Plutonic Rainbows

In 1986 Sebastião Salgado photographed the Serra Pelada gold mine in northern Brazil, an open pit so crowded with men that the pictures look like a Bible illustration. Two years later Godfrey Reggio opened Powaqqatsi on the same pit. The Harvard Film Archive describes those shots as "hundreds of men working up and down the steep walls" of the mine, and says the men are "beautiful to watch, often reminiscent of classic statuary." It's a fair description. It's also the whole problem, stated by an admirer without noticing.

Powaqqatsi came out in 1988 as the sequel to Koyaanisqatsi, with no dialogue and a Philip Glass score carrying almost all of the meaning. Where the first film sped up American cities, this one slowed down the developing world: labourers, markets, crowded trains, faces held in slow motion while the music swells. The composer's own site sells it as a celebration of "the delicate beauty in the eyes of an Indian child, the richness of a tapestry woven in Kathmandu." The child has eyes but no name, and nobody in the film has a voice, because the film has no voices at all. Glass speaks for everyone.

The title makes this stranger. According to Glass's page on the film, powaqa refers to "a negative sorcerer who lives at the expense of others," and the coined word describes a way of life "that consumes the life forces of other beings." Reggio has said the target was the northern hemisphere "consuming" the lives of people in the south. Then he took a crew south, filmed those people at work, cut the footage in the north and sold it to northern arthouse audiences as a transcendent night out. I'm not sure he missed the irony. He may have meant the viewer to feel implicated, and the title is friction of a kind, if you've read the glossary. On screen there's much less of it; the music is too lovely, the slow motion too kind. You leave feeling moved, which is a comfortable place to leave from.

London was doing a cruder version in print. Arena and the style monthlies around it set expensive designer clothes against destitution, sometimes real, sometimes dressed up for the afternoon, until it stopped being a shoot and became a register, a way of making a jacket look like it had lived. The trick depended on the reader never meeting the backdrop. From an office in Soho a peeling wall reads as authenticity; to the person living behind it, it's damp and a landlord who won't answer the phone. The magazine only ever showed you the first version, and the clothes borrowed their seriousness from a place they'd never have to stay.

By the mid-nineties the look had moved off the backdrop and onto the body. The sociologist Karen Bettez Halnon, writing about what she named Poor Chic, notes that Calvin Klein's heroin chic campaign for cK Be in 1996 ran in Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire and Arena, all pallor and scratches and starved faces. Her sharpest point is about the promise underneath: the reader could travel "to and through radical superficial otherness" and come out with their conventional identity intact. That's the deal Powaqqatsi offered too. Halnon also quotes Johnny Rotten's 1977 line about a holiday in other people's misery, which could stand as the caption for all of it.

The two mechanisms aren't quite the same, and the difference matters. The cK Be models were paid professionals wearing hardship as a costume, and they could take it off after the shoot. The men on the ladders at Serra Pelada weren't wearing anything. They didn't get a credit, and whoever lived in the streets behind an Arena shoot got, at most, a crew in the way for an afternoon. Their lives became texture, which is a specific kind of use: you don't need the person, just the surface they've worn into things. In both cases the viewers were comfortable enough to find that beautiful, and they took the texture home and left the hardship where it was.

At the time it read as sophistication. You were supposed to be the kind of person who could look at poverty without flinching and see form in it. People were asking the obvious questions out loud, though. In 1991 Ingrid Sischy took Salgado apart in The New Yorker, the same Salgado whose Serra Pelada pictures had made him famous: "To aestheticize tragedy is the fastest way to anesthetize the feelings of those who are witnessing it." Beautification, she argued, produced pictures that "ultimately reinforce our passivity." Susan Sontag later called him "a photographer who specializes in world misery." The question existed. It just lost, for a long time, to the people selling the pictures.

It didn't stop when the decade did, either. In 2002 Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian that a corrugated iron shack in Soweto and a homeless woman in London had both turned up in the style press within weeks of each other, "not as reportage but as subjects for fashion shoots." Elle Decoration introduced its Soweto story with "Stricken by apartheid, Soweto's townships were once a feared part of Johannesburg. Now they're a source of dynamic design." Williams did the sensible thing and laughed at it. We have learned, since, to ask who gets to look, who gets looked at, and who benefits. I'm less sure we ask it as readily about whatever's on the shelves this season as we do about something from 1988.

