Great interview with the team behind the long gone company General Magic. They invented an iPhone like device two decades too early. Proving once again that for everything there is a season.

“Chances are that you’ve never heard of General Magic, but in Silicon Valley the company is the stuff of legend. Magic spun out of Apple in 1990 with much of the original Mac team on board and a bold new product idea: a handheld gadget that they called a “personal communicator.” Plugged into a telephone jack, it could handle e-mail, dial phone numbers, and even send SMS- like instant messages—complete with emoji and stickers” – New York Magazine

Geoff Dyer’s essay about the erotics of the anonymous space is again available online thanks to Slate Magazine.

“You look out through the smear-free windows at the soundless city that could be any city. No one can see you, and even if they do it’s not you they see: All they can make out—as in a memorable sequence from Ryu Murakami’s Tokyo Decadence—is a figure silhouetted in the window: a figurehead and totem of the depraved, atrocious, inhuman sexiness of hotels”