Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / October 25, 2026

Inside Church Rate Corner, a Late Baillie Scott House in Cambridge

William Fawcett visits Church Rate Corner, a late masterpiece by the Arts-and-Crafts architect M. H. Baillie Scott, set in central Cambridge with no street frontage. Designed in 1924 for Marjorie Duckett as her married home with Arthur Sewell, who died in 1926, it later housed Joan and Stanley Bennett for more than 50 years and now belongs to Michael Nedo and Gillian Moore, only its third owners. Photographed by Will Pryce, the piece walks the almost symmetrical garden front, the south-facing rooms, the plain timber stair and oak-board doors, and a gravity-fed heating system still in operation. Diane Haigh, the author's late wife, was conservation architect for its 1992 restoration.

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Inside Church Rate Corner, a Late Baillie Scott House in Cambridge

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Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / October 24, 2026

Why Cinema Was John Berger's Medium, From Ways of Seeing to His Films With Alain Tanner

Timed to the centenary of John Berger's birth, Carlos Valladares argues that cinema was 'the Berger medium par excellence,' because it makes the spectator a collaborator in the telling. He traces the critic from a 1936 diary entry recording a solo viewing of Modern Times, through his 1965 Picasso monograph and 'The Moment of Cubism,' which he links to montage, to the novel G. and Ways of Seeing. The essay's heart is Berger's trilogy with Alain Tanner: La salamandre, Middle of the World and Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, read through Miou-Miou's cashier Marie, arrested and deported for giving groceries away.

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Why Cinema Was John Berger's Medium, From Ways of Seeing to His Films With Alain Tanner

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Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / October 23, 2026

An Organist Plays and Ranks All 606 Hymns in the New English Hymnal

Maddie Lay, an Oxford-based arts writer and part-time church organist, spent a month playing through all 606 entries in the New English Hymnal and ranked every one. Its ancestor, the English Hymnal of 1906, was compiled by Percy Dearmer and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and was initially banned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, lest it dethrone the popular Hymns Ancient and Modern. The 1986 revision kept roughly two-thirds of the original numbers and added about a hundred more. Lay ranks them from the depths of hell to the heights of heaven, as a guide to which hymns deepen worship and which can be safely ignored.

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An Organist Plays and Ranks All 606 Hymns in the New English Hymnal

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Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / October 22, 2026

Colin Williamson's Photographs of Japanese Game Culture Enter the Video Game History Foundation Archive

Colin Williamson was a game journalist embedded in Japan from 1999 through the mid-2000s, writing for IGN, Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine and PC Gamer. The Video Game History Foundation has added his photography collection to its digital archive, where the images are freely accessible. Shot on what was then a new digital camera, the hundreds of photos cover Tokyo Game Show, Nintendo's Space World 2000, Akihabara game stores and Sega's Kyoto Joypolis arcade. They include the Shenmue booth at TGS Autumn 1999 and the 2005 Electroplankton launch, where Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata joined Toshio Iwai.

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Colin Williamson's Photographs of Japanese Game Culture Enter the Video Game History Foundation Archive

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Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / October 21, 2026

Tori Wrånes Talks Through Her Sailcloth and Bronze Figures in the Nordic Pavilion

John Gayer talks with Tori Wrånes about her work in the Nordic Countries Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, where How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin, shared with Klara Kristalova and Benjamin Orlow, runs through November 22. Her largest piece there, Human Lace, joins eight or more figures in sailcloth and bronze. The sails had crossed the Atlantic many times before she learned to stitch them with sail needles, which she likens to sewing with a knife. The birds are sand cast, the hands lost wax, and a foghorn from the city where she grew up sounds once an hour.

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Tori Wrånes Talks Through Her Sailcloth and Bronze Figures in the Nordic Pavilion

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Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / October 20, 2026

A Fourteenth Century Dante Commentator Retells the Death of King Arthur

Christopher Berard and Morris Tichenor translate the gloss that Benvenuto da Imola, a scholar lecturing in Bologna, wrote on Inferno XXXII.61-62 in his Latin commentary on Dante, composed between 1373 and 1388. Working from Boccaccio's chapter on Arthur and the Geoffrey of Monmouth tradition, Benvenuto tells the whole story: Arthur king at about fifteen, his wars against the Saxons and in Norway, Denmark and Gaul, the Round Table and its laws, the refused Roman tribute, Mordred's seizure of Guinevere, battles at Richborough and Winchester, the duel in which each man wounds the other, and Arthur carried to Avalon.

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A Fourteenth Century Dante Commentator Retells the Death of King Arthur

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Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / October 19, 2026

A São Paulo Bakery's Identity Draws on Japanese Brazilian Shop Lettering

Lisa Cain looks at Estudio CRU's identity for Mirá, a São Paulo bakery that joins Japanese and Brazilian baking. She grounds it in Brazil's Japanese diaspora, more than two million people and the largest outside Japan, whose families adapted home methods to local ingredients, pickling papaya, watermelon and chayote. The identity sets Nikkei Maru, a typeface inspired by the lettering on immigrant-run shops, restaurants and hotels, against oversized Latin type and earthy colours. Cain's argument is that fusion branding usually lines up two countries' symbols, where this one shows how the traditions actually came together.

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A São Paulo Bakery's Identity Draws on Japanese Brazilian Shop Lettering

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