I still think Powaqqatsi is beautiful, and the score still does what Glass wanted it to do to me. I watch the opening differently now, though, wondering whether anyone ever showed those men the film, while they go on climbing in slow motion every time somebody presses play.

"Body by Roxanne," says page 98 of the January 1986 Vogue, in white serif type laid straight across Paulina Porizkova's collarbone. It's a cheeky credit to hand out. By then she'd fronted the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue two years running, only the second model to manage it, and she was still just twenty. The page never names her, but fans on The Fashion Spot file a Roxanne page from the January 1985 Vogue under her name too, so this looks like her second season with the label. A decade later ESCADA would lean on that same face far harder.

Of course the body helps, but what Roxanne is actually selling is fit. The swimwear label cut its suits in proportioned B, C and D bra sizes, a system it says it has offered since 1955, and the copy leans on that: "Soft, but controlled," then a suit that "fits like a blouson should but seldom does." Hence the top, a loose black bandeau bloused over the waist like a jacket, with a magenta sash knotted at the hip to hide the join. It's an enormous amount of fabric for a swimsuit, and all of it is there to smooth and cover rather than to swim in. The control comes from DuPont's Antron nylon and Lycra, whose mark sits in the bottom corner, the same fibre that turns up a few years later on a Mary Jane Marcasiano page, trademark symbol and all. A chiffon scarf in the same pink wraps her head and trails down one arm to a silver cuff, the only part of the outfit with nothing to hold in.

For all the styling, she stands like a fit model. Arms hang straight, fingers loosely curled against her thighs, hips square to the camera, chin level with the lens. It's the posture of a woman at a fitting waiting for someone to check the seams, which suits an advert whose whole argument is that the thing fits.

Hegel's new A200 is a plain black box with two knobs and a small display, and it's almost certainly the next thing I buy. It only comes in black for now, which I'd have picked anyway. What sold me is what Hegel left out. The A200 shares its 150-watt amplifier with the new H200, but where the H200 adds streaming and a DAC, the A200 has no converter, no network card and no digital inputs at all.

My rack doesn't need any of that. The Cambridge Audio CXN100 already handles everything upstream: streaming, the 2,000-odd ripped CDs, and its own ESS ES9028Q2M converter. The H200 would mean paying for a second streamer and a second DAC, then leaving one of each switched off. I went back and forth on external DACs at the start of the year, and the conclusion still holds for me: pick the converter you like and don't bury another one inside the amplifier.

The CXN100 has balanced XLR outputs and the A200 has two pairs of balanced XLR inputs, so the whole connection is one short balanced run. The phono stage borrowed from Hegel's V10, the variable output for a subwoofer and the headphone socket are, for now, hardware I'd pay for and ignore, which is the H200's sin on a smaller scale. At least none of it will ever ask me to install a firmware update.

ATC rates the SCM11 at 85dB sensitivity and recommends 75 to 300 watts. The Exposure 2510 I wrote about in February makes 75, the very bottom of that range. It never actually ran out of headroom, and I rarely took the volume past halfway, yet the combination always sounded as if it were leaning into the load rather than sitting back from it. That's an impression, not a measurement, and it's carrying most of the case for more power. The A200 doubles the rated power into 8 ohms, which is only about 3dB, margin rather than transformation. Hegel's quoted damping factor above 4,000 I'd take with some suspicion, since the cable and the SCM11's own crossover dilute it long before it reaches the drive unit.

The A200 is due in late October at £2,750. ATC describes the SCM11's impedance curve as flat and easy on amplifiers, so the pairing shouldn't be a fight. My doubt runs the other way. Back in February I wrote that the SCM11 has a forensic streak that could sound lean or clinical with the wrong amplifier, and the Exposure's warmth always covered for that. A grippier amplifier might strip the cover away. So I want to hear the CXN100 feeding the A200 over XLR into my own speakers, playing my own records, before any money moves.

