I recently reread “The Curse of Xanadu” by Gary Wolf, published in Wired in June 1995. Gary is a friend, and he wrote the piece when we were both editors at the magazine. To me, it is one of the great pieces of tech journalism. I’ve read it several times over the years, and it gets better with age.

Gary’s article tells the story of Ted Nelson, one of the most interesting and frustrating figures in the history of computing. Born in 1937, Nelson is the son of director Ralph Nelson and Oscar-winning actress Celeste Holm. He coined the words “hypertext” and “hypermedia” in 1965. In 1974, Nelson self-published Computer Lib/Dream Machines, an oversized, hand-scrawled book modeled on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, which argued that ordinary people could and must understand computers. Steven Levy called it “the bible of the hacker dream.” It came out just before the Altair kit appeared, making it one of the first major books about personal computing.

Nelson is also a genuine eccentric. Gary describes him stuffing his many-pocketed clothes with recording devices and notebooks, clipping whatever didn’t fit to his belt. He lived on a houseboat in Sausalito. He called his ADHD “hummingbird mind,” dismissing the clinical term as something invented by “regularity chauvinists.” He developed his life philosophy in seventh grade: “most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.”

In 1960, Nelson started work on Project Xanadu, a universal hypertext library he named after the palace in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Xanadu was going to be the system that connected all human knowledge. And the tragedy is that it had several features the World Wide Web still doesn’t have, more than 30 years later. Xanadu had two-way links, so if someone linked to your document, you’d know about it and could follow the link back. It had “transclusion,” which let you embed a live excerpt from someone else’s document that stayed connected to the source, so attribution was automatic. It had built-in micropayments: reading a page would send a tiny fee to the author. No broken links, because the system managed them. Version tracking for every document. Nelson’s team explicitly rejected the Web’s model, saying it “trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links.”

Read more

Lisbon’s Reservoir Museum

It was my first day in Lisbon in January — jet-lagged, no sleep, wind blowing the rain sideways. I’d already visited most of the city’s museums on previous trips and wanted to try something different, so I searched for unusual museums and found the Mãe d’Água das Amoreiras Reservoir.

The building is stunningly symmetrical, all austere stone geometry, designed by the Hungarian architect Carlos Mardel and completed in 1834. It sits at the end of the Águas Livres Aqueduct, a gravity-fed stone channel that stretches 58 kilometers near Sintra. It doesn’t use pumps, just the slope of the land, delivering water since 1748. The aqueduct is covered, so from the outside it looks like a very long covered bridge running across the landscape.

When I walked in, I wasn’t sure there was water inside. The pool was so clear it looked like empty space — until I saw the faintest shimmer on the surface.

And then in the middle of all this severe geometry, there’s this organic sculpture — carved stone cascading like a living thing, topped by a dolphin spouting water into the pool. The contrast between the rigid architecture and this one burst of flowing, natural form is extraordinary.

It made me think about how rarely we build public infrastructure that’s worth visiting for its own sake. Hoover Dam is one American example — its Art Deco intake towers were designed to inspire awe. But we mostly don’t do that anymore. John Kenneth Galbraith had a phrase for it in The Affluent Society: “private affluence and public squalor.” Nobody wants to pay for the extras, even when they’d make people genuinely happy. But places like this reservoir prove extras can pay off for centuries.

A Murder Mystery Led Me to Liszt

I’m reading The Noh Mask Murder by Akimitsu Takagi, a locked-room mystery first published in Japan in 1951 and recently translated into English by Jesse Kirkwood (Pushkin Vertigo, 2024). An amateur mystery writer is sent to investigate strange happenings at a family mansion, where a sinister Hannya mask appears at night. The patriarch is found dead in a locked study with only the mask on the floor. It won Japan’s Mystery Writers Club Award. I’m really enjoying it, especially the meta-novel aspect — it gives a kind of Borges quality to it.

While reading, one of the characters sits down at the piano and plays Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6. I didn’t know it, so I looked it up on Apple Music and found two versions — one by Vladimir Horowitz (a 1947 RCA Victor recording), and a contemporary one by Lang Lang. Horowitz was one of the most celebrated pianists of the 20th century, known for his ferocious technique. Lang Lang is the contemporary Chinese virtuoso who’s probably done more than anyone alive to bring classical piano to a mass audience.

I listened to the Horowitz version first. The last minute of the piece is fast — really fast — and in his recording it sounds like pure cacophony. I thought maybe that was the point. Then I listened to Lang Lang’s version, and that same final minute sounded controlled and deliberate, every note placed. I don’t know anything about classical music, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say Lang Lang’s version is closer to what Liszt probably intended. My wife listened to both and agreed.

Glassblowing Is the Most Stressful Art Form

My friend Irwin, whose son is an art student studying glassblowing, told us to watch Blown Away, the glassblowing competition on Netflix. It’s in its fourth season now, and my wife and I are hooked.

It’s kind of like sculpting in clay, except you can’t touch the work — everything is done with blowpipes, jacks, and paddles while the glass is 2,000 degrees. And there’s a high probability that hours of painstaking effort will end in a pile of shards on the floor. The contestants are drenched in sweat. I guess that’s what happens when you spend your workday a few feet from a furnace. In each episode, the artists compete in themed challenges, and the winner takes home a residency at the Corning Museum of Glass.

Procreate is a $13 Miracle

Procreate for the iPad is an incredible bargain. It’s $12.99 — a one-time purchase, no subscription — for a drawing and painting app that does much of what Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator (around $20 a month each) can do. You’ll want an Apple Pencil to use it properly. You can technically use your finger, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

I now do most of my sketching on Procreate rather than in a sketchbook. I typically draw little characters — here are some birds I drew after watching pigeons strut around a park in Lisbon in January:

It’s pretty easy to pick up, but to really take advantage of what it can do, I recommend watching the tutorials on the Procreate site. RetroSupply Co, which sells brushes and texture packs for designers, has a bunch of tutorial videos covering everything from basic brushwork to retro illustration styles and halftone effects.

The Puzzle I Can’t Solve (and Don’t Want To)

At Christmas, my daughter gave me a https://hanayama-toys.com/product/cast-infinity/ — a palm-sized metal brain teaser shaped like a figure eight. Inside the two loops sit two small donut-shaped pieces, and there’s a maze-like groove around each circle. The idea is to rotate the donuts through the maze until you can slide them out of the figure eight entirely, then put them back.

It’s rated 6 out of 6 on Hanayama’s difficulty scale, designed by the Finnish puzzle maker Vesa Timonen. I’ve been toying with it since December. I’ll make a bit of progress, feel clever, then somehow get stuck again. It doesn’t matter. The fun is in the fidgeting. I play with it during conference calls, while taking a break, while thinking about something else entirely.

The only downside is the metallic clanking noise it makes. I hope the people on the other end of my calls can’t hear it.

In his audio essay, Rob recommended that the next time you go for a walk, ignore everything designed to capture your attention — street signs, billboards, shop windows — and instead notice things that weren’t designed to grab your attention. One of his examples was to pay attention to shadows.

I followed Rob’s suggestion when I was in Lisbon a couple of weeks ago. It was a rainy and windy morning, and I was bundled up on my way to do some work at a coffee shop called The Coffee. (It’s an excellent place to work, by the way. Walk up the itty-bitty spiral staircase in the back and take your pick of one of many comfy lounge chairs or tables. The addictive egg-and-cheese sandwiches on Texas toast are only about 3 euros. The coffee is good, too.)

On my 20-minute walk from my hotel to The Coffee, I started looking at shadows. After a while, I noticed that some small green plants were growing under the many sidewalk benches the city of Lisbon thoughtfully installed.

Then I really started noticing. Plants growing through cracks in the cobblestones. Sprouting from gaps in the sidewalk. Climbing up walls. Pretty soon, I felt like I was walking through a jungle. They were everywhere, and I had never noticed them before.

It was amazing and a little humbling. No one intentionally planted these. There must be seeds blowing around all the time, all over the place, because every little crack in a sidewalk or in a wall had something green growing out of it. How did the seeds get there? From the wind, I guess. Or bird poop. But the sheer volume of it — every crack colonized — made me think about how relentless plants are. We pour concrete and lay cobblestones, and they just keep finding a way through.

For the rest of the trip, I kept noticing the sidewalk plants. Back in Los Angeles, I notice them here. I’m happy I took Rob’s advice.

If you want to get better at noticing things — or just want a walk to feel completely different — I highly recommend Rob’s Substack, The Art of Noticing.

P.S. Here’s a video I shot after my jungle walk along Lisbon’s cobblestone sidewalks:

P.P.S. Look at this trash can painted to look like an astronaut helmet!

P.P.P.S And this tea set at a flea market in Principe Real! My suitcase was too small to bring it home.

In 1982, I was a college student in Colorado. That summer, my friend got an Apple IIe, and six of us spent every evening that summer sitting in folding chairs around his computer playing Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. The game is meant for one player, but we didn’t play it that way. Each of us took ownership of one of the party’s six characters. We constantly argued about whether to press deeper or retreat to the surface, and freaked out when a character died permanently (the game was brutally unforgiving — we eventually learned we could cheat by turning off the computer as soon as a character was killed, but before it was recorded on the floppy disk).

