The Fender Stratocaster is one of the most iconic guitars of all time. Back in 2009, a court ruled that the Stratocaster design was so ubiquitous, in fact, that it was essentially in the public domain, meaning other guitar builders could use it for their instruments. However, following a ruling earlier this year in a German court, Fender has sent cease and desist letters ordering other companies to stop using the design.
In March 2026, Fender scored a default judgement against Chinese-based Yiwu Philharmonic Musical Instruments Co in the Düsseldorf Regional Court in Germany, that set out that the Strat was no longer a simple trademark, but “a copyrighted work of applied art”.
While this default judgement was made because Yiwu Philharmonic Musical Instruments Co failed to turn up for the trial in question, and only covers instruments sold or imported into the European Union, it seems Fender may have wasted no time in beginning to use this ruling to attempt to police the use of the Strat body shape more overtly.
This has caused no small amount of controversy within the guitar community. Numerous YouTubers have posted their thoughts concerning Fender’s actions, including El Dorado Guitars, who theorizes about Fender’s legal strategy.
Private equity-fueled enshittification comes for everything these days, even electric guitars.
After a 15-year-long absence, Seefeel returned earlier this year with their fifth studio album, Sol.Hz. So now seems like a good time to share this earlier interview that Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock did with Simon Reynolds.
Seefeel slip in and out of categories. In their time, they’ve been designated “ambient” and lumped in with “post-rock”. Some revere them as part of the pantheon of Nineties IDM, alongside Autechre, Aphex Twin, and μ-Ziq. Seefeel’s early sound — blurry, wombing groovescapes propelled gently but firmly along by flicker-pulses and rippling patterns — anticipated the Basic Channel / Chain Reaction / Pole style of dubby house and techno that came out of Berlin a few years later. Equally, Seefeel’s colder, clanky ‘n’ cavernous side pre-echoes the dubstep of Pinch and Loefah. Yet despite all these associations and connections, parallels and pigeonholes, they sound unique.
Related: To celebrate the release of Sol.Hz, Sarah Peacock curated a playlist of the band’s various influences and inspirations, which include Kraftwerk, Noor Jehan, Broadcast, and The Raincoats.
Also related: My review of Seefeel’s debut album, Quique. “If this isn’t the music for late night zero-g trysts, where everything is bathed in various shades of blue and hours seem to stretch out until they no longer move, then I don’t know what is.”
Vini Reilly may be one of the most influential musicians you’ve never heard of, but his work as The Durutti Column has been lauded by the likes of Brian Eno, Morrissey, Harry Styles, and Frank Ocean. Back in 2025, the Crack Magazine staff put together a brief intro to Reilly’s musical world.
Like so many bands to emerge from Manchester’s post-punk ferment, The Durutti Column — the project helmed by waif-like guitar virtuoso Vini Reilly — would go on to exert an outsized influence on countless artists. Yet even from the beginning, The Durutti Column stood apart. The monumental miserablism of his peers was out; in its place, Reilly tilted towards shimmering melancholy through delay-drenched guitars and gnomic lyricism.
His influences were diffuse and, like Reilly himself, quietly spoken: jazz, folk, classical music. Little wonder, then, that The Durutti Column’s sound travelled so widely — from slate-grey Manchester to the violet-blue haze of the Balearics, and further still: into pop, into electronic music and into the present moment, via a sample on Blood Orange’s recent single, The Field.
Related: This 1983 performance of “Sketch For Summer” is one of the prettiest pieces of music I’ve ever heard.
Also related: The Durutti Column’s first album in fifteen years, titled Renascent, will be released on July 31, 2026.
Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord — which follows religious parents who are accused of child abuse after moving to Norway — won the top honors at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur took second place. Barbra Streisand, Peter Jackson, and John Travolta all received honorary Palme d’Or awards for their contributions to film.
Keith Phipps and Scott Tobias discuss Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a contemplative 1979 sci-fi film about three men journeying into a mysterious Zone that will grant people their greatest desires.
[A]s much as I love this film, I would have a hard time telling anyone unfamiliar with it what exactly it is. That we know the three central characters only by their professions suggests we’re in the realm of allegory, but an allegory for what? And while the Writer and Professor have roles we recognize from our world, the Stalker’s job seems to be unique to the world of Stalker. As for the narrative, it begins like a hero’s journey straight out Joseph Conrad’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, as the trio leave the everyday world for one of “supernatural wonder.” But it’s hard to say they achieve any kind of victory, decisive or otherwise. And instead of returning with a boon, the Stalker seems defeated and more morose than when he set out. Should we consider Tarkovsky’s film a rebuke of this kind of story?
Related: My review of Stalker, which is one of my all-time favorite films.
While there are greater consequences from Trump’s misguided war in Iran, this is a good reminder that its effects are wide-ranging: manga is about to get more expensive.
Japan’s manga industry is bracing for the economic impact of war between the United States and Iran as fewer petroleum shipments drive up the price of naphtha, a key raw material in printing, to its highest level in four years.
Why it matters: Printed manga volumes often have glossy dust jackets made using a polypropylene film, a derivative plastic product from naphtha, and ink used in printing those covers also contains solvents made using naphtha.
Originally released in 1993 for the Super Nintendo, Star Fox is one of Nintendo’s most beloved games. So naturally, fans were excited when Nintendo announced plans to remake Star Fox 64 for the Switch. Some fans were less pleased, however, with the characters’ modern (i.e., more realistic) appearance. Ian Dean writes about the difficulties and pitfalls of updating classic characters.
