|
Fog Signals Beautiful things, once a week. Issue 38 · The Edge of the World Edition |
This week we went to the two places most people never reach: a city of books on the far side of the Sahara, and the bottom of the sea. We also opened something we have wanted to build for years, a Cabinet where you can keep every story that stops you. In between there are 50 fruits, a sofa with tailpipes, a car that flies (sort of) and the maple belt hitting peak red. It is a lot. Pour something warm, and keep whatever you like!
● 01 · TRAVEL
The Real Timbuktu: How a City of Books Became the Edge of the World
In Zagora, on the edge of the Moroccan Sahara, a painted sign shows a man leading a camel and four words: Tombouctou, 52 jours. People have posed beside it for decades. Hardly any of them have made the trip.
Timbuktu is real, and its story beats the myth. An emperor who crashed the price of gold by tipping too well. A city where, around 1510, books sold for more than any other merchandise. A poet who won a gold medal for imagining it, the year after an explorer walked in and said it was made of mud. And in 2012, librarians who smuggled some 350,000 manuscripts out of an occupied city in metal footlockers.
One reader wrote that it was the best article she had ever read with photos. We are still a little pink about that. Start with the calculator at the top: from Portland, by camel, Timbuktu is a year and a day away.
● New on Moss & Fog: The Cabinet
Keep every story that stops you
Four hundred years ago, people who had fallen for the world kept cabinets of curiosities. Now you can too.
For years you have told us the same thing: you found something wonderful here once, and then you could never find it again. So every story on Moss & Fog now wears a small ribbon. Tap it and the story is yours to keep, gathered on a shelf of your own. It is free, it takes one tap, and there is no account to make.
Sort your Cabinet by world to find out which corners of the archive keep pulling you back (for us it is fog, every single time). Send it to your phone with one link, or hand your finds to a friend.
An empty cabinet can feel a little daunting, so we filled the first drawer for you: one story from every year since 2009, from the Bicycle Thief to trees that sleep at night, all eighteen addable in a single tap. Shelves you name yourself arrive this winter, members first.
Open your Cabinet● Peak this week
The maple belt is on fire
Our animated fall map, The Turning, rolls the whole season across North America in a few seconds, then stops on this week.
Right now the red is sitting on the Great Lakes, southern New England and the Appalachian ridges, while the boreal north has already gone bare. The heartland and the Ozarks are next, and the Blue Ridge foothills and the Texas Hill Country hold out into November. Our best advice is to chase the slope, not the peak: drive a route that runs north to south or high to low, and somewhere along it the color will be perfect.
On the site you can drag the date yourself, hover any spot for its estimated peak, or tap “Where am I in the season?” and the map will find you.
A giant isopod in the Gulf of Mexico, cousin of the one found in a drawer. Image: NOAA
● 02 · NATURE
A Descent Into the Deep Sea, and the New Animals Found There This Month
Every few days this month, the deep sea gave up another animal nobody had named. 57 new species from a single canyon off Argentina. A spaghetti worm with suction cups. A sea cucumber the scientists nicknamed Loki, for its horns.
Our favorite is a giant isopod, 32.2 centimeters long, that sat in a German university drawer for about forty years as a teaching specimen before anyone noticed it was new to science. So we built the story as a descent: keep scrolling and the water really does get darker, all the way to the bottom of the Challenger Deep.
Dragon fruit, blood orange and rambutan. Photo: Brooke Lark / Unsplash
● 03 · FOOD & DRINK
The 50 Most Popular Fruits in the World, Ranked
We went to the UN’s harvest data and counted down all fifty, from the humble gooseberry to the king of the fruit bowl. On the way you will meet a fruit banned on Singapore’s trains, a moldy cantaloupe that helped bring penicillin to the world, and a berry that was illegal in America until 1966.
Then there is the technicality that would knock the banana clean off its throne. And one last thing: shine a UV light on a ripe banana and its peel glows blue!
The jellyfish that never dies, one of the guide’s strangest residents
● 04 · ANIMALS · NEW GUIDE
The Most Amazing Animals on Earth: A Visual Guide
Seventeen years and 719 animal stories, gathered into nine chapters: start very small, go very big, then meet the weirdest, the gentlest, the cleverest and the most dangerous animals we have ever featured.
Along the way: the platypus that London scientists checked for stitches in 1799, pygmy sloths that can hold their breath for 40 minutes, an albatross named Wisdom who is past seventy, and the firehawks that spread bushfires on purpose.
Max by Lella and Massimo Vignelli, 1964, from the Color Issue’s shelves
● 05 · DESIGN · THE SHOP
The Color Issue: Browse Our Archive by Color, Then Shop the Spectrum
We went back through the lead image of every story since 2009 and sorted them into eleven drawers, Red through Fog. Then we told the stories behind a few famous colors: an 18-year-old who set out to make quinine in 1856 and made mauve instead, and Harvard’s rarest yellow, which came from cows fed only mango leaves.
