Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
Once called the ‘eighth wonder of the world’ by Thomas Edison, Linotype typecasting machines revolutionised publishing when they were invented in 1886, and remained the industry standard for nearly a century after. The first commercially successful mechanical typesetter, the Linotype significantly sped up the printing process, allowing for larger and more local daily newspapers. In Farewell, etaoin shrdlu (the latter portion of the title taken from the nonsense words created by running your fingers down the letters of the machine’s first two rows), the former New York Times proofreader David Loeb Weiss bids a loving farewell to the Linotype by chronicling its final day of use at the Times on 1 July 1978. An evenhanded treatment of the unremitting march of technological progress, Weiss’s film about an outmoded craft is stylistically vintage yet also immediate in its investigation of modernity.
Director: David Loeb Weiss
Producer: Carl Schlesinger
video
Values and beliefs
How a God-fearing Jewish woman found atheism – and bacon – in her later years
9 minutes
video
War and peace
Before he leaves to go to war, Artem, 18, says goodbye to the man who raised him
12 minutes
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
How machine learning can help historians decode ancient inscriptions
7 minutes
video
Animals and humans
What the ancient city of Kars looks like from the perspective of its stray dogs
9 minutes
video
Family life
A son of China’s former one-child policy remembers the sibling he never had
8 minutes
video
Making
Ceramic designs spin to life in a tactile meditation on the art of pottery
9 minutes
video
Information and communication
From mental image to sketch – how memories and emotions conjure up a face
23 minutes
video
Childhood and adolescence
When Paradise, California burned, its teens became instant climate refugees
23 minutes
video
Gender and identity
How the spy-cam epidemic in South Korea affects the women who are its victims
35 minutes