This month’s Short Here cocktail special, the Velvet Fedora, is “the whiskey cousin of a margarita" and a smooth riff on the Ninth Ward.
The Ninth Ward is traditionally a spicy, citrus-forward cocktail made with bourbon, and named after the eastside district of New Orleans. John swapped the bourbon for the floral, velvety notes of Japanese whisky, creating something refreshing and exceptionally smooth.
This month’s Short Here cocktail is the Velvet Fedora. John describes it as the whiskey cousin of a margarita, and a riff on the Ninth Ward.
The classic Ninth Ward recipe uses bourbon, which John swapped for the floral, silky notes of Japanese whiskey creating a refreshing, super smooth result.
Ingredients:
Nikka Days Japanese whiskey
Velvet Falernum
Elderflower liqueur
Creole bitters
Elderflower salted rim
On the menu through the end of May.
Most companies operate under the rule of shareholder primacy, a framework that prioritizes short-term financial gains above the needs of employees, customers, and the planet.
Why are all businesses ruled by this logic? @ericriesactual says it's time to rebel.
Watch his full Long Now Talk at the link in bio.
What an amazing evening exploring The Untimely with philosopher poet @bayo.akomolafe . Time-bending and consciousness-expanding, he was also laugh-out-loud funny. A Long Now Talk that really got people talking.
More opportunities to connect with Bayo at Long Now are coming soon, stay tuned for a workshop announcement next week, followed by the full episode on YouTube.
Special thanks to our incredible co-host Eden Pearlstein of @ayinpress . Photos by @anthony_thornton .
An orrery takes the vast timescales of planetary orbits and compresses them into relative motion. This was mindboggling technology in the early 1700s.
The gear ratios encode the real astronomical relationships (e.g. Earth takes 365 days to orbit the Sun, Mars takes 687 days, Jupiter takes ~12 years) so when the gears are cranked the viewer experiences all the planetary timescales at once, with the outer planets circling slower and the inner planets spinning faster.
The orrery was an important breakthrough for long-term thinking. The ability to visualize planetary movements in relation to ourselves reminds us that we live inside systems that are intricate, ordered, and interconnected.
Drop by to see the beauty and precision of an orrery in person.
A small bird in the forests of Central America has been performing the same cooperative courtship dance for 2,000,000 years.
Male manakins form lifelong partnerships between a senior alpha and a junior apprentice. The apprentice waits years before earning the chance to mate, yet he keeps dancing anyway. It may be the oldest collaborative performance on Earth.
Read the full story at the link in bio.
Meet the Decanted Mother-in-Law — a cocktail so old, its original name was lost to time.
For more than 150 years, this pre-Prohibition classic was a New Orleans hospitality staple. Back in the day, the matriarchs of the family would mix it by the quart and leave it out in a crystal decanter before breakfast, ready to welcome any guests who dropped by. But somewhere along the way it fell out of fashion.
The recipe was almost lost forever until a man named Brooks Baldwin discovered it tucked away in his grandmother's vintage recipe box, inherited from her mother-in-law before WWI. Thus, it gained a new name.
This recipe continues to survive and thrive at The Interval, served in a vintage apothecary bottle.
Ingredients: bourbon, curaçao, maraschino, amer, Angostura & Peychaud's bitters.
Any guesses at what the original name was?
A new opportunity to collaborate with Long Now: introducing Labs, a collaborative space to test, prototype, and build long-term tools.
If you are a designer, researcher, writer, or technologist interested in the deep future, we want to hear from you. Submissions are now open.
Lab Series 001 is a collaboration with the Protocol Institute to investigate three aspects of civilizational durability that are being radically reshaped by frontier technologies.
-> Lab 001.1: Book of Time - An open call to submit a concept for a new way of marking, experiencing, or making sense of time.
-> Lab 001.2: Epistemic Cycles - Seeking an individual or team to investigate historical patterns of technological disruption that broke down society's ability to discern truth.
-> Lab 001.3: Interspecies Protocols - Exploring the protocols needed to support interspecies ecologies.
Apply at the link in bio.
Ever tasted gin from a tree that lives 5,000 years?
Our Bristlecone Gin, crafted by our friends at @stgeorgespirits , was developed exclusively for The Interval’s Bottle Keep. Its botanicals and juniper berries are wild foraged from Long Now’s Bristlecone Preserve in Nevada, home to some of the world’s oldest trees.
St. George Spirits was founded in 01982, making them one of the first craft distilleries based in the USA, and we’re so lucky to collaborate with them. They're based just across the Bay in Alameda, CA.
Master Distiller Lance Winters says, “You can crack open a bottle of our stuff a hundred years from now and it’s going to smell the same way it did as when we distilled it. We’re able to capture an olfactory slice of time.”
You can find more of their fine work on The Interval spirits menu: Botanivore and Terroir gin, green chile vodka, and single malt whiskeys. If you're interested in having your own bottle keep of bristlecone gin, learn more about the program at the shop link in bio.
Scholar Melody Jue worked with artists, musicians, and divers to develop soundscapes that help us “smell” with our ears.
Experience the moment in her Long Now Talk where she helped us remap chemosensation through synesthesia, using the density and flow of sound to mimic chemical gradients of seawater.
Watch Melody Jue's full Talk at the link in bio.
Thank you to everyone who attended our Long Now Talk with mathematician and machine learning researcher @ninamiolane and science historian @claireisabelwebb . They explored the question of consciousness from an unexpected direction: geometry.
Geometry is the most ancient branch of physics, Miolane said. It’s the language we use to describe the curvature of spacetime and the general relativity of the universe. Might it also map the universe inside us?
Stay tuned, the full Talk will be released on YouTube next week. Huge thanks to our partners @futurehumans.info@berggrueninst@noemamag for a magical evening.
Photos by @anthony_thornton
For Earth Day 02026, we're thinking about 02114. That's the year Katie Paterson's Future Library will finally open: a library for readers who haven’t been born yet.
In Oslo, artist and Long Now Council member @studio.katie.paterson has spent the last decade building the @futurelibraryno . Over the next 100 years one writer every year will contribute a text. The writings are held in trust, unread and unpublished, until the year 02114. A forest was planted in Norway to supply paper for the books when they’re ready to publish, a century from now.
So far the library includes works from Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Sjón, Elif Shafak, Han Kang, Karl Ove Knausgård and more.
