Reading Collection

Michael Walker was acting strangely. The 23-year-old Seattle soundman had just been re-introduced to Sara Merker, a college student a couple years older than he was, and the first thing he said was, "Can I take a picture of you for my blog?" This was the second time Merker had really talked with Walker. The first time was a very brief interaction at a party about a year before. Now Merker was at a bar to meet Nick, a mutual friend, and Walker had tagged along. "I was like, why is this guy being … Full Article →

The ReturnOctober 06, 2011, 11:00 AM EDT Everyone knows the transaction where the board sided with John Sculley and Steve left Apple. Steve sold all of his Apple stock, kept one share, and founded NeXT. Typical Steve maneuver. When I was still at Sun Microsystems, I visited him at NeXT—we did a bunch of deals with him. He was exactly the same way he was at Apple: strongly opinionated, knew what he was doing. He was so passionate about object-oriented programming. He had this extraordinary dept … Full Article →

Celebrity This talk by John Gruber and Merlin Mann at SXSW 2009 came up again from John’s link to a fan video, and it was a great reminder to redownload the audio and listen again. It has become much more famous than I imagine John or Merlin expected at the time, but I’m particularly fond of it because of my experience in the audience, which I should share before I become too uptight about my blog appearing unprofessional or embarrassing myself in front of my famous internet friends. I almos … Full Article →

For months, I have been paralyzed. When I sit down to write, nothing comes out. When I start to design, I stare at a blank canvas. My ability to create things does not meet my own ridiculously high standards of quality, so I get stuck in endless loops of making decent things, throwing them away, and then starting over from scratch. I've been floating around in despair, in a creativity limbo, which has nearly destroyed me. I stopped working. I became depressed. In a last ditch effort to restart m … Full Article →

Warning: This article may bring up emotions that you didn’t know you had. I’m not writing this article to enrage you or insult your profession. I’m writing this article because it is definitely an issue that should be addressed by anyone that makes money from web design services. It is a question that people in the world ask and it is in your best interests to have a good answer for them. This isn’t a rhetorical question or one that I am using to start drama. I thought of it because yest … Full Article →

‘”Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing his hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”‘ – A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens I know, I know. I’m old. Worse than that, I’m nostalgic. In the past few months, I’ve written about my love for fountain pens, and traditional publishers, and pape … Full Article →

Eric Gill was an infinitely talented artisan: a sculptor, illustrator, writer, and type designer, among other talents. His yin and yang mind mingled the analytical and creative with ease. He was one of those elite who balanced the oil-and-water mix of form and function. The British are known for their stately charm, and Gill’s work was no exception. Whether carving in stone or working with print, he brought finesse to such a staid and familiar thing as words. Stone alphabet carving by Gill. No … Full Article →

What shall Justin Timberlake do today, on this overcast Los Angeles afternoon in the middle of spring? He’s been going to sleep early, around 10 P.M., so when he wakes up in his Spanish-style house in the Hollywood Hills, he feels well rested. He crawls out of bed all alone to brush his teeth, take a pee with his two boxer dogs, and make himself a cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich with eggs and sausage. He answers a few e-mails, noodles around on his guitar while absentmindedly watching t … Full Article →

Programming in the 21st Century It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your own ideas. - Newest Entry - - Complete Archives - - Atom Feed - I'm a recovering programmer who has been designing video games since the 1980s, doing things that seem baroquely hardcore in retrospect, like writing Super Nintendo games entirely in assembly language. These days I use whatever tools are the most fun and give me the biggest advantage. Since 1999 one of those tools … Full Article →

I do not enjoy Facebook — I find it cloying and impossible — but I am there every day. Last year I watched a friend struggle through breast cancer treatment in front of hundreds of friends. She broadcast her news with caution, training her crowd in how to react: no drama, please; good vibes; videos with puppies or kittens welcomed. I watched two men grieve for lost children — one man I've only met online, whose daughter choked to death; one an old friend, whose infant son and daughter, and … Full Article →

To download this talk as a Word Document, click here. American Psychological Association, Invited Address, 2007 Media Transcript Full Version Is There Anything Good About Men? Roy F. Baumeister Contact: R. Baumeister, Eppes Eminent Professor of Psychology & Head of Social Psychology Area, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, Baumeister@psy.fsu.edu, phone 850-264-8792. Note, I will be out of the country July 3-31 except for the night of July 17-18. You’re probably thinking that a ta … Full Article →

