Ta-Nehisi Coates on the American Civil War and Confederate, the new tv show by HBO: For while the Confederacy, as a political entity, was certainly defeated, and chattel slavery outlawed, the racist hierarchy which Lee and Davis sought to erect, lives on. It had to. The terms of the white South’s defeat were gentle....

My desk faces west towards the Sutro Tower and to be quite honest I only picked this apartment because of the tower and how it looms above Twin Peaks (those lumpy bumpy ridges above). As soon as I walked in the front door I knew that this would be the window where I write. I knew that from this perch I’d write a...

Jer Thorp on data systems and how bias, whether intentional or not, affects the representation of that data: Whenever you look at data — as a spreadsheet or database view or a visualization, you are looking at an artifact of such a system. What this diagram doesn’t capture is the immense branching of choice that...

Tim Maly on the election: I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit hanging around the online communities of the kind of people we are worried about reaching here, and I am here to tell you: They are using their critical thinking skills. They are fully literate in concepts like bias and in the importance of...

What’s your favorite website? Which is the one above all the others that you think about from time to time? In fact, which website do you not only think about but obsess over? I don’t want you to think about which website is the most useful, or the one that’s changed your life the most. I’m thinking more like a big...

Writing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Alan Toner describes the current state of advertising on the web and criticizes Google for not just allowing but almost encouraging advertisers to surveil users on the web: Ad quality needs to improve and advertisers must abandon any attempt to hijack our attention...

A train. A tunnel. Oakland. Walking in the dim light. A bar. Paper (a book). Beer. Basketball on the screen. A small crowd. An argument at the other end of the bar. Singing outside. A birthday. An hour or two. Hannah. A smile. Hugging. Giggles. Small, but easy talk. A silver ring on her index finger. Jean jacket....

Ingrid Burrington is one of my favorite writers and here she’s jotted down notes from a talk she made on data centers and power: When I’ve gone on data center tours I know most of this security theater isn’t really for me, but there is a subtle nudging request for validation in these design choices. In colocation...

Philip Smith made a lovely recording of him playing piano, but the story behind the recording is just as charming as the music itself: Yesterday, on my way home, I went into a bar-restaurant I'd never been into before. There was a goat above the door, and I’d spotted a piano inside. I asked if I could play it and...

Scott Rosenberg on Google Books: ...Google started Books with a “better ask forgiveness than permission” attitude that’s common today in the world of startups. In a sense, the company behaved like the Uber of intellectual property — a kind of read-sharing service — while expecting to be seen the way it saw itself,...

Frank Chimero on text and image: Go take a look at your bookshelf: most books are seas of text without pictures. When a book does have imagery, they are marooned onto their own page, or the text tiptoes alongside the image, reticent and scared of contact. Even this little post is guilty. Images and text are...

Nick Harkaway on the experience of writing his latest novel: This was like weaving a tapestry thread by thread while holding the entire design in your head, and my head just wasn’t big enough. Meanings intersected with other meanings, with consequences. I had to go back, again and again, re-work, re-conceive,...