long strips of photographic paper. We printers waxed the backs of these strips—using a clever machine that applied hot wax to one side and not the other—and then sliced them up into newspaper-column-sized chunks. 

With an editor by our side, working from a rough sketch of the page they brought out with them, we’d start to assemble the editorial copy around the ads that had previously been placed. Headline first, sometimes a subhead, and then the copy for each story.

The copy-fitting process was inexact enough—more of a “this many words takes up roughly this much space”—that, inevitably, either parts of the story would need to be trimmed (literally: we’d cut out sentences with a knife), or space added by increasing the line spacing in later paragraphs (again with a knife).

Compared to the precision of today’s digital tools, this “real time greening” process makes it seem wondrous that this is how newspapers were made up well into my adulthood.

Calvin Trillin, in the introduction to 40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering, by Alice Waters:

I tend to eat in the upstairs café at Chez Panisse rather than in the more formal dining room downstairs, but I find it comforting to know that the dining room is there. Why? Because for fifteen years, beginning in the late sixties, I was in a strange town every three weeks for a series of New Yorker pieces, and my last resort for finding something decent to eat was to approach the motel clerk and say, “Not the restaurant you took your parents to on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary; the restaurant you went to the night you got home after thirteen months in Korea.” In Berkeley, I’m pleased to say, those are the same restaurant.

This is so inventive!

I’m reading a book in the Crosspoint e-reader:

I pop up the settings, select “Show page as QR,” scan the QR code with my phone, and now I have the text to do with as I please:

Like this:

Scheme stood, offering her hand. “It’s the most powerful weapon of all.” She waggled her fingers and, reluctantly, Quintessandra allowed herself to be hoisted up. “It’s a story!”

We were pleasantly surprised to hear the musical stylings of the incomparable Nick Doneff during lunch on the MV Northumberland crossing from Wood Islands to Caribou this morning. He really is a musical treasure.

“It’s times like this that I’m proud to be an Islander,” Lisa said. Agreed.

Writing yesterday about being in Lincoln Centre with Salman Rushdie prompted me to recall the other time, the very same week, we ended up in the same room.

Catherine was 4 months pregnant when, in the spring of 2000, we headed to New York City, along with brothers Mike and Steve, for the very first edition of The New Yorker Festival.

We had tickets to a variety of events, including an architecture bus tour with Paul Goldberger, a reading by Stephen King, and the aforementioned Robin Williams-Lillian Ross event at Lincoln Centre. 

My favourite event, however (and the most “New Yorkery”) was a panel discussion of science writers held at The Princeton Club. I first learned about it when I emailed Malcolm Gladwell to see if he was participating in and (it being 2000, a gentler time), he emailed back:

yes, i think i’m doing a panel discussion with a couple of other science writers on the saturday. but i haven’t seen the final agenda yet either.

The panel included Gladwell, Michael Specter, Jerome Groupman, and Atul Gawande: then and now a cross-section of the smartest science and medicine writers in the US.

When the well-attended panel was over, brother Steve and I, eager to get out the door to the next event on our agenda, ducked out the  back into a service hallway, walked through a maze of corridors, and emerged eventually into another meeting room. Where we encountered Salman Rushdie, just finishing up a panel discussion of his own.

Rushdie had reached a new level of openness by that time, and had moved to New York City that year, so it wasn’t as miraculous to encounter him by chance as it might seem. But, inashmuch as he’d been in hiding for more than a decade, it was still remarkable to just stumble out of a service hallway and come face to face with him.

Lillian Ross, in the introduction to her book Reporting Always, on J.D. Salinger:

He liked what Ralph Waldo Emerson said. He quoted Emerson in a letter to me: “A man must have aunts and cousins, must buy carrots and turnips, must have barn and woodshed, must go to market and to the blacksmith’s shop, must saunter and sleep and be inferior and silly.” Writers, Salinger said, sometimes had trouble abiding by that, and he referred to Flaubert and Kafka as “two other born non-buyers of carrots and turnips.”

Watching Ross interview Robin Williams at Lincoln Centre, for The New Yorker FestivalYork Times, remains one of the highlights of my life. I just learned that Salman Rushdie was in the audience that afternoon too; he writes:

I once saw Lillian Ross on stage in New York, interviewing Robin Williams. This was not an easy job, because Robin Williams could take an innocent question and run with it for a long time, twisting and turning his answer into various kinds of surreality. (At one point, for example, he became for several minutes a beret-wearing, Gauloise-smoking French parrot.) I remember being impressed by Lillian Ross’s demeanor, her faint smile, her unflappability, her willingness to let Robin fly (who could have stopped him?), but also her determination to get the interview done, and done properly.

I wholly concur. 

Matt Webb mentioned Zork in a recent post:

Back in the day, text adventures were games with a natural language interface.

Zork (1977) was the first well-known one.

This surfaced a long-forgetten memory from when I was a teenager, likely about 17: I had read about Zork, and desperately wanted to try it out on my computer. I bought a copy from a computer shop—it was in Oakville, Ontario, if memory serves—and installed it on my Commodore 64. 

Then I played it for awhile, wasn’t impressed, and packed it up and returned it (for some reason this was allowed).

The memory remains because I remember my father being quite angry at me for doing this: he thought the idea of buying something, using it and then returning it was fundamentally dishonest.

To this day, as Lisa will attest, that’s a deeply-imprinted value of mine, and it’s rare if ever that I’ll return something to a store simply because I didn’t like it.

One of my favourite coffee places in Malmö is Café № 6, on Mäster Henriksgatan. I first visited when I was staying around the corner some years ago, and I like stopping in for a coffee every time I’m in the city.

When we were in Malmö in 2024 we enjoyed coffee in the garden on an April afternoon, a delight for we winter-ravaged Islanders. 

As This Box is for Good was in full voice at the time, when we returned home we sent them a Coffee box, and then promptly forgot that we’d done so.

Last week Olle was there for a coffee, and helpfully sent a proof-of-life for the box:

It makes me so happy to see that: the box phoned home.