It took all summer, but we successfully fought our way through all ten levels of the dungeon, and defeated the evil wizard Werdna.

If you’ve never played Wizardry, it’s a first-person dungeon crawler where you navigate a 10-level maze filled with monsters, traps, and treasures. The dungeon is rendered as simple wireframe graphics forming corridors and doors. You create a party of six adventurers, each with a class (fighter, mage, priest, thief, and others), descend into the dungeon beneath a castle, trying to retrieve a powerful amulet from Werdna on the bottom floor. Combat is turn-based. Death is permanent unless you can afford resurrection at the Temple of Cant — and even that can fail, turning your beloved character to ash.

Wizardry was released in September 1981 and became the most popular Apple II game of that year, selling 200,000 copies in its first three years. Along with Ultima, it invented the RPG video game genre. Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Shin Megami Tensei, The Bard’s Tale, Might and Magic — all trace their lineage back to Wizardry. The entire dungeon crawler genre exists because of this game.

The game had no automap. You were expected to draw the dungeon yourself on graph paper. This wasn’t a limitation — mapping was an important part of gameplay. I was the team map-maker. I used graph paper, a mechanical pencil, and more than one eraser.

I’ve been replaying Wizardry on and off ever since, but I’ve never completed it after my first successful run in the summer of 82. But I keep trying.

I’m currently playing a version on the Switch, and I still love making the maps. It’s satisfying to explore a dungeon square by square, marking walls and doors, noting the location of spinners and teleporters that tried to disorient me. The map becomes a record of hard-won knowledge.

You can play the original PC version via an emulator at the Internet Archive.

Instead of using paper and pencil this time around, I decided to build my own browser-based mapping tool. It was a fun project — the kind of thing where building it is as enjoyable as using it. The Wizardry Map Maker (screenshot below) still needs work, but I think it’s good enough to use as is. If you try it out and have any suggestions for improvements, let me know.

If you played Wizardry back in the day — or any of the dungeon crawlers it inspired — share in the comments. Did you map on graph paper? Did you have a party-wipe that still haunts you? Did you discover any cheats of your own?

Thanks for reading The Magnet!

Subscribe now

I should have learned my lesson not to order from Anthropologie. Stupid me.

In December 2025, I ordered a wool coat and silver hoop earrings from Anthropologie as Christmas gifts for my wife. They sent me champagne bottle earrings, Christmas tree earrings, and a pair of novelty socks. What followed was a month of contradictory customer service responses, broken promises of replacement shipments, a threatening automated email accusing me of failing to return items I never received, and a Christmas morning without the gifts I’d ordered three weeks earlier.

The 2024 Incident: When They Tried to Charge Me for Their Mistake

Last year, after receiving a towel fixture instead of jogger pants, I did everything right. I contacted customer service. I documented the error. I returned the incorrect item via UPS — and I recorded video of the pickup, because something told me I’d need proof.

That instinct proved correct.

Months later, Anthropologie attempted to charge my credit card for the towel fixture I had returned. Their system showed no record of receiving the return. Without my video evidence of the UPS pickup, I would have been charged for merchandise I never ordered and had demonstrably sent back.

The resolution took months of effort on my part. Their compensation for ruining a Christmas gift and then trying to bill me for it? A 20% discount code.

I should have stopped shopping there. I didn’t. That was my mistake.

The 2025 Incident: A Masterclass in Systemic Failure

On December 5, 2025, I ordered a $258 wool coat and $38 silver earrings, totaling $324.86. On December 11, the package arrived, without the coat or earrings. Inside was a packing slip that correctly listed my ordered items — and three products that belonged to someone else.

Above: The packing slip in the box said these items were the coat and silver hoop earrings.

What followed was a month-long odyssey through Anthropologie’s customer service apparatus that revealed just how broken their systems are.

December 19: I contacted customer service and provided photos of the incorrect items. Agent Adeeb acknowledged the error and submitted a request for a replacement. He told me to allow 72 hours and promised a replacement before Christmas.

December 22: No update. I contacted them again. Agent Babetnylla confirmed the replacement request was in the system and promised I would receive confirmation by December 23.

December 23: No confirmation arrived.

December 24 (Christmas Eve): Instead of a shipping confirmation, I received an email from a third agent, Jubinia, asking me to send photos of the incorrect items “so we can take the next steps.” Five days after my initial report, on Christmas Eve, they were asking for photos I had already offered.

Christmas morning came and went. The gifts I’d ordered three weeks earlier never arrived. I emailed Anthropologie and asked them to explain the cause of the failure. No reply.

December 30: Agent Starlisha sent a templated response: “We have processed a replacement, and you will receive a confirmation email shortly.” This was the third time I’d been told a replacement was “processed.” No tracking number, confirmation, or answer to my question.

Later that day, a refund of $283.15 was issued for the coat, which was now out of stock. Nobody told me directly — I discovered this later.

January 3, 2026: The hoop earrings arrived.

January 6, 2026: I received an automated email from Anthropologie with the subject line “Don’t forget about your return!” The email instructed me to return the coat and the earrings, even though I never got the coat and wanted to keep the earrings.

The email informed me that if I didn’t return the coat and hoop earrings within 30 days, I would be charged to my original payment method. If the charge was unsuccessful, my account would be restricted, preventing me from shopping with any URBN, Inc. brands in the future.

To recap: Anthropologie’s warehouse sent me the wrong items. Their customer service acknowledged it was their error. And then their automated system sent me an email threatening to charge me and ban me because I hadn’t returned an item I never received.

January 7: My fifth customer service interaction. Agent Guda finally confirmed the refund and sent a return label for the wrong items. Like every agent before, Guda was polite and promised to take care of the problem. These agents, who are doing their best to make customers happy, are victims of Anthropologie’s broken system. I have nothing but sympathy for them.

And sadly, somewhere out there is another Anthropologie customer who ordered champagne-bottle earrings, Christmas-tree earrings, and a pair of novelty socks. Their order ended up in my mailbox instead of wherever it was supposed to go. I hope they eventually got their items. I hope they didn’t have to spend a month fighting with Anthropologie and didn’t receive a threatening email accusing them of failing to return a wool coat and silver hoop earrings they never ordered. But given what I’ve learned about how Anthropologie’s systems work, I wouldn’t bet on it.

What This Reveals About Modern Retail

I’m not writing this just to complain about one company. I’m writing because these two experiences, taken together, reveal something troubling about how retail systems fail customers.

The Accountability Gap

At Anthropologie, the warehouse apparently operates independently of customer service, which apparently operates independently of the automated email system, which apparently operates independently of the returns department. No single person or department has visibility into the complete customer experience.

When the warehouse makes an error, customer service can acknowledge it — but they can’t stop the automated systems from sending threatening emails.

Template Culture

Every agent I spoke with was polite. Every agent said they would help. But every interaction followed the same script: apologize, promise action, close the chat window.

When I received Starlisha’s response on December 30 — “We have processed a replacement, and you will receive a confirmation email shortly” — it was identical in structure to what I’d heard twice before. It wasn’t a response to my situation. It was a Mad Lib: “Hello [NAME], I’m sorry about [PROBLEM]. We have processed [ACTION].”

Threatening the Victim

Perhaps the most revealing moment was that January 6 email. Anthropologie’s own customer service had documented, across multiple interactions, that their warehouse sent me the wrong items. And yet their automated system sent me an email threatening financial penalties and account termination for failing to return items I never ordered. The stress of receiving a threatening email accusing me of wrongdoing, even though I was the victim of their error, means that I now approach every interaction with Anthropologie assuming bad faith, because experience has taught me that’s the only safe assumption.

This is a system designed without any connection between customer service resolution and automated compliance communications. The fact that this email was sent after multiple agents acknowledged the error was Anthropologie’s — it shows that no communication link was built between those systems.

No Meaningful Accountability

After the 2024 incident, where Anthropologie sent me the wrong item, I returned it, they tried to charge me anyway, and I had to produce video evidence to prove I’d sent it back —their compensation was a 20% discount code.

After the 2025 incident — where they ruined a Christmas gift again, gave me a month of runaround, and then threatened to ban me — I received... nothing. A refund for the items I paid for and never received isn’t compensation. It’s the bare minimum.

At no point has anyone from Anthropologie acknowledged the pattern, apologized meaningfully, or offered anything that reflects the actual impact of their repeated failures.

Lessons for Anyone Running a Business

If you’re responsible for customer experience at any company, here’s what I’d ask you to consider:

Do your systems talk to each other? When customer service documents an error, does that information flow to the automated systems that send compliance emails? If not, you’re set up to threaten your own customers for your own mistakes.

Can your agents see the case history? If every interaction starts from zero, customers have to repeatedly re-explain their situation, and promises made by previous agents disappear into the void.

What does “resolved” actually mean? A refund isn’t a resolution if the customer spent hours fighting for it. A return label isn’t a resolution if it comes with a threatening email. Resolution means the customer is actually made whole.

