Adjacent Weekend

This week: how olo — a color only seven people have ever seen — is forcing scientists to rethink what color even is, the improbable teenage garage-band origins of a hit flight simulator's newest airliner, a shoe factory in Kurume keeping a 19th-century rubber tradition alive, and the long, strange afterlife of punk style through the woman who wore it first and paid for it. Also: Fukuyama revisits "the end of history" 35 years on, and a case for why noir is having its moment in theaters again.

A Color Only Seven People Have Seen (paywall)

Scientists at Berkeley used a laser to stimulate individual cone cells in the retina and produced "olo" — a color that, by definition, only the small group of lab subjects has ever perceived. The piece uses this as a way into a genuinely mind-bending question: what color actually is, and whether it exists anywhere outside the machinery of a particular brain. Science writing that turns into philosophy without ever losing the thread.

The New Yorker · 18 min

A Microsoft Flight Simulator Cinderella Story: Building the A220 Airliner

Synaptic Simulations is a handful of developers barely out of high school who built one of the most technically ambitious aircraft add-ons in flight sim history and shipped it as their first product. A good corrective to the assumption that deep, obsessive craft only comes from big studios with big budgets.

XBOX Wire · 12 min

Shoes like pottery

A visit to a rubber shoe factory in Kurume, Fukuoka — a city that's been making rubber footwear since the 19th century — told as a story about material, patience, and a manufacturing culture that treats shoemaking like ceramics. One of the best kinds of writing: specific, sensory, unhurried.

Easy on the Ivy · 10 min

the things I wore made people apoplectic

Jordan Mooney — better known as Jordan, the original punk shopgirl at Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's SEX boutique — commuted two hours a day into a job where her clothes alone could stop traffic and start fights. A profile about the person who wore the look before it was a look, and what it cost her to be first.

Julia Carpenter · 11 min

“In 1974, she commuted two hours every day to work at SEX, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's boutique in London.” — Julia Carpenter

The Eras of Francis Fukuyama: The End of History and the Last Man

Thirty-five years after "the end of history" became the most misunderstood thesis in political science, Fukuyama sits down with Yascha Mounk to explain what he actually meant — and argues that history's engine was never economics, but the human demand for recognition. Worth reading for anyone who's used the phrase as a punchline without knowing the argument underneath it.

Yascha Mounk · 22 min

Why Are Noirs Making a Comeback?

A critic who bought third-row tickets to a 7:30 a.m. screening uses his own slightly unhinged devotion to premium-format cinema as the launchpad for a smart argument about why noir — shadows, moral ambiguity, doomed protagonists — is resurfacing in an era of prestige theatrical formats. Funny and specific in a way film-trend pieces rarely are.

The Bulwark · 13 min

Katja Hoyer on Why We Should Stop Comparing Everything to Weimar

Every political crisis these days gets called "Weimar," and historian Katja Hoyer explains why that's usually lazy and occasionally dangerous. She and Mounk dig into what actually made 1919 Germany's democratic collapse distinctive — and the answer isn't what people assume. A good corrective for anyone who's used the comparison casually.

Yascha Mounk · 20 min

Portraits From The Big Apple

A photo-essay dispatch from New York's Ivy and classic-menswear scene, built around the observation that this notoriously exacting subculture is, in person, unusually welcoming to newcomers. Light, visual, and a nice palate-cleanser after the denser reads above.

Easy on the Ivy · 9 min