Newsletters: This font is taking over book covers

As a kid, snacks were super important to me. Now, the idea of a properly stocked home having a range of snacks, sorted by time-slot appropriateness (weekend, school lunch, after-school, late-night, sleepover party, soccer game, etc.) and purchased in bulk, always highly processed and nonperishable, feels deeply suburban, a phenomenon specific to having a large home and living not very near a grocery store. Families in the suburbs are constantly preparing for the end times of snacks, always having nightmares about their last satisfying crunch.

Whenever I go home, as I did recently for the holidays, I'm struck by how these habits have stuck with my parents even as most of their kids have aged out of the school-day routine. There are still tubs of pretzel rods, boxes of individual Goldfish bags, multi-packs of granola bars, mini sleeves of Oreos, family-size bags of Tostitos. I feel so tender looking at all the junk. What if suddenly I were a teen again? My mother would need to be ready.

This is why I was so delighted by Rachel Sugar's investigation into whether "healthy snacks" — cauliflower puffs, "Beanitos," Cheeto knockoffs made of peas — are actually healthy, and moreover, how much it even matters. In it, Rachel (cauliflower beat reporter) points out that potato chips are an "all-American villain," which is incredible to visualize, and that "there is so little fun in the world," which is hard to admit but is unfortunately the case. You should read all of it, knowing that it ends with Rachel telling you that you are more than permitted to snack.

—K aitlyn Tiffany, reporter at The Goods

Are "healthy" snacks actually good for you?

Sarah Lawrence for Vox

Recently, I ate some "cauliflower puffs," which are like Cheetos, only they are not Cheetos, because they are made with cauliflower. Cauliflower is a vegetable. Did you know vegetables are good for you? I've heard this. The bag, from a brand called Vegan Rob's, doesn't exactly promise that "Probiotic Cauliflower Puffs" are "healthy" — as in, it does not use the word "healthy," a term that the Food and Drug Administration is redefining at this very moment. But it did say it was "plant based" and "crunchy good!" and also gluten-free, non-GMO, vegan, and "powered by Ganeden BC30 Probiotic," which, the website for Ganeden BC30 Probiotic tells me, is an "EXTREMELY stable" ingredient added to "many foods" to support gut and immune health.

The cauli puffs don't say they're "healthy," but the bag exudes an general aura of health. (We reached out to Vegan Rob's to discuss, but they haven't commented as of press time.) The main ingredient isn't cauliflower — it's sorghum, no one is pretending otherwise — but still, it seems, at the very least, cauliflower-adjacent. The bag is a vegetal green with a cruciferous print and purple accents. It is granola-chic. If you were in middle school, it is what your weird friend's cool mom would serve you after school. She would be blonde and elegant but wearing Birkenstocks.

"Love yourself, our planet, and all living things," the cauli bag advises. "Snack as clean & kind as possible." It says I don't have to be vegan to enjoy plant-based snacks (true!) and that if I "meditate and focus on the crunch," I might feel my "stress melt away" as I "reap the benefits of the cruciferous cauliflower." Vegan Rob is kidding, sort of. Vegan Rob is self-aware.

Also, Vegan Rob is very good at making snacks, because cauliflower puffs are delicious. They taste like Cheetos with substance. Is that substance a little bit like sawdust? Maybe. I prefer to think of it as the dust of virtue. It gives them a pleasant sort of heft, like you are eating an actual food product, and not caloric air. At the Kroger I checked, they cost $3.99 for 3.5 ounces, compared to Frito-Lay's Cheetos Puffs, which cost $1.89 for roughly the same amount.

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This font you know from old pulp novels is all over new books

Sarah Lawrence for Vox

What it is: Lydian is a "humanist" sans-serif typeface. That means it gives the impression of being written by a human hand, but it doesn't have any of the characteristic flourishing strokes more commonly associated with calligraphy or popular serif fonts (the best known being Times New Roman). It has crisp, knife-cut-looking edges and is most recognizable by its O, which is punched out in the middle by an eye shape that tilts backward.

Lydian was created by designer and children's book illustrator Warren Chappell in 1938, and named for his wife Lydia. It was used on the cover of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake in 1939, and then on the classic children's novel Homer Price in 1943, but didn't really find its groove until after World War II.

During the war, serialized novels like The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew had super-simple covers with plain white spines and were published on cheap paper, in keeping with the patriotic austerity of the time. But in 1946, artist Rudy Nappi was hired by Nancy Drewpublisher Grosset & Dunlap and art director Ted Tedesco to redesign the series' cover with a dust jacket that was covered all the way around — with a bigger illustration and a more striking overall design. Lydian Bold was chosen as its title font, jump-starting a decade of the font as a go-to for commercial fiction.

In addition to dozens of Nancy Drew titles, Lydian was used on a variety of pulp novels throughout the 1950s — including paperback romances like Paul V. Russo's This Yielding Flesh (which was subtitled, somewhat incredibly, "She flung herself into a man's arms to save herself from an unnatural life"). In the 1960s and '70s, it appeared in the credits forLucille Ball's The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy, but mostly it faded from popular culture for decades until reappearing briefly, first on the cover Patti Smith's 1992 memoir Woolgatheringand, more importantly, in 1994, in the credits for NBC's Friends.