September 2, 2018
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How Software Ate the Point of Sale
“Adam Hunger / Reuters I’m standing at the counter of a Vietnamese restaurant in Berkeley, ordering a pork bun. There was a time when I knew exactly what would…”
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It’s okay that your startup doesn’t have a communications strategy.
“When Marc Benioff’s Behind the Cloud was published in the Fall of 2009, it was declared required reading for all 50 Box employees. Because I was new to the…”
September 1, 2018
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Can we know what music sounded like in Ancient Greece? – Armand D’Angour | Aeon Ideas
“Terracotta amphora, c 490 BCE. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead; They brought me bitter…”
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Y Combinator Learns Basic Income Is Not So Basic After All
“In January 2016, technology incubator Y Combinator announced plans to fund a long-term study on giving people a guaranteed monthly income, in part to offset…”
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The Abandoned, Apocalyptic Architecture of One Bold 1970s Retail Chain
“One of SITE’s striking retail creations, the “Indeterminate Facade,” in Houston, Texas, around 1975. Courtesy of SITE In 1974, the American home goods retailer…”
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Is one drink per day really unsafe? That new alcohol study, explained.
“25,000 people would need to drink 400,000 bottles of gin to experience one extra health problem compared to non-drinkers. Getty Images/EyeEm “The safest level…”
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Spooky Theory on Ills of U.S. Diplomats in Cuba
“During the Cold War, Washington feared that Moscow was seeking to turn microwave radiation into covert weapons of mind control. More recently, the American…”
August 31, 2018
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Thought
The air show is happening in Toronto which means it is VERY noisy right now.
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Review
The Price You Pay (Aidan Truhen (pseudonym), 2018)
Whoa. This is one in-your-face crime novel. Not for the faint-of-heart. That said, it can be fun to get inside the head of a charming sociopath every now-and-then. As long as you can get out again.
I saw someone guessing this is a Nick Harkaway novel and I’m pretty sure it is.
I am a fucking asymmetric criminal startup. I got limited expertise in criminal strategic warfare. I hotdesk and I outsource and I franchise, but what I mostly have is a core concept, forward momentum.
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From Errol Morris, a list of 10 things you should know about truth & photography
“In 2011, writer and filmmaker Errol Morris summarized the main points in Believing Is Seeing , his book on the nature of truth, belief, and reality in…”
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The New Science of Seeing Around Corners | Quanta Magazine
algorithms The New Science of Seeing Around Corners By Natalie Wolchover August 30, 2018 Computer vision researchers have uncovered a world of visual signals…
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Thought
Isn’t this poster gorgeous? Those fonts!
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Thought
I’ve been working on my blog for most of the summer (with help, I’m not a WordPress geek by any stretch of the imagination). My next goal is to automate distribution of posts from the blog to social media.
August 26, 2018
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Review
Ball Lightning (Liu Cixin, Joel Martinsen (Translator), 2005/2018)
Liu Cixin really is a worthy successor to A.C. Clarke – the first author I became obsessed while a mere wee tike). This is a new English translation of an older novel that doesn’t quite have the expansiveness of Three-Body Problem, but was still a joy to read.
August 23, 2018
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Photo
Good morning!
August 22, 2018
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Review
The Beyond (Hasraf Dulull, 2017)
None of this makes any sense at all!
August 21, 2018
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Review
The Commuter (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2018)
Dumb. Fun.
August 18, 2018
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Review
Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi, 2017)
Not a fan – at all – of superhero movies, but this was fun. As with Deadpool, if they go for humor I can get behind it easier.
August 17, 2018
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Review
The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society (Mike Newell, 2018)
An old-timey romance that features beautiful shots of the Guernsey island landscape but otherwise is weak and problematic. We’re still making movies about women falling for their Nazis captors in 2018?
August 11, 2018
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Review
The Incendiaries (R.O. Kwon, 2018)
A great debut novel by R.O. Kwon. Cults and terrorism examined from a new angle. Maybe it’s “cult adjacent” more than about cults.
August 4, 2018
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Online Hate Is Rampant. Here’s How to Keep It From Spreading
Back in the last presidential campaign season, reporters on the tech and politics beats began noticing a rise in far-right memes that supported Trump. Memes…
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The glitzy menace of 1950s nostalgia threatens the world
When I search for the origins of today’s angry, backward-looking politics, I can’t help thinking of a specific August morning almost 50 years ago, on the final…
August 1, 2018
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Review
My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Ottessa Moshfegh, 2018)
Moshfegh writes wonderful stories about damaged women doing terrible things. This fantastical story of a woman going to extreme lengths to avoid the consequences of her life didn’t please me as much as her earlier novel Eileen, but it was satisfying nonetheless.
July 30, 2018
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Review
The Stranger (Orson Welles, 1946)
I hadn’t heard of this film until it popped up unexpectedly on Netflix. Now I know why.
July 29, 2018
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Review
Give Me Your Hand (Megan Abbott, 2018)
Sometimes when I’m reading a murder mystery told from the suspect’s perspective, I like to think about the same book told from the detective’s perspective. In this case, the detectives would have to be the most bumbling cops ever to not figure out what’s happening here. I’m not sure a novel set in 2018 can just ignore modern forensics and the ubiquity of surveillance technology.
July 28, 2018
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We Banned Holocaust Deniers From Our History Subreddit. Here’s Why Facebook Should Do the Same.
Michael Brück during his speech in front of the prison JVA Bielefeld-Brackwede in Munich, Germany, on May 11, 2018. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by David…
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by the Editors Visualization by Celine Nguyen. 1. Ever tried. Ever failed. Fail again. Fail better. Growing old in Paris, the Irish writer Samuel Beckett could…
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Academics explain David Foster Wallace to me
First, the flyers were defaced. Hung in the hallways of Illinois State University’s English department, the message was inked identically on each one: NAH I…
July 27, 2018
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Review
Extinction (Ben Young, 2018)
Pedestrian SF thriller. I’m lame at seeing what the twist will be so I did do a “huh” at the big reveal.
July 26, 2018
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Review
Mercury Rising (Harold Becker, 1998)
Boy of boy, this has not aged well. In particular, the treatment of the kid’s Asperbergers is so hamfisted and plain incorrect it definitely feels like it’s from another age – even though the movie is only twenty years old.