Fog Signals: An Ice Telescope, a Design Guide and 50 Bumper Stickers

What a week. We finished a guide we have been gathering for seventeen years, followed a single grain of salt all the way down to its atoms, went to the South Pole for a Nobel Prize, and spent Saturday reading the backs of other people’s cars. Here it is in one Sunday letter, with peak fall color in between and a shop that has gone fully October, right down to a black cat candle with a skeleton hiding inside. Pour something warm and take your time!

●  The week at a glance

Seven days, from a grain of salt to the Milky Way

●  01  ·  DESIGN

The 50 Greatest Bumper Stickers of All Time

A bumper sticker is a public post you can’t delete, shown to an audience that can only unfollow you by changing lanes. Here in Portland, where a Subaru with fewer than three stickers looks underdressed, we’ve had a lot of red lights to study the genre. At some point we started taking notes.

Fifty stickers, from “I Like Ike” in 1952 to “Don’t Honk at Me, I Will Cry,” with the true stories behind them: the Kansas City screen printer who measured bumpers in a parking lot, the fish that grew legs in 1983, and the 2008 study that found the drivers with the most stickers were 16 percent more likely to rage on the road. It didn’t matter what the stickers said. “Visualize World Peace” counted too!

Seventy years of tailgate, in a few seconds. On the site you scroll it yourself, then build your own bumper and we read it back to you.

●  New: Our guide to design

Seventeen years of design, hung from a mobile

The guide we have wanted to make since the very beginning.

Ten chapters, each one opening with the designer who defines it and filed under one of Dieter Rams’s ten principles of good design. Calder, Rams, Warhol, the Vignellis, Virgil Abloh, and plenty of people you’ll be glad to meet, like the grandmother in Hanau, Germany, who builds wheelchair ramps out of LEGO.

At the top, the chapters hang from a mobile in Calder’s colors, and on the site it’s yours to play with. Give it a nudge, tap a shape, and that chapter opens. We hid a few small nods in there too. See how many you can find, then hit reply and tell us who we missed.

Red maple, backlit and glowing. Photograph by Jeremy Thomas, from our guide to the most colorful trees of the season.

The IceCube Lab under aurora and the Milky Way. Photo: Ilya Bodo, IceCube/NSF

●  02  ·  SCIENCE

The Telescope Buried in a Cubic Kilometer of Antarctic Ice Just Won a Nobel Prize

Most telescopes sit on a mountaintop and look up. IceCube is frozen about a mile under the South Pole: 5,160 glass sensors strung through a cubic kilometer of ice, waiting for the faint blue flash of a neutrino. On Tuesday it won Francis Halzen the Nobel Prize in Physics, 38 years after he first pitched the idea.

Our favorite part is that it spends much of its time looking down, using the entire Earth as a filter to watch the northern sky. That bent our brains a little, so we drew it.

●  03  ·  FOOD & DRINK

Salt, All the Way Down: The Science, History and Hunger Behind Our Favorite Crystal

Every grain of salt on your table is a cube. We zoomed from a pinch of flakes down to the lattice of atoms that decides that shape, then back out through 8,000 years of salt history: a French tax so hated it fell with the Revolution, Gandhi’s 240 mile march to the sea, and Lewis and Clark boiling seawater on the Oregon coast in the winter of 1805.

It ends at Netarts Bay on the Oregon coast, a short drive from our desks, where Jacobsen Salt Co. makes the flakes we keep by the stove. Bring a cookie.

The long hood and set-back cabin, in profile. Photo: Jaguar

●  04  ·  DESIGN

Jaguar Type 01: Inside the Wild Design of Jaguar’s Biggest Swing in Decades

No grille. No rear window. Headlights 3.3 inches tall. Jaguar revealed the Type 01 in New York this week, a four-door electric GT that borrows one proportion straight from the 1961 E-type: front axle to the base of the windshield is 17 percent of the car’s length on both.

Then there’s the Impossible Panel, the roof side, rear pillar and rear fender pressed as a single piece in a press four stories tall. The engineers spent 1,500 hours working out how.

Mist moving along the Blue Ridge, where the oaks and hickories turn russet in late October. Photograph by Jeffrey Hamilton.

Illustration: Sandra Rilova

●  05  ·  ILLUSTRATION

Sandra Rilova Folds Whole Fairy Tales Into a Single Picture

The Spanish illustrator calls her approach visual metaphors, and she can fit an entire story inside one image. From 2018 to 2020 she made every illustration for the Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Odense, Denmark, the Kengo Kuma building that opened in 2021.

Her books run from Perrault’s Donkeyskin to Anne Sexton’s Transformations. Look slowly. Every picture keeps giving.

© Crtomir Just

●  06  ·  ANIMATION

Imposiball: Crtomir Just’s Sports Animations Where the Shadows Won’t Play Along

Five sports, five short loops, one isometric camera. In Crtomir Just’s new series, a ping pong paddle flips from red to black and its shadow doesn’t flinch. The golf loop is just nine seconds long.

We have watched it a lot more than nine times.

●  From the shop

Something for nearly every story

We read back through the week, then went looking on our own shelves. Here’s a piece for almost everything above. Spend $60 and US shipping is free, with a tote on us.

Max Dinnerware Mugs by Heller, Set of 6

$56  $70

Straight out of the design guide. Massimo and Lella Vignelli designed Max in 1964, it won the Compasso d’Oro, it lives in MoMA’s collection, and Heller still makes it. Six colors that stack into a little skyline on the counter.

Shop Max  →

Pacific Northwest Decal$4Start your own tailgate. Draplin, made in Portland.

Black Pepper Sea Salt$11Netarts Bay salt and Tellicherry pepper in one pinch.