What’s your compensation philosophy? When you fail a customer, a 20% discount code is insulting. It says, “We value your continued business at exactly 20% of your next purchase.” It does not say “we recognize the magnitude of our failure and want to make it right.”

Are you listening for patterns? I’ve had two consecutive years of the same failure. Is anyone at Anthropologie tracking customers who experience repeated fulfillment errors? Or does each incident exist in isolation, invisible to anyone who might recognize a systemic problem?

Final Thoughts

Some companies treat customer service as a cost center to be minimized. Others treat it as an opportunity to build loyalty. Anthropologie has shown me twice which category they fall into.

I’ll be shipping the incorrectly-sent items back to them this week. I’ll include a detailed letter explaining everything, with all the order numbers and SKUs, because I don’t trust their systems to handle even that correctly.

And then I’ll be done.

Postscript

I reached out to Anthropologie’s Facebook team and told them I was writing about my experience. I gave them a list of questions and told them that any statement provided would be included in the published piece in full. My questions:

1. Does Anthropologie have any statement regarding how a warehouse fulfillment error led to an automated threatening email being sent to the affected customer?

2. Is Anthropologie taking any steps to improve coordination between customer service records and automated return-tracking systems?

3. Is there anything else Anthropologie would like to add for inclusion in the article?

Anthropologie answered none of my questions. Here’s their response:

Hi Mark. We are sorry to hear you received the wrong item. We see that the replacement for the Layered Hoop Earrings was delivered on January 3rd. You were refunded $283.15 on December 30th for the By Anthropologie Herringbone Wool Maxi Coat, as the item is out of stock. We can provide a return label or QR code for the incorrect item to be returned. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please let us know how you would like to proceed.

After reading yesterday’s Magnet, in which I wrote about seven items I take with me while traveling, my friend Charles Platt sent me a list of his own essential items:

Concave mirror.

What? Why?

In case you get something in your eye, and there’s no one around who you would want to breathe on you while trying to remove whatever is causing discomfort.

A concave mirror about 1.5 inches in diameter can focus when held about 2 inches from your eye if it has sufficient curvature. I bought mine from Edmund Scientific, but you can probably get them on Amazon these days.

I also like to travel with antibiotics, but that requires a compliant US doctor who trusts you not to use them unnecessarily. And, of course, you need to know the basic rules for using an appropriate antibiotic for a particular type of infection.

When in Japan, impacted earwax made me deaf in one ear, which was very annoying. We discovered that the Japanese had never heard of Debrox (which dissolves earwax) or the little rubber squeeze bulb that is sold with it in the US. Several pharmacists were nonplussed when Eriko tried to explain what we were talking about. Fortunately, Amazon Japan had it and delivered it the same day.

Ideally, I think one should travel with hydrogen peroxide, which is not only antibacterial but also promotes blood clotting (endodontists used to use it for this purpose, after tooth extraction). If you dribble hydrogen peroxide into an oozing wound, the blood magically stops flowing after about 10 minutes. But hydrogen peroxide might be too weird for TSA inspections. Who knows.

Thanks, Charles!

Support me on Ko-Fi

I’m an overpacker. Give me a suitcase, and I’ll fill it to the bursting point. It’s a problem. I’m working on it. But no matter how much I eventually cull from my luggage, I’ll always be sure to take the following seven things with me on trips.

From left to right:

Eustachi Blocked Ear Popper

When I fly, my ears often get plugged up during descent. It hurts and it’s annoying to be partially deaf for hours or even days after landing. I started taking Sudafed as a preventive measure, but the side effects are unpleasant, and it's illegal to possess in some countries, like Japan. I discovered the Eustachi device about 10 years ago, and it’s magic. If my ears get clogged, I hold it against one nostril, close the other nostril, and press a button to release battery-powered air into my nasal cavity. Then I swallow, and *pop* — my blocked ears are instantly cleared. Here’s a video that demonstrates its use.

Orthodontic Wax

A couple of years ago, I chipped a molar when I bit into a piece of cake that had a rock in it. The nerve was exposed, and I couldn’t even drink lukewarm water without feeling like Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man. This was at night, so I wasn’t able to go to my dentist, so I went to the drug store and bought some orthodontic wax. I used a pea-sized piece to patch up the broken part of my tooth. It significantly reduced the pain. I haven’t broken a tooth while traveling, but this tiny box is ready to help if I ever do.

Tide to Go

This stain remover looks like a magic marker, but it erases stains. It will remove most traces of coffee, wine, chocolate, and other stains, and can be safely used on colored clothes. Just press the tip into the stain to release a bit of liquid from the pen, then lightly “draw” over it. In a few seconds, the stain will fade.

6X Reading Glasses

I bought the most powerful cheap reading glasses I could find online. They are good for reading tiny print on SIM cards, removing splinters, or doing other tasks that require close-up inspection.

Loop Earplugs

Two days ago, I was at an airport having lunch in a cafe right next to a toddler play area. The kids were screaming with joy as they went down a slide. One kid screamed at a frequency that made my brain shudder. I popped in my Loop noise-reducing earplugs and all was right with the world again.

Hardware Security Key

In 2022, Google sent me an email that said, “Warning — Google may have detected government-backed attackers trying to steal your password.” (I wrote about it in The Magnet). The solution was to buy a hardware security key. It’s supposedly impossible for someone to log into my Gmail account without physically inserting a key into the USB-C port of a computer or the Lightning port of an iPhone (in addition to knowing my password). So now I have to bring it with me wherever I go.

Selfie Stick

I think I’m supposed to hate selfie sticks because they bother other people, but I am careful not to be obnoxious with mine. It is so useful! It fits in a jacket pocket. It weighs 5 ounces, comes with a removable Bluetooth remote, has tripod legs, extends to 28 inches, and grips tightly to my phone. And it’s only $7.

OK, that’s it for this issue. If you have any essential travel items, let me know in the comments.

This spring, Carla and I spent a few days in Boston. On our daughter's recommendation, we visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It’s housed in a fantastical building modeled after 15th- and 16th-century Venetian Renaissance palaces.

Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) founded the museum in 1903. Born into a wealthy family, she began collecting art shortly after her father died in 1891 and left her $1.75 million (about $61 million in 2025 dollars). In 1892, Gardner began her lifelong obsession with art collecting by purchasing Vermeer’s The Concert for $5,000 at a Paris auction. That’s only $175,000 in today’s dollars and would be an incredible bargain (recent estimates put it at $250 million), but it was considered a high price for a painting at the time.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to see Vermeer’s The Concert because it had been stolen in 1980, along with 12 other works of art from the museum. That year, on the morning of March 18, two men dressed as police officers tricked museum security officers into letting them in. They tied up the guards and stole The Concert along with works by Rembrandt, Degas, Manet, and others. The paintings are missing to this day.

A 2013 FBI press release stated that it believed “with a high degree of confidence that in the years after the theft, the art was transported to Connecticut and the Philadelphia region, and some of the art was taken to Philadelphia, where it was offered for sale by those responsible for the theft. With that same confidence, we have identified the thieves, who are members of a criminal organization with a base in the Mid-Atlantic states and New England.” A 2013 Time article has a gallery of some of the stolen pieces.

I didn't even know about the stolen paintings until after we visited the museum, so it didn't matter to me. There were enough works of art to keep me interested for hours. Every floor of the museum was loaded with treasures collected by Gardner over the decades. Here are some photos I took.

I hope you get a chance to visit one day.

5 simple steps to calm yourself down

I avoid politics here, but I think it’s OK to admit that I don’t feel good about the state of politics around the world. It has been a source of anxiety for me. I started meditating last year, which helps keep me grounded. I also came across an article in the NY Times by Jancee Dunn titled “5 simple steps to calm yourself down,” which has good advice for dealing with anxiety.

Dunn spoke with Marc Brackett, the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and the author of a new book, Dealing With Feeling: Use Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want. The book includes a 5-step method to calm yourself if you are stressed, worried, or anxious. It’s called RULER, which stands for recognize, understand, label, express, and regulate. A lot of it reminds me of the things I focus on when I’m meditating. The main idea is to be aware of how you are feeling and accept that you are feeling that way, rather than ignoring what is happening in your mind and body or trying to block it. Dunn explains the steps in her article.

Lastly, a couple of things I shared on Boing Boing and Recomendo:

Devo's "Jocko Homo" was Inspired by a Bizarre 1924 Anti-Evolution Pamphlet

Devo released its first single in 1977. The A-side was "Mongoloid" and the B-side was "Jocko Homo." Today I learned the “Jocko-Homo” was inspired by a 1924 anti-evolution pamphlet called Jocko-Homo Heavenbound. The pamphlet is available as a high-resolution PDF at the Jerry Falwell Library. It is a critique of evolutionary theory from a religious perspective. The Falwell library describes it as explaining "the folly of evolution" and declaring that if humans evolved rather than fell from grace, "there is no need for salvation, man can improve himself, and there is no heaven."