One of the biggest lessons character designers can learn from the best retro games is that silhouette matters, perhaps more than detail. What stands out and needs to be remembered from old games, like Star Fox or indeed Super Mario, are the bold shapes, oversized expressions and confident weirdness that made those characters instantly recognisable. Modern remakes often chase realism first, but realism can flatten personality surprisingly quickly and remove the quirks that made the characters appealing in the first place.
Game artists working on designs in the ‘90s and 2000s needed to focus on exaggerated features because stylisation was a means of overcoming technical limitations. The hardware of the '80s and '90s forced artists to prioritise readability, bold colours, and graphic shapes that worked on blurry CRT screens, and those constraints accidentally created an identity, and it's that style we remember and love.
Via TLDR Design.
An AI company is planning to “resurrect” Stan Lee to use the comic legend’s voice and likeness to narrate books and generate images and videos.
“Stan always believed in meeting his fans where they were: in the pages of a comic, at a convention, or in a quick on-screen cameo,” Chaz Rainey, a lawyer and board member for Stan Lee Universe, said in a statement. “This partnership is a way of continuing that. Fans have always told us that when they read his comics, they hear the words in Stan’s voice, and now, thanks to ElevenLabs, we can make that a reality.”
Gads, but there’s something ghoulish about that statement.
Project Nova is a complete redesign of the Firefox web browser to improve privacy, speed, and usability.
Keeping Firefox the best browser for being online today is what motivated our recent work to update Firefox’s design and design system. We’re aiming to deliver a more cohesive foundation for Firefox: making the browser feel cleaner, warmer, faster and more adaptable.
Internally, we’ve been calling this work Project Nova. The name fits: A nova can look like a new star, yet it comes from existing matter — a renewal, not a replacement.
Chrome still remains the world’s most popular browser, with Firefox a distant third after Apple’s Safari.
So much for being a bastion of free speech… Elon Musk’s X now limits users to 50 posts and 200 replies a day unless they pay up. Previously, users were limited to 2,400 posts/day.
This move could be a part of X’s campaign to cut down on spam and bot activity on the platform, as seen when it introduced the “about this account” feature in October that reveals where an account is based. However, those unhappy with this restriction said it could result in more users leaving the platform.
Via Techmeme.
Related: Meta has announced Facebook Plus and Instagram Plus subscriptions for $3.99/month each. I actually think it’s a good idea for a platform to charge for their services. But in return, paying users should be less subject to the platform (e.g., ads are removed, data collection is reduced, link posts aren’t penalized). Looking through the list of “Plus” features announced so far, I don’t see anything that really merits a subscription.
Congrats to the fine folks at Mere Orthodoxy, who just launched a gorgeous new website full of cool features and functionality. To mark the occasion, editor-in-chief Jake Meador has penned a lengthy essay concerning the modern shift towards a “fandom” model of media, and the challenges that poses for both journalists and those who want to be thoughtful readers and citizens.
Fandom models of media are basically amoral; we do not typically think of our sports fandoms as having moral significance. As much as I am sometimes tempted, I do not view support for Arsenal Football Club or the Iowa Hawkeyes as evidence of moral deficiency. But when we apply the fandom model to media, we reduce our relationship to media down to personal taste. This is a problem, of course, because media is speech and, as noted above, Scripture actually says a great deal about speech! So Christian media producers and consumers must participate in the media world in morally restricted ways while the bulk of the media world is not bound by such moral norms — which means that Christian media producers will feel a strong temptation toward the same sort of amoral style.
For media consumers, this can make it difficult to find trustworthy media and even more difficult to resist the deformative effects of consuming fandom-based media products that are unconcerned with basic moral norms. For media producers, there is a constant pull toward half-truth, mockery, or fabrication in order to expand one’s audience and to attract the attention of donors who care more about influence or victory than they do truth.
Did Pope Leo’s recent Magnifica Humanitas encyclical use a Tolkien reference to criticize Peter Thiel, a man who is fond of Tolkien references?
Leo seems in his encyclical to be sketching a completely different vision, showing Thiel and his Silicon Valley friends that there’s another way to “build.” Not in a world-bestriding, revolutionary way that seeks to earn a billion dollars while strapping AI vision systems onto cruise missiles, but in a quieter way, with love and charity worked out in our local field of action.
Or, as Gandalf put it above, “to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”
Related: Tech bros love to use Tolkien references for branding, but in doing so, reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of what Tolkien actually stood for. “It’s one thing to read and even obsess over Tolkien’s rich, imaginative stories. It’s quite another to appreciate them and understand what Tolkien was trying to say through them — which is where things get tricky, amusing, and even a bit disturbing.”
Unsplash, one of the web’s best sources for royalty-free stock photos, has added 1,000 images from The Smithsonian’s collection, including photos from the National Museum of American History and National Air and Space Museum.
Finally, John Gruber serves up the deep dive into the typography of the U.S. federal courts that you didn’t know you needed.
The gold standard is the U.S. Supreme Court, which uses Century Schoolbook. Yes, I just praised the Fifth Circuit’s change from Century Schoolbook to Equity as an upgrade, but tradition and consistency have their place. The Supreme Court’s typographic style has been stunningly consistent for — no pun intended — well over a century. (If only that were true of their recent decisions. Rimshot.) Here is last month’s Louisiana v. Callais decision — the gerrymandering/redistricting case. Here is 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education. I’d give the nod to the older one, which made better use of proper small caps, but the overall consistency is obvious.
Good typography matters in all things, and especially in federal court decisions. (I really like the quote that closes out Gruber’s post.)
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