From the midst of Mitchell Kanashkevich’s stupendous photo essay Mauritania, the Most Amazing Place You’ll Probably Never Visit rises this image, capturing what must rank among the world’s most primitive phone booths still in operation.

The phone booth on The Payphone Project that most closely resembles Mauritani’s grass shack public phone is the Isla Flotantes, on Lake Titicaca, Peru.

This booth, on an artificially made floating island, appears to be a bit more gimmicky than Mauritania’s remote antenna-powered public phone.

It’s been a rough couple of months here in payphone land. Nothing really good has happened. A 3-year long relationship ended; an old friend died far too young; financial oblivion has seemed imminent (but now looks avoidable); on top of all that Amazon got rid of its Free App Of The Day, one of the quiet little freeloader joys of my tablet-obsessed existence.

For the moment the Payphone Project Facebook page is dead. It will return sooner or later.

What about payphones? New York City awaits its first Link device from the newly named Intersection. Intersection is the latest incarnation of a confusing series of mergers and synergies bringing forces of numerous technology and advertising firms to a monopoly franchise which would replace the city’s payphones with multipurpose communication and information hubs called Links. These devices would offer free municipal gigabit WiFi and free phone calls within the United States.

No fully functional prototype of a Link device has yet been presented to the public.

The first Link devices are promised to be on the streets of New York by the end of 2015.

Don’t expect them to look like the phones booths of Mauritania or Peru. Just sayin’. This stuff’s gonna be MODERN.