The pamphlet's full title continues with "Jocko-Homo (monkey man) the heaven-bound king of the zoo."

The illustrations are fantastic. Look at the title with the little monkeys and faces:

Some Stones are Ancient Books

Richard Sharpe Shaver (1907–1975) was a pulp science fiction writer, best known for his articles that ran in Amazing Stories in the 1940s about an evil race of humanoids living beneath the Earth’s surface. Shaver insisted the stories were non-fiction. Later in life, Shaver came to realize that the patterns in rocks were messages written by intelligent beings of antiquity, and he devoted the remainder of his life to sharing his discovery with his small cadre of admirers.

Richard Sharpe Shaver: Some Stones Are Ancient Books is a new book of Shaver’s “rokfogos” research, complete with photos and typewritten rock-book translations. It was published by a delightful small press called The Further Reading Library.

Cavatelli (+ in Italian) pasta is fun to make. Place a small bit of dough on a grooved wooden board, press with your thumb, and slide (see video below). The dough curls itself into a perfect shell shape. The process feels almost magical.

I learned how to make cavatelli at a recent pasta-making workshop in Los Angeles, where I went with Carla and my daughter. The dough has just two ingredients: water and coarsely ground semolina flour, kneaded by hand for about five minutes until the dough becomes glutinous and smooth.

Then you pinch off a golf ball-sized amount and roll it into a 1/2-inch diameter snake. Next, cut the snake into 1-inch long sections, which look like pillows. Then you slide the pillows down the board. Repeat until you've used up all your dough. It didn't take long to make enough pasta for two or three people — maybe twenty to thirty minutes. I imagine you'd get faster with practice.

Once made, you can either dry the cavatelli and keep them in a jar for later, store in the fridge for a few days, or you can be like us and drive home and cook them immediately. Drop them in boiling water, and after four or five minutes they'll begin to float. That means they are ready to eat. They were delicious with puttanesca sauce and lots of freshly grated parmesan.

Here’ a video of how to make them:

There were about 12 people in the class, and it was interesting to see how every person had a signature style of cavatelli. Like fingerprints, no two people's cavatelli looked quite the same. Carla's turned out small and tidy, almost machine-perfect, while mine were larger and more rustic with looser coils.

I don't know if there's a good reason to buy pasta in a box anymore because this is such an easy way to make it and the cleanup is minimal.

These postcards, which were displayed under glass at the Reina Sofía museum’s exhibition on the Esperpento movement, are from artist Raquel Manchado’s extensive Archive of Illustrated Misogyny. Her archive includes early 20th century postcards, comic strips, posters, calendars, and magazines that weaponized humor to push misogynistic messages. (Manchado also founded the publishing house Antorcha Ediciones, which offers zines with examples of symbolic violence and misogyny in early 20th century popular culture.)

The cards attempt to use humor to mock and degrade women based on their appearance and behavior. Common themes include jokes about "spinsters," "henpecked husbands," and women's physical appearances. The women in these cards were subjected to scorn, torture, and brutal execution.

They were made at a time when women were starting to gain independence through education and paid work.

The Freijo Gallery in Madrid, which represents Manchado, calls these postcards pre-internet memes, “given their viral quality, their omnipresence in public and private space and their role in propagating messages using a false neutral tone.”

It's disturbing to imagine men sending each other postcards like this for fun. Even more disturbing, this kind of mocking misogyny is still rampant in authoritarian propaganda. It's easy to go on Facebook and find vile memes with Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that degrade them because their leadership threatens the values of certain groups of people who think women should be submissive.

The battle between cruelty and kindness never ends. We struggle with it as individuals, and as a species.

Share The Magnet

When my friends David and Chanté came to visit recently, they gave me a booklet filled with puzzles. It's called "More Problematical Recreations" and was published by Litton Industries of Beverly Hills, California. There's no date of publication or copyright.

The 50-page booklet contains 43 p…

Read more

Carla and I spent a few weeks in Madrid at the beginning of the year. It was the first time we'd visited since the mid-90s, when we spoke at a conference about Carla's book, Net Chick, and a book we co-edited, The Happy Mutant Handbook.

Even though it was chilly and rainy, the streets were packed with pedestrians. (I can't imagine how crowded it gets in the summer.) Madrid is a fantastic walkable city. Its distinct neighborhoods — Malasaña, Chueca, Salamanca, Sol, Las Letras — are all within 20 minutes or so of each other by foot. And unlike Lisbon, Madrid doesn’t have steep hills, so you won’t have to catch your breath as you explore.

Everywhere you go, there are restaurants and coffee shops. And it's not a big deal to eat dinner as late as 10 or 11 p.m. in Madrid. Most restaurants don’t even open for dinner until 8 PM. Here in the United States Carla and I usually finish dinner by 6:30. I prefer the European style. It works with my circadian cycle. I can’t do that here because I need to keep U.S. office hours.

One Saturday around noon, Carla and I were aimlessly wandering around the Plaza Mayor area and we noticed a long line of people waiting to get into into a tiny tavern called Casa Revuelta. The line was moving pretty quickly, so we joined it to find out what everyone was waiting for. It turned out to be pieces of deep-fried battered cod (Bacalao rebozado). We ordered a of couple pieces and they were deliciously crispy on the outside and tender and fresh on the inside. Like everyone else, we ate while standing, and most customers were also having a glass of beer, wine, or vermouth.

Madrid has a lot of museums and art exhibitions. The famous Prado holds some of the world's greatest art, including Velázquez's finest works, and Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights (circa 1500), which is my favorite painting. Seeing Bosch's 12-foot triptych in person blew our minds. Carla and I stood mesmerized for at least 20 minutes. The 500+ year-old painting is replete with “chicken fat,” as the old Mad comic book artists used to call their detail-loaded panels.

Why did Bosch paint Garden of Earthly Delights? No one knows. The current name of the painting was not given by Bosch himself. No one knows what he called it. While it was in the possession of an art collector named Henry III of Nassau between 1504–1538 it was called “a picture of the strange things of the world.”

I have a small 1967 paperback book called Bosch by Mario Bussagli, which I consulted when I returned home. I learned that Hieronymus Bosch is a pseudonym. His real name is Jeroen Van Aken and he was born circa 1450. But beyond his approximate date of birth, name, and birthplace (a small town near Antwerp), his life remains a mystery. “Nothing is known of his personality or his thoughts on the meaning of his art,” says Wikipedia.

Bussagli asks, “Was he an anguished heretic who confessed his disbelief, by implication, in his art; or an ironically-minded believer, mockingly cynical about human nature; or a mystic of impregnable faith; or indeed all these things simultaneously?” If I had to pick, I’d say he was an ironically minded heretic who was having a fantastic time painting the bizarre scenes and the hundreds of people and monsters.

There's also the Reina Sofía Museum, which houses Guernica, Picasso's painting about the devastating bombing of the town in 1937 by Spain’s fascist general Franco and his pal Hitler. It’s 25 feet wide. I noticed that everyone who walked into the exhibition room was stunned into shocked silence, as if the painting had accosted them.

The Reina Sofía had a temporary exhibit on Esperpento, Spain’s unique version of the European Grotesque movement. It was influenced by Goya, and some of its hallmarks are humans transforming into animals, circuses and carnivals, bullfighting, and new ways of representing reality through various optical devices like thaumatropes, kaleidoscopes, zoetropes, and stereoscopes. Esperpento (which can mean hideous, absurd, illogical, or ridiculous in Spanish) had its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s, though its roots go back to the mid-19th century. Here are a few of the photos I took.

Scary times often result in great art.

In the next issue, I’ll share some more photos of our side trip to Toledo, Spain, and show you some of the weird little carvings in the cathedral.

Thank you for being a supporter of The Magnet. I appreciate it!

Leave a comment

I wrote a book called Made by Hand, which came out in 2010. It was about my efforts to learn how to grow vegetables, make cigar box guitars, do science experiments with my kids, raise chickens, keep bees, whittle, and make furniture.

In the book, I told the stpry of getting to know my 80-something neigbor, Alfi, after a shaky start. This week, Alfi’s grandson told me that Alfi had passed away at the age of 97, “after a great long life.”

Alfi was a memorable and delightfully quirky man and I’m glad we became friends.

Here’s the chapter about Alfi.

One early December afternoon, while I was working in the guest house, I heard a loud car honk outside. I knew it wasn’t the UPS guy, because he announced his arrival with two polite taps on his truck horn. This honk was urgent and incessant. I hurried out of the cottage and saw a dust covered brown 1980s Crown Victoria in the driveway. When I got closer, I recognized the driver. It was Alfi.

Alfi’s a short, sturdy man who looks like Picasso. He’s about 80 years old. We were friends. We first met about four months ago, when I went outside one morning to pick figs from our fig tree. Alfi was at the tree, picking figs and putting them into a paper bag. He saw me, said hello, and kept picking. His audaciousness irked me. I curtly told him to save some of the figs for me, since I was the tree’s owner, after all. He retorted by saying “But they’re rotting!” When he looked at me, I saw that one of his eyes was bright blue; the other eye was milky white.

