SHAPE Missive 03/25/2024

You don’t need to sign up to receive this email, because you’re already reading it, but you could sign up to receive this email at selfhelpartpublishingempire.com now. It has a little 3D version of the SHAPE logo you can spin around and a really vague description of what SHAPE is, which I’ll elaborate on at some point¹ , probably.

But for now, here are some links for your clicky-clicker.

If you click on one thing, click on this: the third issue of the HTML Review, an online journal at the intersection of literature and code. As someone who has to regularly mentally engage with The Internet as a means of maximizing commerce, it’s so refreshing to see it used inventively for art, especially outside of an endless social media feed. Bookmark and come back to it at your leisure!

A delightful animated short. The sound design is stellar. | On the other end of the spectrum, this simple interactive story about Laika, the Soviet space dog, is quietly devastating. | Variable type, but make it fütball. | Wave a flag | Yellowbird hot sauce tastes nice, and their website is fun.

The music section. | This is extremely fun to scroll. | A long²  Oral History of Pitchfork. It’s still chugging along and publishing reviews as a GQ subsidiary, with 13 “best new album” designations over the past couple months. I was going to be snarky and say that seems high, but it turns out that’s exactly the same as last year. | What have you listened to lately? No judgements, I’ll go first: a playlist I put together.

If you click on two things, click on this one³ , too. It’s an essay entitled, rather provocatively, The Jews, written by Natalia Ginzburg in Italian in 1972 and translated and published by Jenny McPhee for The Massachusetts’ Review back in December. It’s a piece that’s over fifty years old, but the parallels to today are stark and clear⁴ . I found her writing to be incredibly moving. I hope you do, too.

See you next week ✌️
Dave

1  Part Ray Johnson-esque correspondence art, part design studio, part this newsletter you’re reading

2  I haven’t finished it yet.

3  Maybe on your phone—I found the desktop version difficult to read. Your local library might also have The Mass Review in print, which is where I first found the piece.

4  To be extra clear, the 2023 Hamas-led militant attack on the nation-state of Israel was horrific and should be condemned. This does not negate, erase, or justify the violence being perpetuated on the Palestinian people by that state. We can speak two truths at once.