Do hobos still ride the rails in America? Indeed they do, and City of the Rails, a new podcast from journalist Danelle Morton, gives you a firsthand look at their lives. Danelle had a personal reason for her quest: Her daughter left home to hop freight trains as soon as she received her high school diploma. Between attempts to locate “Ruby” (yes, nerds, Ruby on rails), Danelle investigates the history of the railroads, talks to current and former hobos, and seeks answers from train engineers and rail cops. New episodes drop on Wednesdays; prepare to listen to a couple minutes of ads before the podcast begins. A personal note: Danelle and I go way back, to the beginning of our journalism careers, and she got in touch a couple of years ago when she was brainstorming a title for the podcast. I’m delighted at the result! Available wherever you get your podcasts.
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Have you read my latest story for Medium? It’s about my attempts to use Chat GPT and other AI tools to create brand names and taglines. This friend link will bypass the paywall.
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Canada’s Girl Guides are changing the name of their division for 7- and 8-yeur-olds from Brownies to Embers: “We have heard from members and former members that the name Brownies has caused them harm as racialized (Black, Indigenous and people of colour) girls and women. Some do not want to be part of this branch because of the name.” According to the official statement, “Embers have potential that’s just waiting to be unleashed. They’re glowing and ready to start something incredible!”
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More rebranding: Scott’s Cheap Flights, founded in 2015 by Scott Keyes, is now Going—a strong, evocative name that also happens to be short. The company explains the rebranding, which took more than a year, in an unusually detailed and candid essay that could serve as a template for all rebranding projects:
“Scotch what?” “Sheep fights?” Those are just a few examples of the hilarious ways people have misheard our name, or how an admittedly long, clunky name like Scott's Cheap Flights has confused people who hear about us for the first time. We've noticed folks like to abbreviate our brand to "SCF," too, so we knew it was crucial to take this opportunity to streamline and shorten our brand name.
Going ticked every box.
I like the initial G in the new wordmark. The ™ is legally meaningless, though.
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The country English-speakers call Turkey would like the English-language media to start calling it Türkiye (TUR-kee-yeh) instead. The country’s authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, no free-press fan, is one of the prime movers behind the shift, but he isn’t alone: The Columbia Journalism Review reports that “Turkey” has been used pejoratively in the past. “[I]n the nineteenth century, Western cartoons caricatured the late Ottoman Empire as a turkey in a fez.”
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Guardian writer David Shariatmadari set out to create “the next Wordle” and came up with Wordiply, which presents you with a short word, such as SHEA, and challenges you to find the longest word that contains that word. You can play it here—there’s a new game every day—and you can read Shariatmadari’s essay about designing the game here. There’s even a paragraph about the struggle to find an appealing, legally available name for the game! (Via Clive Thompson’s essay for Medium, which dives into ludology and what makes some games more successful than others.)
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Mark Gunnion writes on LinkedIn: “[H]ere’s a picture of the actual piece of paper that Gordon Sumner (also known as Sting), Stewart Copeland, and Andy Summers used when they were trying to come up with the name for their new, punky, reggae-influenced rock band back in the day. If you don’t recognize those names, the band name they went with is the one at the top of the right-hand column, with the doodles drawn around it.” I’m so glad they didn’t go with “Pogrom.” (Image source: Stewart Copeland’s Twitter feed, November 1, 2012.)
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Disgraceniks Sam Bankman-Fried, SBF enabler Sean McElwee, and (Kan)Ye (West) have all proudly and publicly declared that they don’t read books—McElwee has even said that “books are dumb.” Thomas Chatterton Williams, himself the author of several books, responds in the Atlantic : “It is one thing in practice not to read books, or not to read them as much as one might wish. But it is something else entirely to despise the act in principle. Identifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character.”
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There’s a branding angle to this Jeff Maurer essay about left-wing freakouts over right-wing freakouts: M&M’s recent announcement that it is discontinuing its “spokescandy” characters. But you should keep reading to the end. (Content warning: profanity, politics, equal-opportunity idiocy.)
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Realistic gym names (via The New Yorker).
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Truth in branding: Alcoholic Vodka, from Sweden, is “bad for you and expensive.” Beautiful design, though. (via Kottke)
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A glossary of romance-novel terms, including dubcon (dubious consent), JAFF (Jane Austen fanfic), and TSTL (a character who’s “too stupid to live”). I was moved to find this site after I read the very strange New York times story (gift link) about a romance novelist who faked her own death.
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If one monthly linkfest isn’t enough for you, check out Clive Thompson’s newish Linkfest, a pay-what-you-choose weekly newsletter filled with fascinating findings. This week’s topics: Cistercian numbers, robots that hug, dice that roll negative numbers, and a clock that tells time by knitting.
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