“I don’t care,” I said. “I don’t want you to take anymore.”

He grumbled and got into his car and drove off, taking several pounds of my figs with him. I picked the remaining ripe figs off the tree and brought them into the house. I had just started to tell Carla what had happened when we both heard an insistent series of honks outside. I looked out the window.

“That’s him!” I told Carla. “He came back!”

“Go out and see what he wants,” urged Carla.

I walked out and met him as he was getting out of his car. In his hands were a plastic bag and a small knife with an orange handle.

“I want to give you this,” he said, handing the bag to me. It was filled with garden-grown peppers, parsley, and basil. “And look at this,” he said. He leaned into the open window of his car, and grabbed a page from an Arabic newspaper. “Now, watch.” He held a corner of the sheet of newspaper in one hand and, with the orange-handled knife in his other hand, he began slicing strips from the newspaper, letting them fall to the ground.

“These are my knives. They can slice anything — except raw meat. Cooked meat OK, raw meat — don’t do it. My knives are in all the Subways. They all know me! Tell them you know Alfii. This knife is for you.” He held the knife out to me, handle side first.

Sheepishly, I took the knife, and introduced myself. I apologized for getting crabby with him about the figs. He explained that the previous owners of our house had given him permission to harvest figs and persimmons from the property, and he hadn’t realized they’d moved. I told him he was welcome to take our figs anytime, and he thanked me.

“Follow me,” he said. He got in his car and started driving away very slowly. I walked quickly behind the car to keep up. I wondered how long I was going to have to follow him, and where we going.

Alfi turned the corner and drove very slowly for another half a block, stopping in front of a vacant lot barricaded by a metal fence. He got out, unlocked the gate, and told me to walk in. The lot was about a half acre, and filled with black five-gallon plastic containers holding pepper bushes, citrus trees, and other vegetables. There were numerous other vegetables growing in the ground along with dozens of trees sagging with fruit.

“This was my house,” he said. “It was destroyed in the earthquake.” (He was referring to the Northridge earthquake of 1994, which killed 72 people, injured 9,000 people and caused $20 billion in damage.) Alfii’s house had been damaged beyond the point of repair, so he’d torn it down and turned it into a very large garden. He said he lived with his wife in a condominium a couple of miles away.

I wasn’t as interested in gardening then as I am now, so I didn’t pay a lot of attention to his garden, nor did I ask many uestions about his methods of producing such bumper crops.

But as the months passed, Alfi’s honks (and gifts of knives) became a welcome and almost regular occurrence. I started paying more attention to the tips he offered. He told me I should collect the fallen leaves and lawn clippings into a pile near my garden to make compost. He explained how I needed to prune away the branches from the fig tree once growing season was over to ensure a good harvest in the following year.

Usually, he offered this advice while helping himself to our persimmons, loquats, and feijoas, which he always took without first asking. By this time, I liked Alfi too much to care about this quirk of his. He never went into much detail about himself, but I learned he was from Iran, and besides being a knife salesman, he had also been in the book distribution business.

On this day, Alfi was with his wife, a pretty, well-dressed woman who looked to be ten or fifteen years his junior. “Do you remember me?” he said.

“Of course I do, Alfi!” I said, opening the gate to let him in.

“Good!” he said. “I’ve been trying to come here for persimmons, but you aren’t home.”

“I guess we just missed each other.” I told him that all the persimmons were already off the tree, but that I’d dried a bunch. I went in the house to get some for him. When I stepped back outside, Alfi was shaking the branches of the feijoa tree to make the fruits drop to the ground. He had about six of them in his hands, so I went back into the house again to get a bag for him, which he thanked me for. He filled the bag with fruit, went to his car, and gave me another knife, demonstrating its sharpness on a sheet of newspaper.

“Do you want to come with me now?” he asked? “I have things to give you.” I was interested to find out how his garden was coming along as it was early December. I hopped on my bicycle and pedaled behind his car.

After arriving in the yard, Alfi’s wife settled in one of the plastic lawn chairs under a large tree near the front of the lot.

Alfi got out of the car and said to me, “One day, I come over, I give your wife recipes. If you eat, you go crazy. You say ‘I live so long, I never tasted this food?’ Something out of this world. You’re going to thank me all your life.”

Alfi’s wife told me to bring my bike into the lot so no one would take it. “Good idea,” I said, bringing it into the yard and leaning it against a tree.

“Where did you learn to cook?” I asked Alfi.

“Oh, I know a lot of good recipes,” he said, leading me through the rain-soak grounds of his garden. “I know Israeli food, I know Iraqi food, I know Persian food. I know things you could not even imagine there is tasting food.”

Birds squawked at us from the trees. “Everything is mutual,” he said. “If you’re nice to me, I’m nice to you. I like you. The first time I met you I thought you were a good person.” (I wondered how he could think that, after I’d acted so peevish about his fig pilfering.)

He led me to the back of the lot. There were so many trees and tall plants around that I felt like I was in another country, not a mere block away from my house. A rooster crowed off in the distance. “I will show you something you can not even imagine.”

He stopped in front of a pepper plant loaded with chubby little green peppers. He picked one and handed it to me. “Eat this. It’s clean. Eat this pepper. It’s sweet.” I popped it into my mouth. He was right. It was sweet and crunchy. “It’s like cucumber,” he said.

“What kind of pepper is it? What’s it called?” I asked him.

He ignored my question. “I show you here,” he said. He picked up a one-gallon plastic container with a pepper bush, pulled a few of the brown leaves from it, and handed the pot to me. “Here. I give you this one.”

I thanked him and asked him again what kind of pepper it was.

“No no. This is different. You don’t find this in America.”

“Where did you get them?”

“From Middle East I get.” He started picking peppers from the larger bushes and handing them to me. I had no bag, so I stuffed them in my pockets. “They usually sweet at this stage, but be careful, because the weather is changing.”

I tried one. “They’re sweet,” I said.

“If you pick them small, they are sweet,” he said. “And I give you some recipes how you can use.” He started off in a new direction. I followed.

I noticed a rundown chicken coop along a fence near the back. “Did you keep chickens here?”

“I did keep, but a dog came and killed them,” he said. He stopped in front of a large pile of black compost, surrounded by ten or twelve five-gallon plastic pots full of the stuff in various stages of decomposition.

“This is the best compost in the world because this has worms.”

“Did you put worms in it?” I asked, looking at the pink and red earthworms wriggling in the soil he was upturning in one of the containers.

“They create worms!” he said. I asked him what he meant by “create worms.” He explained that crushed old fruit will actually spontaneously generate worms.

I had no desire to argue with him. I was more interested in finding out how he made this loamy compost.

“The scientists,” he continued, “they even don’t know how this worms eat the leaf and the shit that comes out of them — it’s the best fertilizer in the world. Oh my God, everything grow like you can’t even imagine.”

It was hard getting a straight answer out of Alfi, because he was always on to the next thing, walking away before I had a chance to fully understand something, but I told him I really wanted to know how he made the compost.

“I put leaves in a pile, and I put ammonium sulfate — you know ammonium sulfate? It looks like sugar. A bag 20 pounds for three dollars at Home Depot. Or horse manure. I mix, and put water and they will rot. They will be best fertilizer in the world. And something else — you know what is elephant garlic?”

“The giant garlic bulbs?” I asked, not sure what it has to do with compost.

“Yeah. I give you some babies, and if you grow them for thousands of years, without planting them every year you get some and they give babies and every year you will have them.”

I was trying to memorize Alfi’s compost recipe when he led me away. “I want you to try something else.” We wound our way through the dense foliage. We passed by a fig tree and I asked him about it.

“Oh, in March or February I give you cuttings. I have figs you’ve never tasted in your life. You don’t see them in the market. I have four or five kinds. I have some when you eat them — like chocolate. If you close your eyes and eat them, you think it’s chocolate.”

He stopped at a row of pepper plants and pulled a couple from each plant. Some were round like marbles, some were like small jalapenos, others were like cayennes. But they all tasted sweet. “You never get these peppers in America,” he said again. “If you chop this and you put one or two hot also with them and make an omelette with eggs — ah, delicious!”

Since we were on the subject of food preparation, I asked him if he made his own yogurt.

“It’s very easy. You know how?”

“No, I’ve been reading how to, but I don’t really know.”

“You boil the milk. It has to be whole milk. One or two boilings. Put it aside for a while until you can put finger in and it doesn’t burn. Then you put one or two or three spoons of yogurt and mix it and cover it and put it in the oven for a little while without the oven on and you wait a little while.”

Before I got the chance to ask him how long you have to wait, he had plucked a few small greenish yellow fruits from a nearby tree. They looked like unripe grapefruits. “These fruits you’ve never tasted in all your life.” He pulled a knife that was sticking blade down in a pot of dirt, rinsed it under a hose, and cut one of the lemons into quarters, handing it to me. I bit into it, expecting it to be tart, but it was just the opposite — sweet, like a kid’s drink, without acidity.

“This is sweet lemon,” he said.

