Had a fun conversation with Blaine DeSantis on the Books & Looks podcast. We talked about printer's devils, Egyptian mummies, dueling editors, and the ingenious hack that made it possible to print Chinese newspapers in Gold Rush-era San Francisco. Enjoy! booksandlookspodcast.com/mummy-paper-...

Mummy Paper, Print Devils, and Gunslinging Editors: Alex Wright’s Empire of Ink

Before the Hearsts and the Pulitzers, before the front page as we know it, the American newspaper was built by teenagers covered in soot, women who risked hanging, and editors who settled arguments…

booksandlookspodcast.com

In his latest WhatTheyThink video, Museum of Printing President Frank Romano reviews the new book, “Empire of Ink: The Printers, Rogues, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper” by Alex Wright. P.S. He loved it. whattheythink.com/video/130886...

NEW! Read @wsj.com 's review of EMPIRE OF INK by @alexwright.com www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

New piece in the Columbia Journalism Review: What 19th-century media can teach us about the future🦋 www.cjr.org/analysis/wha...

What 19th-century media can teach us about the future.

In an era of change and fragmentation, the history of the early American press shows that media is shaped not only by technology, but by infrastructure, law, and society.

cjr.org

Really enjoyed this conversation with Steven Heller for PRINT magazine. We talked about printer's devils, petrified men, traveling stones, mummies, moon hoaxes, Mark Twain, the telegraph, and how debates about media disruption have been happening for a long time. www.printmag.com/daily-heller...

The Daily Heller: Hot on the Presses – PRINT Magazine

Alex Wright prints the fascinating history of the American newspaper.

printmag.com

New at Big Think: The Great Moon Hoax of 1835. A true story of fake news, bat-winged humanoids, and the origins of the modern mass media: bigthink.com/books/the-18...

The 1835 "moon hoax" that turned fake news into big business

America’s penny press transformed journalism in the 1830s, using hoaxes, sensationalism, and mass circulation to create a blueprint for modern media.

bigthink.com

🗞️ Happy publication day to EMPIRE OF INK! @alexgrantwright.bsky.social tells the story of America’s first media revolution—the rise of the newspaper—and the transformation of a fledgling republic into the world’s first information superpower. Learn more: www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/alex-...

Today's the day. My new book Empire of Ink is officially out in the world. It's a history of early American newspapers, and the people who made them. If this sounds like your kind of thing, I hope you'll take a look: amzn.to/4vctblP

NEW ESSAY — Alex Wright rediscovers the thrilling world of typesetting races, which, at the height of their popularity in the 1880s, drew crowds in the thousands, offered huge cash prizes, and helped women "Swifts" fight for workplace equity: publicdomainreview.org/essay/twilig...

I’ve been mostly quiet here for a while, working on a book about 19th-century newspapers and the early attention economy—an era that looks uncannily like our own. More to come soon; in the meantime, I've been thinking about the history of doomscrolling: substack.com/home/post/p-...

A Brief History of Doomscrolling

News fatigue is nothing new

substack.com

Feeling stoked about my latest acquisition: an antique Kelsey Excelsior press, with mini type case. Would you believe these things used to sell for five dollars back in the 1890s? The Victorian equivalent of a cheap inkjet printer.

Pouring one out for Tom Lehrer, a true polymath if ever there was one. I will never look at pigeons in the park the same way again. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/a...

Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist With a Dark Streak, Dies at 97

nytimes.com

Getting our march on.

An impressive piece of digital sleuthing by researchers at Cambridge, stitching together public records and running data analysis to generate "murder maps" of medieval England. Apparently the biggest troublemakers back then were college kids. Plus ça change ;) www.washingtonpost.com/history/2025...

Just how bloody was medieval England? A ‘murder map’ holds some surprises.

The University of Cambridge project reveals sky-high homicide rates in medieval London, York and Oxford and shows that male college students were among the most frequent killers.

washingtonpost.com

Fascinating piece by David Caswell on the recent changes to x.AI‘s responses on South Africa “white genocide.” Not quite a smoking gun, but gets tantalizingly close to getting Grok to rat out the boss. www.linkedin.com/pulse/interv...

Holy ****

News outlets everywhere should follow @wired.com's lead in dropping paywalls for primarily FOIA-based reporting. freedom.press/issues/wired...

Wired is dropping paywalls for FOIA-based reporting. Others should follow

As the administration does its best to hide public records from the public, Wired magazine is stepping up to help stem the secrecy

freedom.press

A provocative think-piece by @maxmcguinness.bsky.social on the complex, often conflicted relationship between French modernists and their 19th century news media. “The French modernists show us how to carve out space for artistic expression within dominant media without being dominated by them.”

Max McGuinness@maxmcguinness.bsky.social · 2y ago

I wrote about how Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Proust wrestled with the rise of the press for @aeon.co, concluding with a call to reimagine the codex for the digital era. The essay draws on my recent book for @livunipress.bsky.social, Hustlers in the Ivory Tower: aeon.co/essays/the-f...

Paul Otlet was a great many things but, well, not much a poet ;) Still, I quite like this kind of digital found poetry experiment. Sort of an Ezra Pound-meets-William S. Burroughs-meets-Python kind of vibe.

Rémi Forte@rmfrt.com · 2y ago

Otlet, poem poster.

Fascinating think-piece on the heritage of AI hype cycles past and present, from computer historian Thomas Haigh: cacm.acm.org/opinion/arti...

In 1659, the the Puritans in Massachusetts enacted a law that declared that Christmas was sacrilege and exchanging of gifts, greetings, and wearing fine clothing on that day was Satanic. Anyone caught celebrating was fined 5 shillings. (About 5 days wages.) The "War on Christmas" was an inside job.

A few pics from a morning well spent at the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Massachusetts—a wonderland of old prints, presses, and assorted typographical gewgaws. Also one of the last places on earth where you can still see a working Linotype! www.museumofprinting.org

Audubon, a century and a half ahead of modern science, on other minds and animal intelligence

Audubon on Other Minds and the Secret Knowledge of Animals

“In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,”…

themarginalian.org

Sad to hear the news about Zakir Hussein. Indian classical music isn’t my usual cup of tea, but he gave one of the most mesmerizing musical performances I have ever seen. A phenomenally gifted artist, and by all accounts a nice guy. Someone worthy of remembrance. www.theguardian.com/music/2024/d...

Zakir Hussain, legendary Indian tabla musician, dies aged 73

The classical musician, who performed with George Harrison and Van Morrison, died in a San Francisco hospital on Sunday

theguardian.com

Re-watching Modernism, Inc. (now streaming on Prime), a beautifully crafted documentary about Elliot Noyes and his outsized impact on twentieth century design, and the Bauhaus-ification of corporate America. www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8Ts...

Modernism Inc. - Official Trailer | 13th Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival

YouTube video by Resene Architecture and Design Film Festival NZ

youtube.com

Sure, why not? Hello BlueSky. I'm Alex, currently working as a UXer at Google, writing books and things, and hacking away at my five-string banjo. I'm interested in the history of technology, bluegrass music, and the uncanny valley of life with a Labradoodle.