Four women come at the camera in cream knitwear and white tights, three of them laughing and one smiling at the floor, and the only words anywhere are two names. SAKS FIFTH AVENUE sits small in the bottom corner, the store's credit line, while DANA BUCHMAN gets the big serif capitals under four grey squares, which looks backwards until you remember who was famous in October 1987. Buchman's first collection had only just reached the shops, and in August the Los Angeles Times had promised hers was "a name you'll hear more often come September," when the clothes arrived and a national advertising campaign rolled out with them. The label belonged to Liz Claiborne, and it was the company's first attempt to sell anything under a name other than its own, so the page works hard to make that name stick.

Buchman, then 35, had spent five years designing knitwear at Claiborne after stints at Christian Dior and Ellen Tracy, and it shows. The Times described sweaters, shirts, pants and skirts "in winter white", with "many long sweater sets over skirts or pants" at $96 to $296, and that's the picture almost exactly: a V-neck long enough to pass for a dress with a cardigan slung over its shoulders, a checkerboard cardigan knitted tone on tone over a white shirt, a cable turtleneck with the sleeves shoved up, all in creams I couldn't tell apart. Famke Janssen is on the left, then Suzanne Lanza, then Gail Elliott in the cable knit. Janssen had moved to America from the Netherlands three years before and signed with Elite; the acting came later.

For all that type, my eye goes first to the woman on the right, with her cropped hair, round glasses and one hand in her pocket. She's in the plainest piece in the picture and looks the least like a model, because she isn't one. It's Buchman herself, the "gamin looks" the Times had noted, standing right beside her own name in the biggest letters on the page.

The Times turned out to be right. By the mid-nineties Dana Buchman was one of the leading bridge labels, the price tier Escada's Laurel took care to place itself just above, and Buchman later said of the launch, "Liz gave me the keys and told me to go for it." In 2008 she gave up the upscale line to design for Kohl's, which bought the brand outright in 2011 and dropped it in 2020.

Jil Sander shot the new bottle among quartz, and for once the props aren't lying, since the copy promises "shimmering and palpable mineral textures".† Salt belongs to the second chapter of the house's Olfactory Series 1, six scents out this summer, and Alexis Grugeon composed it around aldehydes, upcycled cardamom, French lavender and CO2-extracted vanilla. The brief is about as specific as fragrance copy ever gets: "the feeling of our skin slowly drying after a swim."

On paper there's no sea in it at all. There's no marine note and no salt note, nothing in that list you'd call watery, and yet the house files it as "ambery watery". It hands that job to the aldehydes, which in its own words "turn these sensations into a kaleidoscope". When the first six scents arrived, the brand called aldehydes "sparks of light flashing through the fragrances", and in Salt they're supposed to become the light on the surface of the water. That's a lot to ask of one family of molecules, and at $290 for 100ml it had better work.

For one Parfumo reviewer, at least, it does. They placed Salt in "the smooth, watery-synthetic aquatic style" of the nineties and early 2000s. I doubt the house meant that as the reference, but I hear it as praise. Those were the years when clean and wet smelled like the future, before every shower gel caught up.

Jil Sander already sells a salt scent, and the two could hardly sit further apart. Sun Sea Salt & Genista came out in 2021 with an actual sea-salt note over mimosa and broom, and it's sold as a tester on discount sites like Direct Cosmetics. The new one comes in heavy glass and describes its vanilla by extraction method. Same name over the door, different shops entirely.

Amendment, 23 September 2026. My own bottle arrives on Friday 25 September, and I'll update this post once it's here, with a verdict on whether the scent lives up to its copy. ↩

The cover gives away more than the book ever does. On the Neely edition's black cloth there he is, a robed yellow figure with red wings and a halo that looks more like a warning than a blessing, while inside, Robert W. Chambers never lets you see him at all. Booksellers call this binding the Yellow King cover and list it as a third printing of the 1895 first edition; the earliest copies went out in green cloth. Chambers was about thirty, back from seven years of art school in Paris, and he'd been selling illustrations to Life and Vogue before he turned to fiction. The cover is the first attempt anyone made to picture the King, and it's handsome and not remotely frightening, which is the whole problem in miniature.

