Fog Signals: A New Front Door, Breathing Lava, and a Pantry From the Oregon Coast

This is a long one, on purpose. We rebuilt the front door of Moss & Fog this week, and the archive can finally be wandered by color. So we made you a Sunday issue to match: big stories, small surprises, a few things that move, and a shop full of new arrivals. Settle in!

●  01  ·  MOSS & FOG NEWS

The New Moss & Fog Homepage, and Five Ways to Wander It

Our old homepage had a habit of handing you the same story three or four times. The new one follows a single rule: every story appears once. The slider is gone. In its place is one lead story, chosen by us, running the full width of the page, with two more beneath it.

The space we got back went to new doors into seventeen years of stories: by color, by subject in the Atlas, by feel in the Senses, and in depth in the Guides. Every world, from Nature to Science, now opens on a full-width cover too.

●  New: Browse by color

Pick a color. See what the archive says back.

The one we are most excited about!

We looked at the lead image of every story going back to 2009 and noted the color that fills each frame. Choose Orange this time of year and you get autumn leaves, vintage movie posters and a tiny frog clinging to a pink stem. Blue turns up the Pale Blue Dot, mirrored salt flats and a hotel carved out of ice. Tap More in for a fresh set, as many times as you like.

Right beside it is a button we have wanted for years: Show me something. Press it and one of our all-time favorite stories opens at random. It is the closest thing we have to pulling a book off the shelf with your eyes closed.

Meltwater braiding across black sand, Iceland. Photograph by Benjamin Hardman, from our new Iceland guide.

●  02  ·  NATURE

Iceland From Above: A Visual Guide to the Purest Landscapes on Earth

Fourteen years of the most beautiful photographs of Iceland we have ever published, gathered into one long, slow scroll. Braided glacial rivers, moss over black sand, glacier ice seen from both sides, fresh lava, and two places worth standing in once you finally get there.

Yes, that is a real plane, and yes, it is flying that low over the ice.

●  03  ·  NATURE

The Year Every Oak Drops Its Acorns at Once

Some years an oak drops a handful of acorns. Other years it drops thousands, and so does every oak for hundreds of miles. It is called a mast year, and nobody is quite sure how the trees coordinate it.

If your sidewalk crunches more than usual this October, you may be standing in one.

●  New in the shop

A Pacific Northwest pantry, and a few bright things

Fresh this week: salts from the Oregon coast, chocolate from right here in Portland, and a candle that looks like a party.

White Truffle Flake Salt, Jacobsen Salt Co.

$48

The splurge in the pantry. Jacobsen’s flake salt with Italian white truffle, and that deep, earthy perfume arrives the second the lid comes off. A pinch over buttered pasta or scrambled eggs and you will understand.

Shop this  →

Cherrywood Smoked Flake Salt$15Tastes like the edge of a good campfire.

Raw Alfalfa Honey$11Apricot, fig and straw, from Walla Walla.

Mint Milk Chocolate Hot Cocoa$17.25From Moonstruck, Portland chocolatiers.

Crunchy Milk Salted Toffee Bar$5.75Almonds, toffee, a little salt.

Happiness Pillar Candle by Yinka Ilori $29 The London designer started out rescuing secondhand chairs and painting them in the colors of West African fabric. This is that joy, in wax.

Moss & Fog Painted Ampersand Tee $28 Our ampersand, painted in every color of the archive. Soft, light, and brand new this week.

●  Signals

Quick signals

Small things from our week, and the corners of the site worth knowing about.

01	This jacket is made of thousands of squares of slate. Real rock, worn like a coat. It rocks! Literally.
02	The 1992 Batmobile, the long, low one from Batman Returns, is heading to auction with an estimate of $5 to 7 million. We would argue it is the purest silhouette Gotham ever drove.
03	MSCHF put two brand-new Lexus SUVs through what looks like a blender and showed what came out as sculpture. Somewhere a dealership is weeping.
04	Ten supertalls are planned or rising in New York right now, from The Torch in Times Square to 175 Park Avenue at Grand Central. We ranked them and drew them to scale, plus where their shadows will fall on Central Park.
05	What would happen to a human on Venus? Short answer: nothing good, very quickly. Long answer: genuinely fascinating, and the radar views of its volcanoes are otherworldly.
06	Scratch and sniff is back: on French stamps, New York billboards, horror movie scratch cards and the walls of the Met. Its fascinating, smelly history ends with a new book of twelve paintings you can smell, and it is in our Reading Room.
07	A speckled toy egg that hatches a character, and years later, a child’s first debit card. It is a concept from the studio Filament, and a clever rethink of the piggy bank. We have a few questions for it, too.
08	Tiny homepage detail we love: a row called Around now, years ago. It pulls one favorite we published this week in each earlier year, with the year printed large above it. Come back next Sunday and it will have moved on with the calendar.
09	Every story card on the site now has a little share button on its picture. On a phone it opens your share sheet. If something makes you think of someone, send it their way!
10	From the shop, a small object we keep reaching for: a hand carved oak spinning top. No paint, no batteries. On a hard floor a good spin lasts the better part of a minute. $8.99, and it makes a lovely stocking stuffer later.
11	Our Reading Room started with eight titles in September. It is now thirty things to read, play and give, including Killer Plants, a growing guide for the plants that bite back.
12	Fall color is moving south fast. Our animated fall foliage map shows where it is peaking right now, and the most colorful trees of the season tells you what you are looking at once you get there.

Iceland, breathing. Lava photographed by Gábor Nagy.

●  The October shelf

Made in our own studio, and a few dark delights

Not costumes, and not cobwebs on a string. A small run of things that make more sense in October, and that we would happily keep out all year.

HATCHBACK Geometric Tray

$48

We make these ourselves, one at a time, printed from plant based bioplastic. Each tray takes nine to ten hours on the printer, and the pattern reads like cathedral stonework. Party tray, catchall, or a piece that just sits out and looks good.

See the colorways  →

HATCHBACK Pinwheel Tray$48Also made in our studio.

Zoltar Fortune-Telling Deck$12.95One hundred fortunes, wise and useless.

Inside the ice. One more from Iceland, because we could not choose.

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