Dreamy Dark Chocolate Bar$5.75Deep blue, gold stars. For the stargazers.

The UFO Book$24.99For anyone still looking up.

The Little Frog Wrapping Paper Book$19.99Wrap a gift like a fairy tale.

Evergreen Bandana Board Game$20  $25A whole board game, printed on a bandana.

Endless Column Wood Sculpture From $28 Faceted wooden modules stacked into slender towers, in pale beech or dark walnut. A small, warm nod to Brâncuși, from Senser Woodcraft.

●  Signals

Quick signals

The small stuff from a big week, plus a few corners of the site and the shop worth knowing about.

01	The candle we can’t stop lighting this month: PyroPet Kisa. It’s a faceted black cat, and as it burns down an aluminum skeleton appears inside, skull first. When the wax is gone, the skeleton stays. There’s a bat called Blaka too, if bats are more your speed. They’re $40 each, or any two for $70, and the best centerpiece we know. Order by Friday, October 16 and they’ll be on your table for Halloween!
02	Foster + Partners is part of a new research project that wants to build buildings from the roof down. Robots assemble the timber roof at waist height, jacks lift it, and the floor below gets built underneath. No scaffolding, and the joints unbolt for reuse. In three years it has to prove itself with a full-size pavilion.
03	Every new driver in Japan has to put a green and yellow leaf on their car for the first year. Older drivers once got an autumn leaf. A spring leaf for beginners, an autumn leaf for the old guard. We have never seen a government get this poetic about traffic.
04	About 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second, and IceCube’s team figures a detector your size would wait around a hundred years to catch one. Two people stay at the pole all winter to look after it, and every single sensor has its own name.
05	Why recipes go wrong: a teaspoon of fine table salt weighs about 6 grams, and a teaspoon of Diamond Crystal kosher about 2.8. Same spoon, very different dinner. Our field guide to nine salts explains why.
06	The honeycomb cracks on Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni puzzled people for years. A 2023 study tied them to slow convection in the salty groundwater below. We first fell for the place back in 2013.
07	“Keep Portland Weird” came from Austin, and Portland admits it. Terry Currier of Music Millennium brought it north in 2003. It’s No. 34 on our list, and the photo is his record store.
08	Peak color is sliding south and downhill this week. The Turning, our animated fall map, shows where it is right now, and the most colorful trees of the season tells you what you’re looking at once you get there.
09	Want the range, the charging and the numbers on the Type 01? Our sister site Electric Future has the full rundown.
10	If the bumper stickers got you, keep going with the walking men on crosswalk signals around the world. Vernacular design, made by nobody in particular, seen by everybody.
11	New on the shop shelf and not lasting long in the studio: Sour Wild Strawberry Fish from BonBon, a little Swedish candy company. $8, and dangerously chewy.
12	For lake people: Aaron Draplin’s Great Lakes Stack patch, $8.50. Iron it onto a jacket and wait for someone to ask which lake is yours.
13	Candle season needs matches. Our Safety Match Jars are corked glass bottles full of orange safety matches with black heads, $7.50, and they look good sitting out.

The maple belt from above, with the afternoon sun moving across it. Photograph by Jonathan Ng.

●  The October shelf

Candles with skeletons inside, and other dark delights

Halloween is three weeks out. This is the kind of spooky we’d happily keep out all year.

PyroPet Kisa, Black Cat Candle

$40

Light it and watch. As the black wax melts away, skull first, an aluminum cat skeleton slowly appears, and it stays on your table long after the candle is gone. Unscented, so nothing competes with dinner. Creepy, clever and somehow sweet, and the centerpiece we keep lighting this month! Take any two PyroPets for $70, a cat and a bat or a pair of cats.

Shop Kisa  →

PyroPet Blaka, Black Bat Candle$40Blaka is Icelandic for bat. Same trick, with wings.

Tarot Candle, Death$39In tarot, Death means a new beginning.

Posable Skeleton Magnet$18Pose him on the fridge. A new mood every morning.

Zoltar Fortune-Telling Deck$12.95Ask Zoltar. Zoltar knows.

Eir Norse Magic Incense $13 Amber and myrrh from Smells Like Spells, named for the Norse goddess of healing. Light one when the evenings close in early.

Candle Care Set $29 A snuffer and a wick trimmer in a handsome red box. Your candles burn cleaner, and you get to snuff them like a lighthouse keeper.

●  Settling in

Cold air, warm things

The rain is back in Portland, which means lamps on at four and a lot of tea. Here’s what we’re reaching for.

Rechargeable Flameless Candle Light

$34

A slim perforated metal lantern that throws warm amber light out through its perforated sides. It recharges, so there’s no wax and no worry: porch, tent, bedside, or the middle of a long dinner.

Shop the light  →

Enamel Camp Mug, Midnight Mushroom$24Sixteen ounces of something hot.

Forest Mushrooms Notebook$6A pocket notebook for walks.

Cabin Porn$32  $40The book that launched a thousand daydreams.

How to Stay Alive in the Woods$21.99A classic, for the overly prepared.

Giant Sequoia Pinecones, Set of Three$12Hand gathered in the Pacific Northwest.

Mossy Walls Room and Body Spray$20The name alone sounds like November here.

Sapele Balance Stones, Set of Five $79 Five smooth stones of sapele wood that stack into a leaning cairn. A desk toy for grown-ups, and a very good thing to fidget with on a phone call.

Moss & Fog Ampersand 5 Panel Cap $36 Our ampersand, embroidered in gold on black. For rainy walks and bad hair days.

Moss & Fog Organic Crew Sweatshirt From $46 Organic cotton, our ampersand on the chest, and the right weight for October.

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