Last month, the US Postal Service revealed some stamps that are due to be released in 2023. Alongside a stamp honoring John Lewis and some cool microphotography stamps are a series of four stamps featuring the Art of the Skateboard.
Antonio Alcalá designed the stamps, which feature skateboard decks created by four different artists:
Di’Orr Greenwood is a member of the Najavo Nation who does pyrographic art, burning images into the wooden decks of some of the boards she designs. Greenwood also carves cedar wood flutes and teaches skateboarding. From her Instagram, one of decks she’s designed recently:
William James Taylor Jr. is a prolific self-taught artist from Virginia. You can check out his work on Instagram and buy a bunch of decks with his designs — here are just a few of them:
Crystal Worl is “Tlingit Athabascan from Raven moiety, Sockeye Clan, from the Raven House” who currently lives and works in Juneau, Alaska. Her Instagram is here and here’s a recent deck from her website:
Federico Frum is a street mural artist from Colombia who is based in Washington DC; he operates under the name MasPaz. From his Instagram, a recent desk design:
I’m excited to get some of these stamps when they come out later in the year. (via lizzie armanto)
How It Feels to Surf the World’s Biggest Wave. Nazaré, Portugal is home to some of the largest surfable waves in the world, 70- to 80-foot monsters that propel riders at 45mph down their faces.
Ted Gioia is one of the best music writers and critics around but has proved an astute cultural (and even business!) critic as well. In a piece for his excellent The Honest Broker newsletter, Gioia writes about the recent turnaround of Barnes & Noble, which he attributes to the company’s new CEO and his love of books. James Daunt, who took the helm of B&N in late 2019, previously saved UK bookshop chain Waterstones, in part by refusing to take promotional money from publishers:
Daunt refused to play this game. He wanted to put the best books in the window. He wanted to display the most exciting books by the front door. Even more amazing, he let the people working in the stores make these decisions.
This is James Daunt’s super power: He loves books.
“Staff are now in control of their own shops,” he explained. “Hopefully they’re enjoying their work more. They’re creating something very different in each store.”
This crazy strategy proved so successful at Waterstones, that returns fell almost to zero — 97% of the books placed on the shelves were purchased by customers. That’s an amazing figure in the book business.
On the basis of this success, Daunt was put in charge of Barnes & Noble in August 2019. But could he really bring that dinosaur, on the brink of extinction, back to life?
The boldface above is mine and it matches up with the bold text from Gioia’s conclusion:
Of course, there’s a lesson here. And it’s not just for books. You could also apply it to music, newspapers, films, and a host of other media.
But I almost hate to say it, because the lesson is so simple.
If you want to sell music, you must love those songs. If you want to succeed in journalism, you must love those newspapers. If you want to succeed in movies, you must love the cinema.
One of the reasons I decided to take a sabbatical last year is that I was not loving what I was doing here and it was starting to show. Oh, I’ve been doing this long enough that I know how to paper over the cracks. Also, I’m stubborn and will keep at something even if I’m not enjoying it, but the wheels were starting to come off of the wagon. Now that I’m back, I’m trying to figure out which bits of this weird job I’m really into and redirect my efforts there. Gioia’s piece is a good reminder to follow the love and the rest will follow.
I woke up this morning and, for some reason, needed Sarah “Smac” McCreanor’s hydraulic press interpretive dances to be the first thing you saw on this site in 2023. I’ve watched these on Instagram many times before (see the whole set here) but I think it’s worth stopping to appreciate just how great these are: the wardrobe, the inventiveness in interpretation, the physicality, the comedic timing, and the precise choreography with the press. It’s something completely ridiculous pulled off with unbelievable skill — more of that energy in 2023 please!
Do bumble bees play? “We show that rolling of wooden balls by bumble bees, Bombus terrestris, fulfils behavioural criteria for animal play and is akin to play in other animals.”
10 years on, the influence of the NY Times’ “Snow Fall” interactive piece remains strong. “No longer are charts, maps and animations considered last-minute sweeteners for completed articles.”
Beloved weather app Dark Sky stopped working on Jan 1. I haven’t used it in years (it’s less useful in my rural area) but I d/led it on the day it launched and used the hell out of it. RIP.
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