This is a shockingly beautiful thing by Jason Farago about art and power. Everything about this piece is a delight: the design of the site, the looking-closely-until-it-hurts, the pace and momentum of the writing. Jason writes about art in the time of Shah Jahan, the 17th century Mughal emperor (that's the chap that...

Lucy wrote a great piece about the good days: On the good days, everything feels connected—a giant wall of conspiracy string. But on the bad days, every gesture and thought sits in isolation. It’s like I’m looking at the same board, but someone has turned off the layer containing the string. Rather than an electric...

Alberto Manguel in The Library at Night: One of the lost plays of Sophocles is The Loves of Achilles, copies of which must have perished one after another, century after century, destroyed in pillaging and fires or excluded from library catalogues because perhaps the librarian deemed the play of little interest or...

Patterned is great. It's an iOS light puzzle game with soft piano in the background which makes it the perfect thing to play in bed. I've watched Celine play it the last few nights and it's so dang soothing. (This is an endorsement of the game part of this app though and not the typography because it is very...

I’m late to the party here but this week I discovered that iA Writer has a feature they call Style Check which suggests superfluous words to remove: It’s not like any of the existing grammar checkers or functions. There is no AI, it is not smarter than you, and it doesn’t steal your texts. It makes you think about...

Okay, hear me out: what if I wrote a book in public? And—what if—I wrote about the process of writing/designing/building it each week in a newsletter. I’d have no idea where I was going with it, or what the book could possibly be, and we’d all figure it out in public together. It would be the equivalent of a...

A fabulous piece about the videogame box design of Hock Wah Yeo. Phil Salvador writes: When Yeo was making packaging for a game, the way he thought about it, he was giving the game a physical form. Software is “intangible,” he explained, and when you’re designing a box, it’s a opportunity to give the game a physical...

Jesse Frederik: I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who thought: but what is it then, for God’s sake, this whole blockchain thing? And what’s so terribly revolutionary about it? What problem does it solve? That’s why I wrote this article. I can tell you upfront, it’s a bizarre journey to nowhere. I’ve never seen so much...

I haven’t read a book all year. During the course of the pandemic I haven’t been able to focus enough to get through anything longer than a blog post or a newsletter. Typically I’ll start reading something, the novelty will wear off, and then I’ll have no interest in pushing forwards. It’s like I can’t hold all the...

“Let a website be a worry stone,” Ethan wrote last year and I believe that’s so very true. We can treat our personal sites like stress balls and use all that pent up anxiety about the state of the world; we can tidy up the fonts, improve the Lighthouse score, tweak the colors, or edit the copy of an old blog post...

James Bridle on museums, archivists, and art: And at some point I had this vision of the great bonfire at the end of time, and how there’s this conveyor belt moving towards it, filled with everything we’ve ever made: every word, every image, every artifact of culture and society, getting closer to the fire all the...

Sloan wrote about blogging this morning and so of course I must excitedly reblog this: ...the High Blogging Era might be behind us, but there is still blogging to be done, and it is so easy and rewarding to dip a toe in, start to follow a few, and experience a different kind of network. There is so much blogging to...