Compiled here are the miniature versions of Object Lessons, a series on the secret lives of ordinary things, edited by Atlantic contributing editor Ian Bogost. Read longer Object Lessons and books at objectsobjectsobjects.com.
“Put that to music,” intoned NBC analyst Chris Collinsworth, after wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr.’s one-handed catch for a touchdown last November. Video of the play went viral, and soon fans young and old tried to emulate Beckham’s ballet-like catch in playgrounds and backyards everywhere.
It was a beautiful feat. A dazzling one. Some called it poetic. And although it has been heralded as a one-of-a-kind catch, it joins a list of other one-of-a-kind catches and all-time great plays collected on highlight reels. But besides oohing and aahing over such moments, what more is there to say?
As a literature professor, I find myself watching football in poetic terms.
And by that, I don’t mean generalized notions of “beauty” or “grace under pressure.” The enjoyment I find in a poem is in the words, sounds, and structures that repeat, connect, or hang together in specific ways—its patterns—and especially in those moments that deviate and surprise—its variations. For me, football is most beautiful in the interplay of such pattern and variation.
Take the back-shoulder throw that many quarterbacks have now mastered. The quarterback throws the ball to the receiver’s “back” or “outside” shoulder—usually before the receiver (and the defender) has turned around to see it. It’s a modification of the in-stride, over-the-shoulder pass, and it’s extremely difficult to defend. The poetry of this play is found in its timing variation, not in its elegance. In its innovation on an established pattern.
On any given Sunday, you will hear commentators allude to variation. The quarterback “reads” the defense, sets up in the “read-option,” or recognizes a “hot read.” These “reads” are all about identifying formations (patterns) and using options (variations) to defeat the defense’s expectation. Likewise, defenses show different “looks” and make modifications often at the last second before the ball is snapped.
One hallmark of a great quarterback is his ability to audible: to modify verbally the set-play at the line. Conventional thinking says that an audible is beautiful when the variation results in a successful play. But even if the play fails, I often find beauty in the language of the audible. In Peyton Manning’s “Omaha, Omaha, Omaha” or “Bags Montana Fat Man,” where the “poetry” lies in strange variation where one doesn’t expect it.
So back to Beckham Jr. The beauty of the play comes from its high degree of variation: to catch a 43-yard pass at the goalline, after being fouled, bent over backwards, with only two fingers and a thumb. It’s unexpected and stunning. And then: it’s a new pattern in your mind, for watching the next game.
Like trends, fonts go in and out of fashion. And like all fashion, some fonts make us wish they had never been made. Let’s take a trip back in time to revisit the worst fonts of each decade since fonts became usable on computers.
2010s — Papyrus
The typeface has been around since 1982, when it was designed to look like handwriting on its eponymous material. For years Papyrus had led a quiet life as “that font on Asian restaurant menus.” Then James Cameron made Avatar. The 2009 blockbuster film gave Papyrus its big break role in typographic infamy. It was an incongruous choice even in the film’s promotional materials—but then the scourge continued in on-screen subtitles. It still hasn’t gone away.
Runner-up:Impact. A perfectly good display font ruined by its now-inextricable connection to I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER-style internet memes.
The font everyone loves to hate. It was designed by Microsoft for Windows 95. Soon Comic Sans became profoundly overused, perhaps because it offered an option that was legible but more “fun” than Arial or Times. Then it became the subject of widespread scorn and even protest—and even protest of its use in protest. Errol Morris would eventually demonstrate that setting text in Comic Sans made it less trustworthy.
Runner-up:Verdana. This wide sans-serif with its high x-height was also created by Microsoft in the ‘90s, designed for readability at all sizes. By the mid-2000s it had become a symbol of typographical homogeneity. A furor erupted in the late aughts when IKEA switched from the classic geometric sans Futura to Verdana, supposedly to normalize its online and in-store materials.
1990s — Democratica
There were many grunge fonts in the 1990s, all characterized by a torn or otherwise disheveled appearance that paid homage to its namesake music genre. Then there was Democratica, a grunge-adjacent quasi-steampunk industrial specimen that seemed to be everywhere by the mid ‘90s. For a few seconds it seemed cool. Soon enough, you just wanted to stomp on it with your Doc Martens.
Runner-up:Mistral, the Papyrus of the 1990s. It graced Corel Draw compositions and Word ‘97 how-to guides everywhere.
1980s — San Francisco
The 1984 Macintosh made visually distinct, proportional (non fixed-width) typefaces widely available. Susan Kare designed most of the 12 that shipped with the original Mac, including this one. San Francisco was made to look like ransom note lettering, and it became popular on flyers and other newly-printable novelties.
Runner-up:Davida, from The Print Shop, a flyer and brochure-making program popular in the ‘80s. The font was actually called “Party” in Print Shop. If you attended school or church functions before the fall of the Berlin Wall, you probably partied with Party.
It’s autumn, the season for leaves, nuts, needles, and other arboreal detritus. They pigment briefly, reminding us that summer really is over, before dropping their foliage. Then the usual nuisances apply: raking and bagging, then raking and bagging again, and maybe even again. Depending on the type of trees, the quantity of rainfall they enjoyed during the late summer, and current weather conditions, your leaves might fall all at once or over a period of many weeks.
I live in Atlanta, the “city in a forest.” Evergreens are common, but also the deciduous trees that make autumn into fall. Magnolia, hickory, poplar, dogwood, oak, birch. The magnolias are ornery; they hold onto much of their foliage in autumn and instead drop their thick, hearty leaves in spurts during spring.