The book is odder than its reputation suggests. It holds nine stories and a sequence of poems, and only the first four deal with the thing everyone remembers: a play, also called The King in Yellow, whose first act is harmless and whose second act drives anyone who reads it mad. Chambers never gives us the second act. He gives us an epigraph instead, Cassilda's Song, and it does more work than a hundred pages of description would:

Along the shore the cloud waves break, The twin suns sink behind the lake, The shadows lengthen In Carcosa.

After those four stories the collection drifts into Paris studio life and romance. "The Demoiselle d'Ys" keeps one supernatural time slip, borrowed in spirit from Gautier, and by the end the horror has simply left the room. The change of tone hits like a missed stair. It reads like a man deciding, halfway through a book, what kind of writer he's going to be.

Even the vocabulary is borrowed. Carcosa comes from Ambrose Bierce's "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" (1886), and Hastur from Bierce's "Haïta the Shepherd" (1891), where he's a gentle god of shepherds. Chambers seems to have liked the sound of the names and not much else. In "The Repairer of Reputations" Hastur turns up alongside the Hyades and Aldebaran, as though it were a place, and nobody tells you which reading is right. That refusal is the whole method, and it's the thing every later writer would be tempted to fix. The story itself is still the strongest of the four. It's set in a future America where, from April 1920, a white Government Lethal Chamber stands open on Washington Square for anyone tired of living, and it's narrated by Hildred Castaigne, who has read the play and believes he's the rightful king of it all. You can never quite tell how much of his New York is real. "The Yellow Sign" does something simpler and nastier with a churchyard watchman whose face suggests a plump white grave-worm and who keeps asking the same question: "Have you found the Yellow Sign?"

Chambers made the choice for good. He turned to romances and historical novels, and by most estimates had one of the most successful literary careers of his period, with several best-sellers and a run of silent-film adaptations around 1920. H. P. Lovecraft, who read The King in Yellow in early 1927, put the regret plainly in Supernatural Horror in Literature: "One cannot help regretting that he did not further develop a vein in which he could so easily have become a recognised master." That essay is part of the reason the early weird fiction stayed in print through most of the twentieth century while the best-sellers faded. Lin Carter later called the book "probably the single greatest book of weird fantasy written in this country between the death of Poe and the rise of Lovecraft," and critics from E. F. Bleiler to S. T. Joshi to T. E. D. Klein have treated it as a classic. The Los Angeles Review of Books calls Chambers "practically the Harper Lee of horror", which is fair for a reputation resting on four stories and a poem cycle.

Lovecraft handled the material lightly. He dropped the Lake of Hali, Hastur and the Yellow Sign into a list of dread names in "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1931), in passing, the way you'd nod to a friend across a room. August Derleth is where it goes wrong. He developed Hastur into a Great Old One, spawn of Yog-Sothoth and half-brother to Cthulhu, which is exactly the family tree Chambers had declined to draw. Along the way Hastur, a name Chambers left floating somewhere between god and place, got fused with the King himself, and Hastur's reference entry now lists eight epithets, from The Unspeakable One and The King in Yellow to Xastur and Kaiwan, for a figure Chambers never once described. It's a filing system. Once the King has a genealogy, he stops being a rumour and becomes an entry. Chaosium, the publisher of the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, kept the name circulating into the nineties, publishing Robert M. Price's anthology The Hastur Cycle in 1993, and by then the King was something you could roll dice against.

The second wave arrived in January 2014 with the first season of True Detective. Nic Pizzolatto's Louisiana is full of spirals carved into victims and murmured references to Carcosa and the Yellow King, and it sent a lot of viewers hunting for a play that was never written because it was never real. For most of its eight episodes the show understood Chambers better than Derleth did. Then the finale gave Carcosa a physical address, a derelict fort in the backwoods, and the Yellow King turned out to be a man with a grudge and a lawnmower. It's a fine ending for a crime drama and a poor one for the King.

Some of the best work since has taken Chambers's side. Signalis, the 2022 survival-horror game, keeps the play sealed for its protagonist until the very end and builds the game around the waiting, which is his trick moved into a medium that usually rewards you for opening everything. A YouTube video called Searching For a World That Doesn't Exist, which a student reporter credits with a resurgence of interest in the book, held people, in the reporter's reading, because it refuses to explain itself and nothing ever confirms the theories it sets off. Chambers got there first, then went off to write romances and left the second act for everyone else to not write. You can read the whole book free at Project Gutenberg. The first act, anyway.