“This is good,” I said. “will it grow from a seed?” I was thinking of saving the seeds from the piece he’d given me.

“No. No.”

“Is it something you got in the Middle East, too?”

“Yeah, yeah. And I’ll tell about this. If somebody has cold. If you eat eight, ten of this, he’s gonna jump back up after a day.”

My pockets full of peppers and sweet lemons, I said good-bye to Alfi and his wife and rode my bike home.

I hope you liked this snapshot of a remarkable person. I still use Alfi’s knives every day.

How could anyone resist reading a Wikipedia article titled “Homicidal Chauffeur problem?” I couldn’t! I learned that it was a math problem posed in 1951 by game theorist Rufus Isaacs in his paper for the RAND Corporation called “Games of Pursuit.”

The problem takes place in a parking lot, empty except for a person on foot (the evader, designated by the letter E) and a homicidal chauffeur (the pursuer, P) who wants to run over the evader. P is faster than the E, but E can make tighter turns while running. With E’s “only hope being delay until rescue,” what is the best strategy to avoid being run over?

“Some qualitative aspects are evident,” wrote Isaacs. “If E is more or less in front of P the situation is simple; E will flee and P will follow.” Because P is faster, E is doomed.

But what if the chase begins with the evader behind the pursuer? Isaacs included a hand-drawn illustration in his paper to explore this scenario (shown above). P₀ and E₀ are the starting positions of the pursuer and the evader. If E can get inside the circle of P’s turning radius (shown in the figure as the solid circle), they can avoid being hit. But if P is smart enough to first turn away from E and “then swerve about and pursue directly,” then E will have to run toward P in an attempt to stay inside the car’s turning radius. “But as P starts to swerve, E (now at [.a]) turns tail and flees until capture is consummated near b.”

To determine E’s best strategy for staying alive as long as possible, Isaacs developed a solution that started with the desired outcome and worked backward to find the optimal strategy — the best moves for both pursuer and evader where neither can do better by changing their approach. This is called a “Nash equilibrium” in game theory.

Origins of Game Theory

The RAND corporation wasn’t interested in helping people learn how to evade homicidal chauffeurs. They were interested in military problems, like how a nimble fighter jet could outmaneuver a faster but less nimble heat-seeking missile. The Homicidal Chauffeur was just one of many problems that RAND was exploring while developing the foundations of Game Theory, the study of how people and organizations make decisions where success depends not just on your own decisions, but on anticipating and responding to what others will do.

Much of RAND’s Game Theory funding came from the U.S. Department of Defense and the Air Force, who wanted to apply Game Theory to nuclear deterrence, cybernetic weapons systems, and conflict resolution. The most famous concept to emerge from RAND’s Game Theory work was Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). RAND came to the conclusion that nations armed with nuclear weapons would avoid striking first against any other nuclear-armed nation that they knew would automatically respond with a nuclear counterstrike.

During the Kennedy administration, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara adopted MAD as official U.S. policy. He was telling Russia: “If you kill us, you will die, too.”

Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) was a satirical take on MAD as a nuclear deterrence strategy. Kubrick based the character of Dr. Strangelove on RAND Corporation theorists, and had extensively researched nuclear strategy. He originally planned to make a serious film but concluded that the logic of MAD was so bizarre that the concept could only be conveyed through satire.

WarGames (1983) was also about MAD and the danger of automated response systems. Its famous ending line was, "The only winning move is not to play." But how do you prevent the other player from making the first move, which forces you to play? That’s the point of how Mutually Assured Destruction works — by letting the enemy know you have an automated retaliation system that assures devastation, you can make sure the first move is never appealing to a rational opponent. (MAD doesn’t work against a suicidal opponent, obviously.)

In 2020, Javier Garcia and Professor Aaron T. Becker at the University of Houston created an interactive simulation of the Homicidal Chauffeur, which Becker described on YouTube:

The Hamstrung Squad Car

In his same 1951 paper, Isaacs described a similar, but simpler problem, which he called “The Hamstrung Squad Car.” (You have to hand it to him for coming up with attention-grabbing names for math problems!) This problem was revisited by Martin Gardner in his 1975 book, Mathematical Carnival. Here’s how he described it:

Imagine a city of infinite extent, with streets that form a regular square lattice. A squad car is at one intersection. At another is a carful of criminals. The squad car moves twice as fast as the criminals' car but is hamstrung by having to observe municipal traffic rules that prohibit left turns and U-turns, so that it can only go straight ahead or turn right at each intersection; the criminals' car does not observe these restrictions, so that at each intersection it can move in any of the four directions.

The problem to solve:

From what starting positions can the criminals be captured? Isaacs shows that surrounding the squad car's initial square there is an asymmetrical, compact area of exactly 69 squares, each of which is a fatal starting spot for the criminals.

The reader is urged to draw a large checkerboard of, say, 50 squares by 50 (or find a room with a suitable floor pattern), choose a starting position near the center for the squad car, and see if he can identify the 69 fatal squares.

Here’s a Hamstrung Squad Car simulation I made (with coding help from AI). Give it a try, both in the manual and auto mode (for either or both cars). It’s a work in progress. Neither the squad car nor the crook car is using an optimal strategy. My goal is to have it run continuously until it finds the 69 safe squares. You are welcome to clone the GitHub repository to improve the project, or ask me for an invitation to work directly in my repository.

Thanks so much for supporting The Magnet, and I wish you a happy holiday!

Edited by Carla Sinclair

I'm obsessed with using generative AI to write computer programs. I feel like I've unlocked a superpower. I tell the AI what I want, and it generates the code for me. Then I run it, and if there are any problems, I give it feedback (e.g., "make the page device and width responsive," "put the controls on the side"). After going back and forth with it a bunch of times, I’ll end up with something surprisingly good.

This week, I asked AI to make a "Rule 30" cellular automaton, which Mathematica creator Stephen Wolfram writes about in his 1280-page book, A New Kind of Science (2002). Wolfram posits that much of the complexity we see in the world, like zebra stripes, the shape of snowflakes, neural networks, swarm behavior, and stock market fluctuations are the result of simple rules being repeated over and over.

Here’s the Rule 30 generator that I made with the help of AI.

If you don't know what a cellular automaton is, imagine a group of clams sitting in a circle on the beach. Every few seconds, each clam decides whether to open or close by checking three things: the state of its own shell, its neighbor's shell to the left, and its neighbor's shell to the right. It's like a neighborhood where everyone changes their behavior based on what they and their immediate neighbors are doing.

Read more

Lately, I've been having fun experimenting with an AI coding editor called Cursor. It has many professional features, such as integration with developer tools and predictive editing. However, since I don't really know how to code, I primarily use Cursor's natural language code generation. This feature allows me to describe what I want in plain English, and then Cursor generates the corresponding code.

Here’s an example of a recent program I asked Cursor to write for me: “The Four Bug Problem.” It first appeared in the November 1957 issue of Scientific American in Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” column:

Here’s how Gardner stated the problem:

Four bugs — A, B, C and D - occupy the corners of a square 10 inches on a side. A and C are male. B and D are female. Simultaneously, A crawls directly toward B, B toward C, C toward D, and D toward A. If all four bugs crawl at the same constant rate, they will describe four congruent logarithmic spirals which meet at the center of the square. How far does each bug travel before they meet? The problem can be solved without calculus.

(I’m not sure why he had to say that the bugs were male and female — maybe to give the bugs a reason to pursue each other?)

Gardner revisited the Four Bugs Problem in the July 1965 issue of Scientific American, and this time, it was featured as the striking cover image:

The issue’s description of the cover also included the puzzle’s solution:

The Op-art pattern on the cover, a set of nested and rotating squares, is an example of the close relation of such patterns to many problems encountered in recreational mathematics (see "Mathematical Games," page 100). This painting illustrates the "four-bug problem." The bugs start at the corners of a square. Simultaneously they begin to move clockwise, each crawling at the same speed and each heading always for its neighbor. At any moment the bugs mark the corners of a square that becomes smaller and rotates as they crawl. Each bug's path (shown here in the appropriate color) to their meeting point in the center is a spiral the length of which is exactly equal to a side of the original square.

I thought it would be fun to see if I could use Cursor to recreate the cover art. I told it I wanted it to write a web app that recreated the famous four-bug problem and drew colored lines connecting the bugs as they pursued each other. It took a few iterations to produce what I wanted, but in less than 20 minutes I had a nice little demo. Check it out here.

I'm having such a great time with Cursor that you'll probably see more of these demonstrations in future issues of the newsletter.

By the way, Scientific American often featured Gardner's puzzles on its covers. Here are some other examples.

7-Eleven Is Lying to You About the Japanese Egg Salad Sandwich Coming to America

Read more

I Found a Brown Widow Spider and Learned That They Are Bullies Toward Black Widows

This week, while in my kitchen, I noticed a spider on the outside of my window. I sent a photo to Google Lens, which identified it as a Brown Widow. The spider had built a web in an upper corner of the window. A fly hovered nearby, exciting the spider, which quickly ran up its web to get closer. I watched for a couple of minutes until the fly disappeared from view. After turning to take a slice of bread from the toaster, I looked back and saw that the spider had caught the fly and was already wrapping it up. Although I missed the capture, I managed to record about 30 seconds of the spider encasing the fly in silk, which you can see in the video I uploaded to YouTube.