“We are overcome by anguish at this illogical moment of humanity.” — Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara I was born in 1979, when the world still was quite a simple place. “They” hated “us”, we hated them, the ozone layer had no holes and we were only 21 years away from flying cars and all the other major technological advances the year 2000 promised. I was a bit too young to be aware of the second Cold War, but 1986 was quite a good reminder that nuclear holocaust – even though I had only … Full Article →

Print PDF Is there a new anti-intellectualism? I mean one that is advocated by Internet geeks and some of the digerati. I think so: more and more mavens of the Internet are coming out firmly against academic knowledge in all its forms. This might sound outrageous to say, but it is sadly true. Let’s review the evidence. 1. The evidence Programmers have been saying for years that it’s unnecessary to get a college degree in order to be a great coder–and this has always been easy to concede. … Full Article →

Lessons learned: Americans are hotheads, Australians are drunks—and never say where you're calling from. Read the story everyone's talking about. By Andrew Marantz on Tue. July 5, 2011 3:00 AM PDT "We were asked to hate everything Indian," said 26-year-old Arnab (shown in his Delhi flat).Photographs: Sanjit Das/Panos I stand flush against the window of a Toyota showroom, trying to stay in a shrinking sliver of shade. We're on the cusp of midday, which, in Delhi in June, lasts most of the day a … Full Article →

Text-based adventures were written as much as they were designed, employing tantalizing adjectives to create a sense of the world In my mind, the house is clapboard, with a black, precisely shingled roof and shutters in a bit of disrepair. The sky is always an intangible, faded blue, and the forest surrounding the clearing is dark green. In other words, it's always summer -- and hot, since I imagine the house surrounded by long, tan, untrampled grass. The front door is boarded -- I pictured som … Full Article →

Outline/Corbis There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?" If at this moment, you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. … Full Article →

The World Science Festival's panel on Probability and Risk started out in an unusual manner: MIT's Josh Tenenbaum strode onto a stage and flipped a coin five times, claiming he was psychically broadcasting each result to the audience. The audience dutifully wrote down the results they thought he had seen on note cards, and handed them in when the experiment was over. Towards the end of the program, he announced there were low odds that even one person in the audience had guessed the right order … Full Article →

'Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that increasingly have come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning. From metal detectors to drug tests, from increased policing to all-seeing electronic surveillance, the schools of the 21st century reflect a society that has become fixated on crime, security and violence." So reads a passage from the opening pages of Lockdown High, a new book by … Full Article →

(I am currently suffering from a bad cold, and it's screwing with my ability to think straight. So rather than risk damaging my real work in progress, I decided to tidy up some thoughts I've been kicking around for a while, and bolt together this essay. Which will, I hope, begin to highlight the problems I face in trying to write believable science fiction about space colonization.) I write SF for a living. Possibly because of this, folks seem to think I ought to be an enthusiastic proponent of … Full Article →

Yesterday 37 Comments [NB: Today's guest post is by the world's most famous ex-blogger, the great Kathy Sierra.] We’re always searching for that secret formula, that magic pixie dust to sprinkle over our products, services, books, causes, brands, blogs to bring them to life and make them Super Successful. Most marketing-related buzzwords gain traction by promising pixie dust results if applied to whatever it is we make, do, sell. “Add more Social!”. “Just need a Viral Video!” “It’s … Full Article →

NEW DELHI—Instead of playing cricket with the kids in the alleyway outside, 4-year-old Sumit Jha sweats in his family's one-room apartment. A power cut has stilled the overhead fan. In the stifling heat, he traces and retraces the image of a goat. In April, he enrolled in the nursery class of Shri Ram School, the most coveted private educational institution in India's capital. Its students include the grandchildren of India's most powerful figures—Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress p … Full Article →

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Tech Life standards-free, chaotic, atomic pushes The Anatomy of a Notification In an otherwise elegant and well-integrated operating system, the notifications user interface in iOS 4.x feels like a wart — a tacked-on afterthought that offers a bare minimum of usefulness. Competitors have jumped all over this weakness. An early Microsoft Windows Phone ad implies a strategic notifications deficiency by showing users glued to their iPhones… because of the platform’s alleged inability to give … Full Article →

Of all the cities in India that I have lived in, Delhi by far has had the best public transport infrastructure. I was a regular user of the city buses during summer vacations in class 8th and 9th when I had joined a computer programming course out of my personal interest. Following this the next major phase of my life when I used city buses came in class 11th and 12th. I would take a bus to travel from school to my coaching classes and also back home. Back then, I had no choice. There was a car … Full Article →