The Magnet

When I was in Portland, I came across this payphone in the Buckman/Belmont area. I hadn’t seen a payphone in a while, so I was curious to see if it still worked. I picked it up, and a voice started speaking in Spanish, saying something about pressing the number 1. Then the voice switched to English and said that to make a call, press the number 1 and dial the number. That was weird, I thought. Don’t I have to put some money into the phone?

Dialed.gg is a simple browser game that shows you a color, hides it, asks you to recreate it from memory, and scores you on how well you did. They recently added similar tests for sound, time, and shapes, too. I did OK on the color and time recall test, and not as well on the sounds and shapes. The Internet Archive has a full scan of How It Works... The Computer, a 1971 Ladybird Books children’s guide by David Carey, illustrated by B.H. Robinson.

I recently reread “The Curse of Xanadu” by Gary Wolf, published in Wired in June 1995. Gary is a friend, and he wrote the piece when we were both editors at the magazine. To me, it is one of the great pieces of tech journalism. I’ve read it several times over the years, and it gets better with age. Gary’s article tells the story of Ted Nelson, one of the most interesting and frustrating figures in the history of computing.

Here’s a grab bag of things that caught my interest in recent weeks. It was my first day in Lisbon in January — jet-lagged, no sleep, wind blowing the rain sideways. I’d already visited most of the city’s museums on previous trips and wanted to try something different, so I searched for unusual museums and found the Mãe d’Água das Amoreiras Reservoir. The building is stunningly symmetrical, all austere stone geometry, designed by the Hungarian architect Carlos Mardel and completed in 1834.

I subscribe to Sam Harris’s Waking Up app, which has daily meditation practice and a bunch of interesting lecture series on consciousness, meditation, and spirituality. A couple of weeks ago, I listened to an audio essay on the app by Rob Walker, who publishes a Substack called The Art of Noticing.

In 1982, I was a college student in Colorado. That summer, my friend got an Apple IIe, and six of us spent every evening that summer sitting in folding chairs around his computer playing Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. The game is meant for one player, but we didn’t play it that way. Each of us took ownership of one of the party’s six characters.

In December 2024, I ordered Flannel Jogger Pants from Anthropologie as a Christmas gift for my wife. They sent me a metal bathroom towel fixture. I thought returning the wrong item would have been the end of it, but months later, Anthropologie attempted to charge my credit card for the fixture. I should have learned my lesson not to order from Anthropologie. Stupid me. In December 2025, I ordered a wool coat and silver hoop earrings from Anthropologie as Christmas gifts for my wife.

After reading yesterday’s Magnet, in which I wrote about seven items I take with me while traveling, my friend Charles Platt sent me a list of his own essential items: Concave mirror. What? Why? In case you get something in your eye, and there’s no one around who you would want to breathe on you while trying to remove whatever is causing discomfort. A concave mirror about 1.5 inches in diameter can focus when held about 2 inches from your eye if it has sufficient curvature.

I’m an overpacker. Give me a suitcase, and I’ll fill it to the bursting point. It’s a problem. I’m working on it. But no matter how much I eventually cull from my luggage, I’ll always be sure to take the following seven things with me on trips. From left to right: When I fly, my ears often get plugged up during descent. It hurts and it’s annoying to be partially deaf for hours or even days after landing.

This spring, Carla and I spent a few days in Boston. On our daughter's recommendation, we visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It’s housed in a fantastical building modeled after 15th- and 16th-century Venetian Renaissance palaces. Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) founded the museum in 1903. Born into a wealthy family, she began collecting art shortly after her father died in 1891 and left her $1.75 million (about $61 million in 2025 dollars).