The Daily Report
-
Tales o’ Tech: Suffering Fools
Why first impressions are often correct. Today’s jerk is tomorrow’s techno-fascist.
-
Mix
The start of a beautiful weekend.
-
Her Glamorous Life
Snow White—17 years old—didn’t come meowing for food when I entered the kitchen at 6 a.m. An hour later I found her lying motionless on the sofa. I stared until she moved, slightly, nestling her…
-
The Most Important Industrial Designer of All Time
One Frenchman can’t be wrong. Push to the edge of what people will accept. Stop there. Raymond Loewy called it MAYA, and used it to design the modern world. The most important industrial designer you’ve…
-
Ebb, Meet Flow: Intrinsic Design in a Nutshell
In 2020, the gifted makers of websites at Clearleft shared methods to achieve fluid responsive design. “Utopian” web design was (and still is) their half-kidding name for this approach, which Apple’s Jen Simmons, working indendently,…
-
For students who make websites
Meet WordPress.com Education, a new, free product for teachers and students.
-
A Permanent Home
Your writing needs a permanent home—a domain that you own and control. Every few years, the internet convinces writers that a new digital paradise has arrived. First, it was social media like Facebook. Then blogging networks like…
-
You lost me at “infielder.”
The instant a business guy uses a sports metaphor to make his most important strategic point, I am lost. If you want me to understand your business idea, try wrapping it in Wendy Carlos’s secrets…
-
The name of this LP is “Side One.”
On Sunday, I published Side One of my album on Bandcamp. The name of the album is also “Side One.” It is instrumental music with roots in Soundtrack, hip-hop, funk, jazz, 19th Century Romantic classical,…
-
Stalin decided what was good science. Millions starved.
What happens when leaders choose political expediency over science?
-
The Secret
If I learned one thing in 25 years of running design and education companies, it’s that idealism isn’t a business strategy. If you wonder why my partners and I had to shut down organizations we…
-
Memories Can’t Wait—or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying About the Web
The web is still the best hope we have for a durable, shared memory. But it requires us to be gardeners, not merely tenants.
-
The End
ON THIS DAY in 1971, Pamela Courson found Doors frontman Jim Morrison dead in the bathtub of their Paris apartment. The cause of death was heart failure. No autopsy was performed. Morrison was 27. A…
-
The Human Story of the Open Web
STOP ME if you’ve heard this one: The members of an extended family spend years curating a shared online photo album. Then the website they posted on vanishes, flushing their collective memories away forever.
-
Underdubbed
When my brother Pete and I were kids, and our parents were out of town, we ditched school for a week and cut an “album” by recording backing tracks to my dad’s reel-to-reel, then live…