But it’s the oaks that cause the most trouble. There are so many of them here, and they are so stately, rising 40 to 80 feet in height when mature. That’s a lot of leaves. And the oak’s leaves and its distinctive acorns contain a surplus of tannins, which easily stain stone and concrete sidewalks, driveways, and walks if left to decompose.
Among those who dwell under oak canopies, the experienced will learn to sweep, rake, or blow the leaves and acorns off of porous surfaces quickly. But even the vigilant can’t keep up with nature. When dropping leaves are accompanied by rains (and the winds that help them fall), immediate cleanup becomes impossible.
Worse, the rain helps seep more tannins out of the leaves and especially the acorns, creating strips of stained pavement where water flows down a grade. So many shades of rust, from ruddy to alloy to burnt to russet to umber. The tannins in red wine are what make its stains so hard to get out; acorns are the cabernets of autumn.
There are solutions, none perfect. Everyone should have a pressure washer—but that’s an object lesson for another day, and plain water probably won’t help anyway. Some try to bleach their drives, but the runoff risks harming plants and probably creates even more unsightly blotches anyway. Rust removers like oxalic acid or CLR might work, but applying these chemicals to large areas is impractical. A 20 percent solution of hydrochloric acid is another option, but it’s corrosive and highly poisonous. Anyone with kids or pets might think twice, and that’s probably most everyone with oaks to worry about.
There’s another choice. Sunlight will fade the stains over time, and other stains of other sorts will even and deepen the patina of the pavement. The oaks, decades or centuries old, rise high above your silly little house with its leaf blower whining in vain. They are here to remind you that nature is bigger than you, and your driveway, and your pride.
Last week, Ian wrote about the strange economy of gift giving. He suggests that part of what is so unsettling about the splurge of Black Friday is its flirtation with less calculable formulations of exchange and expenditure.
The following day I found myself at my local independent bookstore for Small Business Saturday, signing copies of my new book The End of Airports (okay, maybe I only signed one single copy, for my mother-in-law who was sweet enough to stop by and patronize the shop). As I talked to shoppers, I thought about an old quip: how a book is “a gift that keeps giving.” This slogan was first used to sell phonographs in the 1920s, and subsequently it was adopted to shill any number of goods and services. It’s reached a point of saturation such that it can now be applied ironically to unwanted things: Herpes, the gift that keeps on giving.
A good book is read only to be reread (sooner or later), or better, circulated in short time among friends or family members—read by many people, maybe even discussed at the dinner table or in a book group. Sometimes such circulation occurs until a book’s pages are falling out of the binding, its cover long lost.
One of the minor joys of my job is seeing the old tattered copies of books that students bring to class when we are discussing literary works such as Frankenstein or Lolita. Whether these books get transferred by campus bookstores for a modicum of profit, or among friends in bursts of passion or frustration, they are doing their job—giving, and giving again.
After finishing a book recently, I didn’t know what to make of it. It kept me up at night—I wondered whether it was this or that kind of book. Why did it make certain stylistic moves? Who was its intended audience? There’s something simple and generous about these nagging questions: the book has given them to me to ponder. Books give even after they are given. A new idea; unresolved feelings about something (or someone); a glimpse of a new place through descriptive prose…these are just some of the gifts waiting inside the wrapped covers of a book.
As our attention increasingly is directed toward new media modes of reading and consuming text, especially in the frenzy of holiday shopping, it is worth pausing to consider the older form of the bound book, a special kind of gift—a gift that gives in special ways.
Everyone knows what bread is, and everyone knows what toast is. And everyone knows that the first can be transformed into the second. Less clear: when, exactly, does the transformation take place? When does bread become toast?
The browning process we call toasting is an example of the Maillard reaction, in which amino acids and sugars interact to produce the characteristic brown color, texture, and flavor we know as toast. When heat encounters amino acids (many are present in wheat and flour) and sugars, the two rearrange and produce brown polymers (called melanoidins). The Maillard reaction is also responsible for the deep flavors of browned barley in beer, roasted coffee, seared meats, and French fries.
Toast pedants will stress that the Maillard reaction is not the same as caramelization, which is a type of thermal decomposition that chars—that’s what can happens when you toast your toast too long. Too much charring and you’re carbonizing bread, not toasting it.
That’s all well and good, but when, precisely, does bread become toast?
If you search the web, you’ll find endless threads from the tongue-in-cheek clown to the overzealous armchair chemist, all attempting to answer (or to mock) this metaphysical question. Sites leaning more toward geekery embrace scientific answers, while others use toast as an object lesson in the universe’s ultimate mystery.
Is bread toast only insofar as a human toaster perceives it to be “done?” Is bread toast when it reaches some specific level of nonenzymatic browning?
If the former, toast seems more like a performative speech act—“I dub thee toast!” than it is a physical configuration of bread and heat. Toast was first produced with a hand-iron over an open flame, after all, rather than an enclosure called a toaster that enshrouds the process in unnecessary and pregnant secrecy.
If the latter, the epistemological question doesn’t go away, as no toaster I know of can measure and evaluate all the varied configurations of amino acids, sugars, water, and heat. (Please, do not attempt a Kickstarter for such a device.) There are even some who might prefer their toast more on the caramelized or even charred side. Who’s to say that those rare (if not rarified) tastes should preclude the label “toast?”
Perhaps it’s such a welcome and common question because “when does bread become toast” demands that you engage in a fairly complex metaphysical debate on relatively ordinary terms. This isn’t God or nature we’re talking about, but browned bread. And yet, all the frothy urgency and spectacle of more serious matters still pervades such an ordinary substance. This is the ultimate payload of the puzzle: not to find an answer, but to admire that the question can spread so much complexity on to such a modest surface.
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