Black Widows are common around our house. I regularly check our outdoor furniture for them, often finding them hiding on the underside of chairs in their chaotic webs. Brown Widows are less common. I initially mistook them for immature Black Widows, but they're actually a separate species. While Black Widows are native to the United States, Brown Widows are believed to have arrived from South Africa in the mid-1930s. Brown Widow bites are less toxic than those of Black Widows, but they're more aggressive, especially towards their black counterparts.

A 1993 New York Times article reports that Brown Widows are causing the Black Widow population to decline. In experiments, "researchers found that brown widows were 6.6 times as likely to kill black widows than other species. Young brown widows in particular made a beeline for their native cousins, eating them 80 percent of the time."

And this excerpt made me feel kind of sorry for Black Widows:

Brown widows tend to be bold, investigating nearby webs and attacking spiders that don't resist. House and cobweb spiders challenge them, and brown widows often go on to coexist with them peacefully. The shy, retiring black widows generally tried to escape, fighting back only as a last resort.

Louis Coticchio, the lead researcher and a science tutor at St. Petersburg College in Florida, argues that Black Widows have an undeserved bad reputation. While America's Poison Centers reported 1,004 Black Widow spider bite cases in 2010, fatalities are extremely rare. "Black widows generally don't bite when harassed," Coticchio told the Times, noting that they prefer to run, play dead, or flick webbing at a threatening finger. "It's only pinching them that'll get you bit."

If you're a paid subscriber, thank you for supporting my work! If you’re a free subscriber, thanks for reading! I hope you'll consider upgrading to a paid subscription. It's only $5 a month or $45 a year. Click the button below to find out more. (If you want a full subscription but are unable to afford one at this time, email me at markfrauenfelder@gmail.com, and I’ll give you a one-year complimentary sub, no questions asked.)

UPGRADE

Point Nemo: The Ocean's Most Remote Location

Read more

Hi and welcome to another issue of The Magnet! I'm Mark Frauenfelder, and in this issue I'll be taking you on a nostalgic journey through three fascinating books that explore the quirky world of 1960s toys, novelties, and comic book ads. From mail-order disappointments to controversial model kits, these books offer a captivating look at the products that captured the imaginations (and allowances) of kids in a bygone era. Whether you're a collector, a cultural historian, or just someone who loves a good dose of vintage weirdness, I think you'll find plenty to enjoy here. Let's dive in!

If you're a paid subscriber, thank you for supporting my work! If you’re a free subscriber, thanks for reading! I hope you'll consider upgrading to a paid subscription. It's only $5 a month or $45 a year. Click the button below to find out more.

UPGRADE

Aurora Monster Scenes: The Most Controversial Toys of a Generation

The first book is Aurora Monster Scenes: The Most Controversial Toys of the Generation, the Official History and Reference Guide by Dennis L. Prince and Andrew P. Yanchus.

In the early- to mid-1960s, the Aurora Model company produced a successful line of plastic model kits of famous classic movie monsters such as Frankenstein, The Werewolf, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and The Mummy. In the 1970s the company started to branch out in a darker direction by introducing torture device model kits for kids. For instance, you could buy a Chamber of Horrors guillotine model kit for $0.98. It featured a man lying prone on a platform with his head sticking through the opening of a guillotine. The ad for the guillotine said:

"Harmless Fun! Flick a switch and the blade comes down… beheads victim… works over and over again."

Soon after, Aurora licensed the usage of Vampirella, a character in a comic book published by Warren. She became the star of a new line of model kits called called Monster Scenes. Vampirella served as the muse and enabler of Dr. Deadly, a mad scientist who abducted innocent victims off the streets to torture and perform cruel experiments on. Dr. Strange's assistant was Frankenstein, who apprehended the victims and brought them to Dr. Deadly's torture chamber.

My introduction to these Aurora kits came from a ubiquitous comic book advertisement. The ad took the form of a single-page comic strip, featuring Dr. Deadly, Frankenstein, and Vampirella in the streets of New York City. In the opening panel, Dr. Deadly declares, "We need a girl victim for the experiment." Vampirella and Frankenstein eagerly comply. The next panel depicts Frankenstein forcibly seizing a young woman in shorts and a halter top, her cries for help falling on deaf ears. When Dr. Deadly commands to silence her, Vampirella reassures him, "Don't worry. This is New York. No one will help her." This chilling dialogue refers to the tragic case of Kitty Genovese, whose 1964 rape and murder became synonymous with urban apathy. The ad's casual reference to such a disturbing real-life event seems unthinkable by today's standards, but when I read it as a kid, it didn’t make a dent in my conscience. I was too busy trying to tell if Vampirella’s camel toe was real or an artifact of the poor printing quality of comics at that time. The remainder of the ad showcased the gruesome array of kits available for purchase: a swinging pendulum designed to bisect victims, an iron cage for imprisonment, and a brazier of hot coals for heating torture implements.

A newspaper article from the early '70s reported that over 800,000 Monster Scenes kits had been sold, noting:

"The list of grisly, sick scenes that can be staged with this equipment is, of course, limited only by your offspring's imagination. The chances are that a really disturbed kid could produce some stunners."

However, the tide of public opinion eventually turned. By December 1971, the controversy had reached such a fever pitch that government intervention became inevitable. A New York Times article dated December 20, 1971, announced:

"This will be the last Christmas that California youngsters can expect Santa to bring them a toy guillotine, a battlefield strewn with horribly wounded soldiers, or a doll that screams when she is tortured by a Frankenstein monster."

Governor Ronald Reagan responded by signing into law a bill that prohibited, effective July 1, 1972, the manufacture or sale in California of sadistic torture toys, toy bombs, and hand grenades.

Despite the backlash, some retailers were reluctant to give up on these lucrative items. A toy store manager in San Diego admitted, "I wouldn't buy one of them for my kids, but there's quite a demand for the kooky things. And if I don't stock them, someone else will."

The article went on to describe some of the best-selling items:

One of the best sellers among a score of torture toys is the doll that emits a scream when placed upon a thimble-sized torture rack by a monster in a blood-spattered white coat. The purchaser has the choice of three victims — man, woman, or child.

Another clerk in San Diego showed the reporter the “Pain Parlor” kit:

The basic kit, selling for $1.99, contained a brazier of hot coals with a branding iron and a rack for tearing plastic limbs away. Additional torture components cost $1.99, including a doll named Vampireilla, who comes with a plastic beaker of blood.

Aurora Monster Scenes covers the rise and fall of these toys in great detail and includes interviews, preliminary sketches, model sheets, and photos of assembled models. It's a fascinating bit of pop culture history.

Mail Order Mysteries: Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads

The second book is Mail Order Mysteries: Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads by Kirk Demarais. In the introduction, Kirk recounts being a first-grader buying a copy of Micronauts #9 in 1979. As he was paging through the comic, he realized that the advertisements were far more interesting than the comic book itself. He describes coming across a page of ads from the Johnson Smith Catalog::

"I turned to an overcrowded page of fascinating black-and-white drawings. I was captivated. It was an ink-smudged window into an unfamiliar realm where gorilla masks peacefully lived among hovercrafts and ventriloquist dummies."

Kirk explains the allure of these ads:

"To me, the ad's seductive nature was the result of a powerful combination of factors. Most obviously, the products were otherworldly: X-ray vision, karate courses, a money-counterfeiting device. They almost seemed too good to be true. For the first time, I wasn't thinking in terms of playthings. These were life enhancers that offered the means to satisfy a familiar range of wish fulfillment, including power, glory, revenge, and romance."

Kirk's parents forbade him from ordering these items, calling them "rip-offs." He later set out as an adult to collect them all on eBay, often paying 20 to 50 times the original price (“A small price to pay to uncover life's greatest secrets"). Kirk discovered his parents were right:

"Nearly everything is smaller, flimsier, simpler, or more inflatable than I imagined it to be. As a kid, I would have been devastated, but now the objects are symbols of a bigger story. As a consensual participant in the long-standing tradition of mail-order letdowns, I welcome the role of the rube and revel in the lackluster surprises that fill my mailbox."

The book juxtaposes the original comic book ads with photos of the actual items, revealing their true nature. It’s shocking to see how junky the items are. For instance, the “kryptonite rocks” were just plain old rocks coated in glow-in-the-dark green paint. The “U-Control Seven-Foot Life-Size Ghost” was a balloon with some fishing line and a trash bag.

Read more

Flipper's Pancakes: Tokyo-style Fluff in WeHo

Our first stop was Flipper's Pancakes in West Hollywood at 11am. If you haven't heard of souffle pancakes, they are extra fluffy pancakes that are popular in Japan.

