David Letterman (whose team is doing a wonderful job of presenting and narrative his formidable archives) recently posted an amusing anecdote about Prince's first appearance on his show, in December of 1994. It's a fascinating story, because it reveals a lot about the two men who … | Continue reading
"We almost never never actually teach people how to use the ordinary tools of business communication in more effective ways. So, I'm gathering some advice that I regularly share with people, in hopes that this helps you get your messages across more effectively." This is brillian … | Continue reading
You've heard the call to action at the end of nearly every podcast you've ever listened to: "Listen to us on your favorite podcast app", or in the phrasing of podcaster extraordinare Roman Mars, "...wherever you find podcasts". (By the way, you should be radicalized by the recent … | Continue reading
It has been a full generation since the last time I can remember the definitive, most credible perspectives on a major tech news story happening across multiple people's personal blogs, but amazingly, the open web renaissance has brought us the kind of human moment that hasn't be … | Continue reading
Not too long ago, I said "Thanks to the mistrust of big tech, the creation of better tools for developers, and the weird and wonderful creativity of ordinary people, we’re seeing an incredibly unlikely comeback: the web is thriving again." And at the time, there was some skeptici … | Continue reading
I find myself often having to explain to people how our reaction to certain events or actions depends a lot on the existing context where we were relating to someone, and while it's imperfect, there's an analogy I often use to do that job. Imagine a mug that's left on a coffee ta … | Continue reading
I didn't think I'd keep reflecting on this day, but somehow I can't. It's been with me for most of my lifetime that I can remember, and perhaps more importantly, the world's narrative about what happened that day is completely unrecognizable to me. I suppose I have to keep reflec … | Continue reading
It's happened again! I'm an answer in today's Daily Crossword Puzzle over at Vulture, called The Single Puzzle This is thanks (once more) to Malaika Handa, seen previously in one of my earlier crossword appearances. Yes, this somehow happens fairly regularly. | Continue reading
VCs and big tech CEOs are living together in a reactionary bubble, insulated from people who might call them out # | Continue reading
Today, in the New York Times, Paul Krugman shares a key insight that his headline editor summarizes as The Rich Are Crazier Than You and Me. While this is true, what's even more key to me is why the most prominent tech tycoons (who are one of the most powerful cohorts of the rich … | Continue reading
Today’s highly-hyped generative AI systems (most famously OpenAI) are designed to generate bullshit by design. To be clear, bullshit can sometimes be useful, and even accidentally correct, but that doesn’t keep it from being bullshit. Worse, these systems are not meant to generat … | Continue reading
There's an extraordinary amount of hype around "AI" right now, perhaps even greater than in past cycles, where we've seen an AI bubble about once per decade. This time, the focus is on generative systems, particularly LLMs and other tools designed to generate plausible outputs th … | Continue reading
Back in the latter part of the 20th century, a lot of subcultures held onto a concept called "selling out", a nebulously-defined idea based on a negative view of compromising one's values or creative expression in the pursuit of money or, sometimes, power. And the thing is, like … | Continue reading
Back in 2021, my friend Jesse Thorn interviewed two of my creative heroes, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, for an absolutely indispensible episode of Bullseye. The whole show is incredible, but the highlight for me is at the 47:43 mark: Jesse: I have a friend who is king nerd of t … | Continue reading
I've been saying this for a few years now, but it's worth recording here for the record: It's impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech CEOs and venture capitalists are being radicalized by living within their own cultural and social bubble. Their level of paranoi … | Continue reading
Mastodon and the fediverse are clearly taking off, bringing in millions of new users, and also organically inspiring a wave of technical innovation that dwarfs all of the efforts that the bribes and empty promises of the Web3 crypto bubble couldn't touch. I'm even enjoying having … | Continue reading
You should absolutely keep some ketchup around the house. And soy sauce, and Sriracha, and a good BBQ sauce. And some honey. But if you really want to add flavor to all kinds of dishes (I don't mean fancy stuff, but like, if you want to punch up a sandwich or a salad or make some … | Continue reading
The only time someone remembered September 11, 2001 to me in the last year was when a stranger mentioned it as part of the reason he was trying to assault me. So it's clear that the events of that day have fully passed into myth, useful only as rhetoric in a culture war, or as ju … | Continue reading
"Our institutions have no capability for responding to crisis with compassion." # | Continue reading
Though he’s one of the most gifted and important artists to have ever created popular music, Stevie’s legacy as a tireless and fearless advocate for justice may he even more powerful, and is too often overlooked. We should heed every word he says. On April 4th, 1968 at | Continue reading
Each year, folks ask me for predictions about what's going to happen in tech in the coming year. Generally, what they're really asking is what I hope/expect is going to happen to the five or six biggest companies in the tech industry. That matters, especially in the context of | Continue reading
I've been blogging here for more than 20 years, and the only organizing principle behind what I write here, if anything, is a fascination about how we make culture, and especially how we make culture around, and with, technology. Nothing has exemplified the complexity of that con … | Continue reading
I've sprnt a couple weeks using a new 14" Apple MacBook Pro daily (as a replacement for my last machine, which was a similar, but rather terrible, 2016 MacBook Pro) and thought it might be valuable to share a few observations that might help you assess whether it's a useful | Continue reading
