Month: April 2018
April 30, 2018
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I just backed Emoji: Designed by Shigetaka Kurita, NTT DOCOMO, Japan, 1999 on @Kickstarter
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The Good Room
This talk was given on February 15, 2017 at Substans in Bergen, Norway. I’m a designer, but writing is another important part of my practice. Most of what I’ve written focuses on making the case for a cohesive and generous philosophy for how we design technology: it must not only look good and feel…
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An alternate ending to the tragedy of the commons – Nadia Eghbal – Medium
I recently read Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons and have been evangelizing it so enthusiastically that I figured I’d do a quick writeup of its main points, and why it’s been so transformative to my thinking. Elinor Ostrom’s work deals with common pool resource (CPR) management, for which she…
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NBA Commissioner Adam Silver Has a Game Plan
Photograph courtesy of the National Basketball Association Adam Silver is one of the longest-tenured team members in the National Basketball Association. But he doesn’t spend much time on the court. In more than 26 years, Silver, who briefly practiced law before joining the league in 1992, worked…
April 27, 2018
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Raptors baby! pic.twitter.com/ow7UcrEzFg
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The Surprising History of the Infographic
As the 2016 election approaches, we’re hearing a lot about “red states” and “blue states.” That idiom has become so ingrained that we’ve almost forgotten where it originally came from: a data visualization. In the 2000 presidential election, the race between Al Gore and George W. Bush was so razor…
April 26, 2018
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I just had a fantastic customer service experience with American Express.
I had a fraudulent charge on a card. They spotted it and warned us. I then decided to cancel the card since I pretty much never use it anyway, and I was able to cancel the credit card by talking to their toll-free voice assistant. I still can’t quite believe I cancelled a credit card in about 5 minutes without talking to a human about it.
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The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t quite get modern American misogyny
Hulu The Handmaid’s Tale is a difficult show to appreciate right now. After following the plot of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 book in its first season, its second…
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My old blog posts look almost exactly like my tweets do.
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A Smorgasbord of Solutions for Global Warming
Opinion Thinking about Earth Day, I did a Google search for “global warming solutions.” Up popped a slew of “what you can do” lists from leading scientific and…
April 25, 2018
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The Rise in Self-Proclaimed Time Travelers
In the year 2000, a time traveler reportedly walked among us. He was from the year 2038, but he drove a 1967 Chevy Corvette. His sweet time ride disrupted…
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It’s official! Wordnik is now a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit!
You may remember when we first announced we had started the process of becoming a not-for-profit corporation, with the mission of collecting and sharing data…
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Opinion | Sometimes a Broken Glass Is Just a Broken Glass
It is tempting to think that a work of great art appears in the material world complete and perfectly formed, like a rainbow or an egg, that every note or…
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The future of mobility will be multi-modal, shared and zero emission.
This interview is published in The Beam #5 — Subscribe now for more on the topic
Robin Chase is a transportation entrepreneur who became famous for co-founding… -
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The Cult Brand Whisperer Behind Casper, Allbirds, And Birchbox
In 2013, the patent for finasteride, the active ingredient in male-pattern-baldness medication Propecia, expired. This might seem an unlikely development to…
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Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans?
A look at the available evidence
It only took five minutes for Gavin Schmidt to out-speculate me.
Schmidt is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space… -
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Review: Beyoncé Is Bigger Than Coachella
INDIO, Calif. — Let’s just cut to the chase: There’s not likely to be a more meaningful, absorbing, forceful and radical performance by an American musician…
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Beyoncé’s Triumphant Homecoming at Coachella
Beyoncé’s Coachella performance, her most comprehensive retrospective to date, underscored not only her Southernness but the global black vernacular that…
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The Myth of “Real” America Just Won’t Go Away
Watching the film Phantom Thread , I kept wondering why I was supposed to be interested in a control freak who is consistently unpleasant to all the people…
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I wonder if English should move away from gendered pronouns (he/she, his/her) rather than adding a third (they/their), gender-neutral option. (I assume no one wants to be called “it”.)
If the gender of the person discussed is important it can be referenced elsewhere.
April 24, 2018
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The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action. — Frank Herbert
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Selling Politics Like a Lifestyle Brand
There’s a small stack of Planned Parenthood T-shirts in Rebecca Davis’s closet, each one acquired at a volunteer event with the organization. Davis is a…
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The Odds of That
When the Miami Police first found Benito Que, he was slumped on a desolate side street, near the empty spot where he had habitually parked his Ford Explorer. At about the same time, Don C. Wiley mysteriously disappeared. His car, a white rented Mitsubishi Galant, was abandoned on a bridge outside of…
April 23, 2018
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I firmly believe the best way to deal with knuckleheads looking to spread mayhem is to deprive them of the spotlight they seek.
Toronto is a welcoming, tolerant, strong, and peaceful city. No knucklehead is going to change that.
April 22, 2018
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The Raptors play-by-play guys’ constant ref-bashing is embarrassing
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OMG those socks. Kids, never have heroes, they’ll always let you down in the end.
Clash frontman Joe Strummer runs the London Marathon in 1983. Photo credit unknown. pic.twitter.com/yhHXMsXSAR
— British Culture Archive (@britcultarchive) April 22, 2018
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This is fantastic. This looks like the future to me.
Kpop boy band doing Latin pop with some rap thrown in because why not.
Everything is a remix.
April 21, 2018
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Why does this keep happening?
BREAKING: Nabi Tajima, the world's oldest person, dies in southern Japan at the age of 117. https://t.co/K45IbVFQwc
— The Associated Press (@AP) April 22, 2018
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This is particularly good. 👏🏼
distraction is the enemy of vision
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 17, 2018
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In a broken world: Towards an ethics of repair in the Anthropocene – Duncan P McLaren, 2018
Introduction Section: Both materially and discursively, the Anthropocene is redefining humanity’s relationship with the Earth, positioning humans not only as a…