There are actually a lot of things that are awesome over here, at Makeshift Magazine. Makeshift is a quarterly magazine, printed on super-gorgeous-luxurious paper that I just love to hold, about creativity in unlikely places. You know, places everyone else calls “poor.” Here’s a video that not only tells you what we’re up to, but gives you lots of other local names for what we back here call “DIY.”
I joined on last fall as features editor, and we’ve just published our second issue. With it has come a redesign of the website, which is also gorgeous. In fact, the creative geniuses behind this magazine concept are design-world folks, so everything about it is gorgeous. It almost makes me want to give up words.
Each issue has a theme, and this second issue is about mobility. Meet the team trying to manufacture the first car on Africa’s continent for the tough off-loading needed on so much of the continent. Follow a motor taxi rider as he investigates those roadside gasoline stands in far-off places, this particular far-off place being the Thai-Vietnam border. Find out how in the world that matatu system really works — if anyone knows? Take a wild journey through the amazing ingenuity behind smuggling drugs from Mexico to the U.S. (Hint: Secret tunnels that look like acquaducts, Jesus statue made of cocaine…)
Every article in Makeshift is a surprising look beneath the ordinary into the hustle, hacking and straight up inspiration that makes most of the world run. The magazine was founded by wunderkind Steve Daniels, and has been abley abetted by Myles Estey, about whom I would use the adjective “intrepid” without irony. I joined on because I loved this as an angle on Africa. It seemed to get so many places I’ve been exactly right: that there’s a whole world that official things like a census or a work survey or taxes or job training programs don’t see. In fact, it’s most of the world. So follow us — on twitter, online, in print — and find out what it looks like. It might even assuage some of your well-worn cynicism.
If this sounds interesting to you, get in on a subscription… because we sold out of our last issue toute de suite, and when they’re gone, they’re gone.
Three other things that are awesome:
–A English version of “Bright Brass,” the gorgeous multimedia piece (“photofilm,” in one of the producers words) by Dutch journalists Laurens Nijzink and Rachel Corner. I posted this earliest his week, in French with French subtitles, and to great excitement among you all.
—A Mexican family torn apart by violence in the midst of a drug war — and, allegedly, at the hands of the national Army.
—Why Koreans are planting trees in Mongolia
