Daniel Temkin’s Olympus sounds punk as hell: We command machines as if they were are servants, and yet they often do not do what we want. Olympus is a new programming language which better reflects the actual power dynamic of programmer and machine. An invocation can ask for more than one command, but the right...

I was trawling through the interweb the other night and I saw someone mention “ranged media queries.” My immediate thought was how dare anyone ship ranged media queries without consulting me and then my second thought was what the heck is that? Bramus has, of course, written an excellent piece already describing...

TypeMedia is a type design masters program in the Netherlands and each year a graduating class of designers band together to make a little website showcasing their work. I get real excited for these because they’re always a delight and the work from 2021 is certainly no different. Shocking shapes! Curious, distorted...

There’s an idea in David Eagleman’s Livewired that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this week. Here’s the setup: our brains have a physical map of our bodies printed on them. You touch this part of your brain—blam!—your elbow just felt that. You go down and—double blam!—it’ll feel as if your forearm has...

“I am happiest in the second,” he said. “I can look at each frame of my animation and tell you what’s wrong, what the right order should be, and then fixate on that one perfect second for days. That’s what makes me happy.” Fancy wine in one hand, bocce ball in the other, I was talking to an animator and peppering...

I took a lot of photos for In Praise of Shadows and after a ton of humming and hawing and editing in Lightroom, I think I discovered at least one or two good pictures in the batch. So! Considering I hid all that with the stubborn text sitting on top, I thought it would be fun to show all the photographs here.

How is writing going to be affected by AI tools like Sudowrite? Josh Dzieza has written this fabulous piece for the Verge called The Great Fiction of AI in hope of finding some answers. He tells the story of Jennifer Lepp, a fiction writer who uses these tools to help her crank out books faster: Gradually, Lepp...

Whenever I open up DevTools and inspect a website I feel this overwhelming sense of lost potential. Here’s just one example: today I wanted to buy a pillow so I went to casper dot com, and saw this lovely animated gradient on a banner trying to sell me something. Interesting! I popped open Chrome’s DevTools to see...

Pals! Nerds! Photo-buddies! I just hit the big green publish button on a new essay called In Praise of Shadows. Here’s the cover: It’s an essay about photography and my new camera, the FujiFilm X100V, but it’s also about what I’ve learned over the past six months; where to put my feet, how to line things up, how to...

Klim Type Foundry just released The Future, a reimagining of Futura but from the original sketches rather than the more polished version that we’re all familiar with today. Kris Sowersby writes about all this and the history of Futura as well as what inspired him to design The Future: Renner was working at the nexus...

Jia Tolentino: The future that we now inhabit will not resemble the past before Roe, when women sought out illegal abortions and not infrequently found death. The principal danger now lies elsewhere, and arguably reaches further. We have entered an era not of unsafe abortion but of widespread state surveillance and...

I made a bunch of fun updates to the site last night: fixed a lot of the default typography styles (they’re not good yet, please hold!), added a few colors, replaced a ton of tags in older blog posts, and sort of redesigned the homepage around that. Now when you head to the homepage you won’t see a list of notes but...