The first souffle pancake restaurant started in Honolulu at a place called Cream Pot in 2009 and then spread to Japan, where they perfected the art. Carla and I tried the Cream Pot souffle pancakes. They were fluffy and delicate, but the ones in Tokyo are next level. Japan has a bunch of fluffy pancake chains, like Graham and Happy Pancakes, but Flipper's is the most famous, and for good reason — they're just the best!

Flipper's opened their first LA location in 2023 on Fairfax Boulevard in West Hollywood. We'd been wanting to try it for ages and finally got the chance. Parking was a bit of a pain. They share a lot with a coffee shop and there aren't many spaces. We ended up creating our own spot and I kept an eye out for tow trucks.

The outdoor seating is nice — they've got umbrellas out front and a covered area on the side that feels kind of garden-like. There are a few indoor tables too, but it was a nice day so we sat outside.

I went with my usual — plain souffle pancakes with whipped cream. You get three for $17, which is probably twice what you'd pay in Tokyo with the current exchange rate, but it's worth it. These pancakes are magical.

The service was a bit slow at first. I had to flag down a server, which was annoying, but once we got his attention he was super friendly and everything went smoothly from there.

My daughter ordered the strawberry pancakes ($19), and Carla and I split a side of scrambled eggs ($6). The pancakes were just as good as the ones in Japan, which was a relief. We tried the Flipper's in New York City a few years back, and it was a letdown — raw in the middle, dingy restaurant, apathetic staff. The total opposite of Tokyo. So we were happy that the LA Flipper's nailed it.

Pygmy Hippo: A Wee Wonderland

After pancakes, we headed to one of our favorite LA stores: Pygmy Hippo Shoppe. This tiny store on the corner of Stanley and Beverly Blvd store sells a mix of vintage books, glassware, old magazines, and ephemera, plus a bunch of new stuff like jewelry, clothes, and artwork. The curation is exquisite.

The owner, Emi, told me she got the idea for Pygmy Hippo Shoppe after a trip to Japan in 2009. She was inspired by these tiny, super-niche stores that sell one kind of things. When she got back to LA, she rented a space and opened her first store in just 79 square feet. (Here’s a good interview with Emi from a website called More Than Stores)

My wife and daughter regularly shopped there when it was that small and kept telling me I had to check it out. By the time I finally got around to it, Emi had expanded. It's still small, but now you can actually walk around inside.

I love Emi’s eye for weird, obscure things: books and magazines about UFOs, psychedelics, the occult, and technology. Every time I go in, I find something I didn't even know I wanted.

Crystalarium: A Gem of a Place

Our final stop of the day was Crystalarium, on La Cienega Blvd in West Hollywood. If you're into crystals and minerals, or just enjoy looking at shiny things, this place is a must-visit.

The moment you walk in, it's like entering some kind of magical cave. They've got an incredible collection of crystals, including a bunch I'd never even heard of before. But it's not just loose crystals — they have all sorts of items carved from minerals: bowls, skulls, and even huge pieces of furniture carved out of crystal. The staff told me I was free to sit on the crystal couch. It wasn’t soft, but they told me it’s cool on a hot day.

What really made the visit special, though, was the staff. They are super friendly. We got into this great conversation about House of the Dragon and other TV shows, which was fun. And when it came to the crystals, they were like walking encyclopedias.

I especially enjoyed learning about Moldavite, a very rare mineral which, according to the sign in the store, “is the product of a meteor collision with Earth nearly 15 million years ago.”

They also do events like sound baths, which sounds cool. We couldn't make it this time because of other plans, but I'd be curious to check that out in the future.

As we left, one of the staff members thanked us for the enjoyable conversation!

So that was our Saturday — fluffy pancakes, curated curiosities, and crystal wonders. Just another Saturday in LA, but one that reminds me why I love this city.

If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you for supporting my work! If you are a free subscriber, thanks for reading! I hope you'll consider upgrading to a paid subscription. It's only $5 dollars a month or $45 a year. Click the button below to find out more.

UPGRADE

Free Unclassified Ads!

A couple of years ago, I started running Unclassified Ads in my Recomendo newsletter. The newsletter has over 80,000 subscribers. We charge $150 for an ad, and most people buy more ads after learning how well it does. I’m now running Unclassifieds in The Magnet, but with a twist: Subscribers get one free ad a year, and I’ll run them in the order I get them. The ads will be seen by paying and non-paying subscribers (12,100 as of today). Here’s the form to order an ad.

If you want to place an Unclassifed in The Magnet but don’t have a subscription, you can get one here.

Are you a senior executive who's frustrated by your team's performance? Join us at our complimentary monthly executive forums for great tips, tools and learning from fellow executives. Each month features a new focus topic and innovative ideas you can apply right away.

MEDIA

Download Digitized Copies of Weird Tales

Weird Tales was a fantasy and horror magazine published from 1923-1954. Open Culture wrote of it — “As the Velvet Underground was to the rapid spread of various subgenera of rock in the seventies, so was Weird Tales to horror and fantasy fandom. Everyone who read it either started their own magazine or fanclub, or began writing their own ‘weird fiction.’”

Despite never achieving a large circulation, Weird Tales is famous for being the birthplace of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos stories. It also published Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard's first professional short stories.

My favorite thing about Weird Tales is the illustrations from its stable of fantastic artists. Here are the most notable:

1. Virgil Finlay - His detailed pen-and-ink style became a hallmark of the magazine from 1935 onward.

2. Margaret Brundage - Known for provocative covers, often featuring nude or scantily clad women in the 1930s.

3. Hannes Bok - Incredible surreal illustrations with psychedelic colors. I’ll bet the late underground cartoonist Richard Corben was influenced by Bok.

4. J. Allen St. John - He designed the title logo used from 1933 onward. Best known for his Tarzan covers. If you ever wondered who Frank Frazetta looked up to, here you go.

5. Boris Dolgov - Significant contributor in the 1940s and early 1950s, known for his distinctive style featuring thin, ethereal characters.

6. Lee Brown Coye - One of the five regular artists in the mid-1940s until 1954, known for his "Weirdisms" series of full-page illustrations.

7. Matt Fox - Painted eleven covers and contributed interior illustrations, including the image above. “He created ghouls, demons, and grotesqueries of all types, evoking a disquieting horror vibe that no one since has ever matched,” said Roger Hill, author of The Chillingly Weird Art of Matt Fox.

You can download digitized copies of Weird Tales at The Internet Archive.

(By the way, the Internet Archive is the greatest thing on the Internet. It has many lifetimes worth of old books, magazines, radio broadcasts, movies, ephemera and more. I donate to it every month. Please consider supporting it.)

ART

Look Familiar?

The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California is not a large museum, but it’s a treasure trove of paintings, sculpture, and drawings. Its collection includes "Woman with a Book" by Pablo Picasso (1932), "Patience Escalier" by Vincent van Gogh (1888), "Madonna and Child with Book" by Raphael (1503), and "The Ragpicker" by Édouard Manet (c. 1865-1870). You can walk right up to the paintings with your nose an inch away, which I like to do to see how the paint was applied.

The museum also has wonderful temporary exhibitions. Last month Carla and I went to see I Saw It: Francisco de Goya, Printmaker, featuring Spanish artist Francisco Goya’s (1746-1828) darkly sardonic etchings from the late 1700s and early 1800s. Goya made these when he was deaf and isolated from the royalty who once courted him. The curator said of the work on display, “In witty, haunting and often raw narratives, Goya critiqued the abuse of power, both religious and political, his country’s prejudices and superstitions and the brutality of war.”

Everything in the exhibition was stunning, but I want to share one print in particular, “Los Chinchillas,” from 1799 (above). Does the figure on the lower left of the etching look familiar? He did to me. And when I read the signage next to the print, my suspicion was confirmed:

The Chinchillas’ title derives from a well-known play that Goya could have seen in Madrid's little theaters. It concerned the so-named family's excessive devotion to their distinguished ancestry as a tool to elevate themselves and avoid working. The artist's powerfully conceived figures had an interesting afterlife. The flat, square head and prominent brow ridge of the reclining figure at left inspired the makeup for actor Boris Karloff's role as Frankenstein in the 1931 movie.

William Poundstone writes about this on his LACMA on Fire website, and says if this claim is true, it would have helped the defense of people who had been sued for copying the Universal Picture version of Frankenstein’s monster (like Herman Munster and Franken Berry):

Intellectual property lawyers have split many a hair over Shelley's public domain novel and Universal's copyrighted interpretation of the monster's appearance. Visual adaptations of Frankenstein can be distinguished between those operating under Universal's license (the 1964-66 sitcom The Munsters) and those relying on fair use (FrankenBerry cereal), parody (Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein), Shelley's text (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), and/or counterintuitively handsome monsters (Lisa Frankenstein). 

A public domain source for the Universal Frankenstein in Goya could upset this applecart. But I suspect that [film historian Christopher] Frayling’s [unsubstantiated] claim [in his book, Mad, Bad, and Dangerous?: The Scientist and the Cinema (2005) and Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years (2017)] would fail to stand up in a court of law. In any case, the copyright for Universal's Frankenstein is set to expire in 2026.

Read more