"You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here." Zork gives you that and waits. Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels and Dave Lebling wrote it on a PDP-10 at MIT in 1977, and it spread over the Arpanet while its authors watched strangers play in real time. "If we found a lot of people using a word the game didn't support, we would add it as a synonym," Daniels said, so the players ended up writing part of the dictionary.

Colossal Cave Adventure, the game that inspired it, understood two words at a time. Zork took adjectives, prepositions and compound verbs, and unlike ELIZA, which had faked comprehension a decade earlier by handing your words back to you, it wasn't bluffing. The troll, the Cyclops and the jewel-encrusted egg were modelled as objects that could act and be acted on. What it chose not to model mattered just as much. Walk into an unlit room and you read "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue," and the game never shows you one. A lot of Zork's pull comes from that restraint: a precise world, with the frightening parts left to you.

Home computers couldn't hold the mainframe version, so Infocom, founded in 1979 by three of the authors and seven colleagues, cut it into three and wrote each part once, shipping an interpreter for every machine. Apple, Atari, Commodore and TRS-80 owners all bought the same Zork, which is a large part of why it sold. The trilogy passed 680,000 copies by 1986, and Inc. reported in 1983 that Zork I alone, one title out of fifteen, made up a fifth of Infocom's sales. Jason Scott, who has spent years preserving this material, says the games "were a reason to buy a home computer."

The early follow-ups added plenty without giving up the restraint. Lebling said Zork II brought in plot and magic spells and Zork III was less straightforward, with timed puzzles, and the Enchanter trilogy (1983 to 1985) carried the same world into harder, spell-driven games. After Activision bought Infocom in 1986, the additions started to show things. Beyond Zork (1987) put a map on the screen and bolted on role-playing combat, and the prequel Zork Zero (1988) added menus, graphics and built-in hints. Infocom was already drawing the house before Activision closed it in 1989.

Activision's own Zorks finished the job. Return to Zork (1993) dropped the parser for point-and-click and filmed actors, the same year as the far more popular Myst; Zork Nemesis (1996) needed three CD-ROMs, and Zork: Grand Inquisitor (1997) brought the jokes back. Mental Floss says hardcore Infocom fans "don't even acknowledge that these games exist." Grand Inquisitor probably deserves better than that, but the fans have the core of it right. Once you film the white house, it's one house, and the typed version gave every player a different one, with a grue nobody ever had to cast.

Lebling conceded in 2007 that to modern players Zork is "retro, it's hard to get into, it's not graphical." Scott is blunter: "Most people don't want to read." They're right about the game. Zork is a museum piece now, a decorated one: the Library of Congress named it one of the ten most important video games in 2007, and in November 2025 Microsoft, which owns it through Activision, released the source of all three games under the MIT License. The form outlived it, though. Typing a sentence to a machine and getting prose back looked finished by the mid-nineties, and now it's how a lot of people use a computer.

Claude "leads" 26% of Anthropic's own AI research and development as of August 2026, with more than 90% of the work at "collaborates" or above and nothing yet running fully autonomously. That figure sits in three measurements the Anthropic Institute has just published, offered to the public as a way to watch the loop where AI builds AI while the industry argues about pacing the frontier. The methodology sits in an appendix longer than the argument.

The ratings use a six-level scale borrowed from Epoch AI, assigned by a Claude judge reading evidence a Claude research agent gathered. Everything turns on where "collaborates" ends and "leads" begins, and that boundary is soft. Anthropic checked the judge against the staff who own each area: it matched them exactly 59% of the time, and they matched each other 35% of the time. The judge is more consistent than the people, which is the more interesting result, and it means the scale isn't measuring something its raters can reliably see. Ratings landed within one level 97% of the time, and one level is the whole distance between 26% and a rather different number.