The key to protecting people's privacy on the internet isn't in trying to stop users' data from being sent to different services, it's in poisoning the well by having user data be so inconsistent, disconnected, spurious or expensive to collect that today's surveillance infrastruc … | Continue reading
The key to protecting people's privacy on the internet isn't in trying to stop users' data from being sent to different services, it's in poisoning the well by having user data be so inconsistent, disconnected, spurious or expensive to collect that today's surveillance infrastruc … | Continue reading
One of the biggest sources of miscommunication is people having different styles of communication, or different norms about the right way to express emotion or context even if there's agreement on more straightforward aspects of verbal communication. Things like "ask vs. guess" c … | Continue reading
One of the biggest sources of miscommunication is people having different styles of communication, or different norms about the right way to express emotion or context even if there's agreement on more straightforward aspects of verbal communication. Things like "ask vs. guess" c … | Continue reading
Recently, a motivated Prince fan created a spreadsheet that attempts to catalog the complete the entirety of Prince's thousands of recordings over the course of his career. Beginning in 1973 as a then-15-year-old Prince taped his first few tracks, and going through (so far) the e … | Continue reading
Every year, for twenty years now, I've written an observance of this day. Sometimes it's for myself, sometimes it's for the small cohort of folks who've checked back in with me on this day every year since then, a group which has shrunk a bit over the years. But this | Continue reading
Amongst the many new publications that's popped up in the current newsletter boom, I've been enjoying Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci's "Embedded". One of the biggest reasons why is the recurring feature "My Internet", which details the way one person uses all the common aspects of … | Continue reading
Here are some before-and-afters from a set of photos my parents took on a visit to Manhattan in 1985. I tried to replicate the angles as best I could in the modern photos. MacDougal StreetSixth Avenue | Continue reading
The Konami Code is one of the longest-running inside references amongst both gamers and coders, acting as something of a shibboleth for a certain kind of nerd. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. I never owned a Nintendo Entertainment System, didn't care about mos … | Continue reading
With the recent availability of nearly all of Prince’s catalog on the most popular streaming services, it’s a great time to (re?)discover the breadth of Prince’s incredible body of work. The full scale of Prince’s music is probably too much for any unfamiliar listener to | Continue reading
After a pause of a few years, Twitter announced today that they're going to resume allowing any user to request the blue verification checkmark for their account. The social and technical dynamics around Twitter verification remain as fraught and fascinating as they were in the e … | Continue reading
Anytime a big new market pops up, people rush in to stake their claims and make their fortunes. Our culture loves creation myths, especially in technology. Fables about lone geniuses are ubiquitous in the tech industry, with their fundamental falsity doing nothing to undermine th … | Continue reading
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of the greatest games ever made, and one of the breakout hits of the Nintendo Switch platform, which is on its way to becoming the 10 most popular video game consoles of all time. But now, years after its release | Continue reading
On this day in 2007, Prince won Super Bowl XLI with a soaring halftime performance that climaxed with the skies opening up to honor his guitar solo. It is not just the best-regarded halftime show ever, but was to that point the most-viewed musical performance in American history. … | Continue reading
It is almost impossibly difficult to explain Robin Byrd to anyone who was not an adult living in NYC toward the end of the last century, though everyone who recognizes the name immediately responds with unbridled enthusiasm. This comes up in conversation for me from time to time … | Continue reading
I love any kind of advocacy for safer, more humane streets, so it was a real joy to get to guest on the wonderful The War on Cars podcast. Doug Gordon went deep, really pushing into the connections and surprising resonances between what makes communities safe and healthy in both | Continue reading
Duleshwar Tandi, better known these days as Rapper Dule Rocker, is one of the most successful and influential rappers to have ever come out of the Kalahandi district in Odisha, where my family is from. I jumped into his catalog of videos this weekend and was blown away not just | Continue reading
A while back, when I wrote out in plain words that we have a politically dominant death cult ruling America right now, I worried about the risks of saying my opinion so straightforwardly. As you might expect, I did get a good number of people saying I was exaggerating, or | Continue reading
These days, I'm a hobbyist web developer. That used to be a common thing people did; it was like having a crafting hobby, but with web pages. Over the last decade or two, though, making a website became either something done by professional developers using incredibly complex too … | Continue reading
Ted Lasso, the standout series of Apple's new Apple TV+ streaming service, rightfully earned a place on many people's lists of the most-recommended new shows of 2020. But what's best about it is what makes it so different from most other highly-acclaimed shows, especially "presti … | Continue reading
I was delighted to discover Omar Rizwan's TabFS, a brilliant hack that lets you see your browser tabs as folders and files on your computer, because it's incredibly clever on its own, but also opens a view into how shift in metaphor can totally change the way we see technologies | Continue reading
I was delighted to discover Omar Rizwan's TabFS, a brilliant hack that lets you see your browser tabs as folders and files on your computer, because it's incredibly clever on its own, but also opens a view into how shift in metaphor can totally change the way we see technologies | Continue reading
In the early days of Twitter, there was a pleasingly low-tech tradition called "follow friday" (which people later denoted with the #FF hashtag), wherein people listed other accounts that they suggested you might follow. It did a good job of providing a manually-curated form of d … | Continue reading