We have been publishing Moss & Fog since 2009. When we went back through the archive this year, the stories that stayed with us were rarely the ones with the biggest ideas.
They had a smell or a sound attached: French lavender fields photographed after dark, a Swiss town dusted in cocoa from its own chocolate factory, a concert played to an audience of 2,292 plants.
New on Moss & Fog
The Senses
Five shelves of stories from our archive, sorted by what you could taste, smell, touch, hear or see.
Open the Senses →Five shelves, sorted by feel
The Atlas already sorts what we have found by subject: architecture, art, design, the natural world and the rest. The Senses sort the same stories by feel. There are five shelves, and they are deliberately literal.
Taste holds food and drink, from chocolate that is naturally pink to a restaurant that has been feeding guests for more than 1,200 years.
Smell is scent and bloom: gardens, flowers, perfume, even an alarm clock that wakes you with a smell and the scents of flowers that went extinct.
Touch is material and texture. Oak, clay, stone, cardboard, a pillow carved from white marble, and the question of whether wool could be the future of electronics.
Sound is music and noise, from a volcano loud enough to burst eardrums 40 miles away to a map of what forests sound like around the world.
Sight is color and light: neon, infrared, prisms, the Vatican under red light and a new color called Olo that almost no one has ever seen.
Why literal
Our first sketch was more poetic. Every story touched all five senses at once, and a post about citrus was somehow also about sound and light. It read beautifully and made no sense to browse. A bowl of ramen belongs on Taste. A cedar staircase belongs on Touch. A few stories earn two shelves, like the ice cream shop that made its own perfume, and those crossings are some of our favorite finds.
How to browse
Each shelf opens with our picks, then everything else in a grid. Filter by subject, sort by newest or oldest, or press Pull one off the shelf and let the archive choose for you. The default order shuffles on every visit, so a photo essay from 2011 can land next to something we published last month.
Still sorting
This is a first pass through a very full drawer. Some stories will be on the wrong shelf, and some of your favorites may be missing. If you spot one, tell us and we will move it.
Start browsing
The Senses
Five shelves of stories from our archive, sorted by what you could taste, smell, touch, hear or see.
Open the Senses →Edited by Ben VanderVeen · About Moss & Fog
