William Weaver, the translator of many of Calvino’s books, wrote this great piece about his relationship with the author: Writers do not necessarily cherish their translators, and I occasionally had the feeling that Calvino would have preferred to translate his books himself. In later years he liked to see the...

Ross Andersen, an interview with Elon Musk ...a one-way trip to Mars could be a tough sell. It would be fascinating to experience a deep space mission, to see the Earth receding behind you, to feel that you were afloat between worlds, to walk a strange desert under an alien sky. But one of the stars in that sky...

Here’s a neat post from Sally Kerrigan, where she helps writers to make that sometimes terrifying rough draft: Now you just need to start putting your ideas on paper. Try not to reread until you absolutely have to, preferably on a different day altogether. Just think about what you’re trying to say, and jot the main...

Kathy Sierra, Trouble at the koolaid point: It begins with simple threats. You know, rape, dismemberment, the usual. It’s a good place to start, those threats, because you might simply vanish once those threats include your family. Mission accomplished. But today, many women online — you women who are far braver...

Here’s an interesting post by Tobias Frere-Jones about naming typefaces and how this process has evolved over the ages: Years ago, I asked one of my mentors what he thought was the hardest part of designing a typeface. I was expecting “the cap S” or “the italic lowercase” or something like that. But he answered...

“Every webpage is a latent community,” writes Clay Shirky in the most lucid piece of writing about Social Media™ that I’ve ever read. Yet despite its yawning blurb, Here comes everybody is not another book about the horrors of technology. Instead, it examines how the web influences congregations of people in a...

I do not think it is possible to feel empathy for 7 billion people. I know it is not possible to mourn the ~400,000 souls we lose to death every day on this planet earth. In a city like New York, it is not even reasonable to say Hi to everyone you pass on the street. Forget New York, it wasn’t reasonable to say Hi...

I’m adding Peter Mendelsund’s book What we see when we read to the small pile of books that I’ll heartily recommend to everyone – it’s a meandering collection of thoughts about what happens during the act of reading. Unlike the title suggests however, the book is not in any way didactic or scientific, instead it...

In recent weeks I’ve been trying to improve my fledging JavaScript skills, which have always bothered me. Sure, for the longest time I’ve been able to hack away in order to get something to work in the browser but parsing all the quirks and eccentricities of the DOM, BOM and related APIs felt entirely beyond me. So...

For one reason or another I had entirely forgotten about Matthew Buttericks’ excellent book Practical typography which he published last year and asked readers to pay whatever they wanted for it afterwards. In his latest update he described it as “an experiment in taking the web seriously as a book-publishing...

I get the impression that I’m not supposed to be here; the impassable language, the strange food, and my own fumbling terror as I accidentally stroll through the red light district at eight in the morning. These unfamiliar surroundings are beacons warning me away, and sometimes I catch them whisper you are not...

Nicole Fenton has posted her notes of an excellent talk she gave on how to improve copywriting for interfaces. Sadly though I often tend to neglect lots of this advice, for example the bit where Nicole writes: Don’t assume you’re the core audience. Most of the time, we’re not designing for ourselves. Think about the...