Culture

How digital media changed reading, publishing, community and the way cultural work gets made and paid for.

11 articles

Food traditions move with people, but they rarely arrive intact. Ingredients get substituted, techniques get simplified or elaborat…

Idris Oyelaran14 Jul 20268 min read

Physical formats were meant to be replaced outright by streaming and digital files, but sales of vinyl, printed books and even film…

Mara Devlin9 Jun 20268 min read

Volunteer translators and subtitlers built the informal infrastructure that introduced global audiences to media years before offic…

Idris Oyelaran19 May 20264 min read

Cover versions are among the most common yet least understood acts in music, straddling tribute and theft, homage and reinvention.…

Mara Devlin12 May 20268 min read

Link rot erodes the internet's memory a little at a time, and the effort to preserve digital history is more fragile than most peop…

Mara Devlin22 Apr 20263 min read

Most objects a museum owns never reach a gallery wall at all, sitting instead in storage for decades. The decision about what does…

Idris Oyelaran21 Apr 20268 min read

A three-hour conversation with no ad breaks and no hard time limit would have seemed like a broadcasting failure twenty years ago.…

Helena Vos2 Apr 20268 min read

Typography works best when it is invisible, which is exactly why its influence is so easy to overlook. Small decisions about letter…

Mara Devlin18 Mar 20268 min read

Online communities have shifted from open forums to private chats and closed groups, changing how people find belonging and how ide…

Helena Vos11 Mar 20263 min read

The public library used to be defined by its shelves; now it is defined by what happens between them. That change has turned a nine…

Idris Oyelaran3 Mar 20269 min read

Digital publishing didn't just move words online; it reshaped editorial timelines, business models, and the relationship between wr…

Helena Vos3 Feb 20264 min read

One email a week: the stories worth your time, plus what we are working on. No tracking pixels, unsubscribe any time.

The weekly briefing