The weighting deserves a look too. Each sampled person contributes one unit per week, split evenly across every task they touched, so a morning on a postmortem counts for as much as three days of pretraining work. That is a headcount proxy rather than a time proxy, and Anthropic calls it crude. The bigger question is where the basket came from: a Claude agent read the Slack messages and internal documents of a 20% staff sample to list what people worked on. Work that no human touched or discussed in July 2026 never entered the catalogue, and so cannot be rated as automated.

Compute is where the hedging piles up. Six percent of AI R&D compute went to safety over the sampled week, twelve percent of the AI-driven portion. Before you can react, you are told compute is an imperfect proxy, safety research is inherently compute-light, the estimate is deliberately conservative, efficiency gains shrink the share, and one week is not a trend. Each of those is true. The line that would settle the matter, that an independent third party could re-run the classifier on a random subsample, is written in the future tense.

Oversight is the strongest section, partly because METR has already red-teamed the offline monitor from outside. Roughly 30,000 agents, every action through a monitor before execution, one block in 47,000 across more than a billion August decisions. That is somewhere around twenty thousand blocked actions in the month, and Anthropic says humans review any blocked action within a week. It doesn't say how.

The contribution here isn't the numbers. It's the header repeated after each one: what any AI developer could report today. Outside researchers had already proposed metrics like these; the difference is that Anthropic ran them on itself and published the working. A method with its weak points attached is harder to walk back than a principle, and it hands outsiders something to pull on. METR did that in July, re-deriving researcher uplift from Anthropic's own published code figures and noting that the methodology behind Anthropic's lower estimate wasn't public.

Third-party evaluators with internal access, which is what a credible brake would need, appear here as something Anthropic plans to embed. Until they are, this is a company measuring itself with its own models and publishing the result, which is worth more than nothing and less than an audit.

Estelle Lefébure laughs straight into the camera in Laurel's spring 1990 picture, one hand pushed into her hair and a painted bangle slipping down her forearm. The jacket is black cotton overprinted with lime, cobalt and tomato-red shapes, finished with gold buttons and a gilt bull's head pinned near the pocket. It is loud and cheerful, a little naive. Another page from that season calms down: she sits with one arm draped over a knee, gazing off to the side, in a cream sweater knitted with two spotted animals in ochre, sheer chiffon in the same colour below, and a wooden bangle stacked against a gold one. Three years earlier she had been on the cover of Grazia in Italy. Neither spring scan mentions Escada, and you would never guess from them that the clothes came out of the same Bavarian operation as one of the loudest luxury labels of the decade.

Margaretha Ley and her husband Wolfgang started a knitwear business in 1976, launched Escada in 1979, and added Laurel a year later as a secondary, mid-priced line. It sold. By the end of the eighties Laurel was outselling Escada by number of pieces, and when the Leys visited Neiman Marcus in Chicago in November 1989, the Tribune described Laurel and a second sister label, Crisca, as Escada's "sportier relatives", made at the same complex outside Munich as the main collection.

The autumn campaign is franker about the family tree. Glancing back over her shoulder, Lefébure wears a black jacket worked in gold scrollwork that could have come straight off an Escada rail, with star studs in her ears and a gold star stitched to the cuff. An oversized, lower-case "Laurèl" runs across the bottom, and beneath it, in small capitals, "A Division of Escada". Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus sit in the top corner. The copy reads "For Every Woman who has Personal Style down to an Art," and the tagline is "The Smart Decision."

A fashion label calling itself a smart decision is selling the parent company's name at a discount, and the page does exactly that, setting Escada's embroidery and Escada's stockists beside a word usually reserved for insurance. In 1991 the Los Angeles Times still listed Laurel and Crisca among Escada's "designer lines", alongside the new Apriori collection.

Within three years Laurel was a problem. Margaretha Ley died in 1992, the group started cutting losses, and Crisca closed with its spring 1993 collection. In a piece on Escada's American recovery plan, from around 1994, WWD called Laurel "a troubled division that was categorized above bridge and below designer": too dear for the bridge shopper, not quite the real thing. Five Laurel stores were shut. Jackets that had wholesaled at $220 to $325 were cut to roughly $155 to $220, and ten deliveries a season became five or six. The new customer was a career woman of about 40 to 55, and the competition was Ellen Tracy and Anne Klein II: sensible career separates, a long way from a bull's head pinned to a painted jacket.