Every drawer ends on the shop’s shelf in the same color, so you can browse a feeling and leave with a candle.
● From the shop
A little something for every story
We read back through the week, then went looking on our own shelves. Spend $60 and US shipping is free, with a tote on us.
 | Giant Sequoia Pinecones, Set of Three $12 Every good cabinet of curiosities starts with something picked up off the ground. Hand gathered in the Pacific Northwest. |
 | $25 Apple’s new HomeView reads as a lamp before it reads as a computer. This one is just a lamp, in eight colors, and proud of it. |
 | $49 Hand carved natural stones and a steady hand. The game we pull out after dinner when nobody wants a screen. |
● Signals
Quick signals
The rest of the week in a few lines each, plus two ways to get closer to its farthest places.
| 01 | DESIGN Apple HomeView finally gives the home helper a beautiful body. A seven-inch square screen on a domed speaker, joined by a steel hinge you tilt with one finger. Its ancestor is the 2002 iMac G4 “sunflower,” and it ships November 13. |  |
| 02 | CARS The Tesla Roadster is a flying car! Sort of. On a rocket range outside Waco it drove up a curved wall, hung upside down, then hopped a Semi on cold-gas jets. Guests were handed earplugs. |  |
| 03 | DESIGN The $30,000 sports car sofa that seats exactly one and goes nowhere. Headlights, tailpipes, 13 speakers, a wine chiller and an engraved plate that reads “The One and Always.” |  |
| 04 | DESIGN A speaker shaped like a milk carton. CMF borrowed a 1915 patent from a Toledo toymaker, then made the panels swappable and 3D printable. From $59. |  |
| 05 | ARCHITECTURE BIG wants to hang a cloud over Tirana, and let it rain. Most fountains shoot water up. This one drops it from the underside of a building floating above a park. |  |
| 06 | SUSTAINABILITY A startup that turns fallen leaves into plastic. Close to a third of the leaves cities collect end up in landfills. In early tests these films broke down in soil in two to three months. |  |
| 07 | THE DEEP Watch a deep-sea dive tonight. The Schmidt Ocean Institute is streaming live from a crack in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge through late October, down to 4,500 meters. You could be among the first people to see what drifts past the camera. |  |
| 08 | TIMBUKTU Get a postcard from Timbuktu. For about $15, one of the city’s former tour guides will write out your message and mail it from the Timbuktu post office. It takes a month or two, which feels exactly right. |  |
|
Coming in early November The Moss & Fog We have been quietly filling a very large drawer. In a few weeks we will open it: gifts sorted by the people you love, a few sets we put together ourselves, and some things you will not find anywhere else. It lands here first, so keep an eye on your Sunday letter! Already shopping? Spend $60 and US shipping is free, with a tote on us. Pocket Terrariums are $9 each when you take three, the Autumn Sale is still on, and any order can be wrapped in kraft paper and twine for $5, with a handwritten card for free. Get a head start |
● Curiosities
Small wonders from around the world
Seven small things that made us look up this week.
● A pumpkin heavier than your car. Ron Wallace’s 3,156-pounder topped the record Guinness lists by nearly 300 pounds. AP
● Goodbye, leap second. Hello, leap hour. The world’s timekeepers retired the leap second. The next correction may be centuries away. Smithsonian
● Walk inside a camera. Pneuhaus built an inflatable room whose 221 tiny lenses throw the sky onto its soft walls. Colossal
● A 4,700-year-old shipwreck, still loaded. Off the coast of Turkey, some of its jars still hold traces of olive oil or wine. Smithsonian
● London’s oldest restaurant gets a guardian. Rules has served dinner since 1798. Now the National Trust owns it, and dinner goes on. Smithsonian
● Meet the Jurassic platypus-otter. A 165-million-year-old swimmer with a throat startlingly like ours. Smithsonian
● The year’s best wildlife photographs. Our favorite: a carder bee touching down, shot by Amelie Davis, age ten and under. Colossal
● Support independent publishing
Free, and fiercely independent, since 2009.
Everything you keep in your Cabinet is free to read, and so is everything you have not found yet. Members are a big part of how it stays that way, and Champions are first in line for Cabinet shelves this winter.
Become a memberFrom $3 a month · Cancel anytime
|
If you only do one thing this week, open any story that stops you and tap its ribbon. Then hit reply and tell us the first thing you kept. We read every one, and we are dying to know what ends up in your Cabinet. And if a friend would love this, forward it along! |
Explore
The Atlas · The Guides · Your Cabinet · Fall Color Map · The Senses · The Shop
|
About | Shop | Become a member | Contact Forwarded this? Get Fog Signals free Just hit reply. We read every message, and a good tip has started more than one story. |
