Alessandra Ram: Every major technological boom has produced the same figure, the person who gives everything to the wave...

Micah Nathan: Writing, I told them, isn’t supposed to be easy, and of course it can be tedious but that doesn’t make it rote. Writing isn’t just the production of sentences – it’s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It’s a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it. An LLM can...

I might be botching a Hank Green quote with the title of this post but I’ve noticed how it’s increasingly difficult to stay buoyant, to keep light on my toes, to feel optimistic about the future. In Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium, lightness is the first quality he notes for aspiring writers but...

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is a fantastic book all about mushrooms and fungi but what made it a breezy read for me was how weird they are. It’s like Merlin got his hands on creatures from another dimension where the rules of biology simply don’t apply. First: Merlin goes into great depth about genes and how...

I made a few updates over the weekend! All the images in /photos are smartly resized and they also load as you scroll so I’m not sending you 700GB of data down the wire. I have a lot of ideas about what I’d like to turn /photos into but either way it’s amazing how little work is required to build your own personal...

Erin Kissane: There is a lot—like a lot a lot—of research suggesting that using social media to keep up with news does not actually inform us but does makes us feel more informed. Many studies of many populations have found for knowledge about what’s happening to us, social media essentially magnifies the...

Mass-Driver just released MD UI, a neo-grotesque type family that’s been designed to compliment Rutherford Craze and Co.’s already excellent mono-space. And just as the name implies, MD UI is designed for a different kind of reading: When we think about reading, we tend to picture books, or magazines, or business...

I strain to use my eye as an investigatory tool—as a pencil, with my mind the sketch pad. I am not very skilled at it, which means that I can get better. That’s Patrick Bringley in All the Beauty in the World, a great little book about his experience as a guard at the Met but it’s also a book about loss, art, and...

Here’s how writing works today. First, a tiny thing. Then: a follow-up. And then a sentence with a strangely condescending tone! The real information is right here though. Not in this sentence. Or this one. Could it be here? Nope! After a few short, vague, and mysterious sentences now you get to read a much longer...

This weekend we’re in Napa for C’s birthday. We lounged by a river and a fire pit, binoculars in hand, listening and waiting for the birds to show themselves. Earlier that morning we had a falconry lesson with Daisy, a large, powerful peregrine; Kirby, a dainty Harris’s hawk; Hermes, another peregrine but loud as...

It all began with the nav. Notice how in the sidebar of this here blog where you can open and close folders to reveal more entries? Well, the tappable area of the arrow was way too small and I kept miss-clicking and selecting folders instead. So, I tried to fix it and realized the only way to do so was by tweaking...

Uketsu’s Strange Pictures is real good. It’s one of those rare books that make you realize that a novel is a game, not just a bunch of text printed on a page. And the way that Uketsu reimagines their novel is with drawings and diagrams, making what might be a simple murder mystery thriller feel like you’re a...