Via Susan Jean Robertson, here’s a story about Octavia Butler's life for the LA Times by Aida Ylanan and Casey Miller—they’ve made a particularly lovely story here by binding the map of Butler’s life with the format of the site itself. It's all focused on a bird’s eye view of LA—as you scroll, the story jumps from...

Zeynep Tufekci: There is a Turkish saying for times like these, when we can see a light at the end of the tunnel: “Time passes quickly if we can count the days until the end.” We are no longer in the open-ended, dreadful period of spring 2020, when we did not know if we’d even have a vaccine, whether any...

Heather Havrilesky’s life advice: The good news is that once you understand the things that trigger you, attract you, make you anxious, relax you, etc, the whole world looks a lot less complicated: You seek worthy judges in life and you throw yourself at their feet. Or you play the worthy judge for someone else....

Over the course of a summer it all clicked for me. I mean how computers are for much more than playing Zoombinis and making spreadsheets. And I cannot describe how liberating that felt. My life today is still buzzing in the afterglow of that one delirious summer when it clicked. Because within six weeks I had...

Over the past few weeks I’ve made a few notes about some front-end things for CSS-Tricks. First up, I wrote about the flex-grow, flex-shrink, and flex-basis CSS properties and a simple trick to understand the flex shorthand that you see like this: .child { flex: 0 1 auto; } This scared me for the longest time but...

I saw Eddie Glaude as all good things used to appear—in a flash, captured somewhere in a snippet of video in my timeline. I can’t remember how and when and where but I remember thinking “holy shit, I want to read something like this.” A quick scan later and I found Begin Again, a book written by Glaude earlier this...

She once texted me from a train. "I am enjoying my own company, giggling to myself," she said. O was not a good person, but she was dazzling. Because in those rare moments in which she loved herself it was impossible not to agree with her. And I saw that happen many times; strangers buckling at the knees because of...

We knew Biden and Harris were going to win days before they did, but when the call came on Saturday morning I found myself without excitement. I didn’t shout “yahoo!” or jump up and down. Short bursts of relief were punctured by the knowledge that it was four years of unnecessary cruelty and an incompetence that...

Prop 22 passed in California, and Alex Press wrote about why it’s devastating: On Tuesday, California voters passed Proposition 22, a ballot measure backed by app-based “gig” companies that exempts them from classifying their estimated three hundred thousand workers as employees. Included in Proposition 22’s fine...

Election anxiety has led to a small website cleanup today. To the ol’ blog I added a reply link that lets you pop open an email directly to me — emails I get from here are a pure delight and I want to encourage many more conversations like that. I also added a random link button to the bottom of a post. It’s partly...

Students at the Plantin Institute of Typography in Antwerp documented their research of the 18th-century Belgian punchcutter Jacques-François Rosart and turned it into a fabulous website called The Rosart Project. But what’s so interesting here is that the research was treated as a network of publishing projects; an...

Robinson Meyer just started a newsletter about the environment called The Weekly Planet that I’m pretty excited about. He’s on the climate crisis beat for The Atlantic, where he writes: Many readers, as well as some of my own colleagues, think it’s a depressing job. But in the past few years, I’ve become convinced...