Derecka Purnell: Police couldn’t do what we really needed. They could not heal relationships or provide jobs. We were afraid every time we called. When the cops arrived, I was silenced, threatened with detention, or removed from my home. Fifteen years later, my old neighborhood still lacks quality food, employment,...

“As long as we think abstractly,” writes Chris Hedges in his fantastic and heart-wrenching book War is a force that gives us meaning, “...as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of war our fulfillment [...] we will never discover who we are.” Every sentence of Hedges’s book is like this: punch after...

Here’s something distasteful I've noticed over the past few weeks: instead of folks saying “I am learning and growing”—being honest with their mistakes—a large number of people are just shouting constantly into the void of social media hell, desperately trying to prove that they're on the right side of history, that...

When it comes to design systems I don’t have many words of advice. I have opinions and intense anxiety but giving advice without context of the organization, the codebase, the people, is so very hard to do. But if there’s one word of advice that I keep learning, over and over again, and with almost every design...

The latest album by HAIM, Women in Music Pt.III, has been on infinite repeat for the last couple of days. Their music is like a fantastical broth between PJ Harvey, Shania Twain, and One Little Plane. Also, they happen to be upsettingly good live and earlier this year they made the best music video of all time. Ugh!

Back in 2014 I was talking to a chap after a speaking gig in London and I had become the dictionary definition of a big dumb mess. I told him how I hadn’t slept the night before, how I was extremely nervous about the talk (which turned out very poorly in the end), and how I was starting to think the whole thing was...

At my previous gig, Slack channels were weird. No one would talk about the work; what was good, what was bad, what was difficult, what we could be doing better. Folks kept their work private. So let’s say I was working on a refactoring project, I wouldn’t dare go into a channel and say “hey, I’m going to think out...

Umm...uhhh...there is an edit of Raiders of the Lost Arc by Steven Soderbergh and it is the single most perfect thing. No greater, more perfectest thing has ever existed. It’s in black and white with the soundtrack from The Social Network thrown on top of it. Just go watch it. Soderbergh also wrote about why he made...

Imagine a future made perfect. What would you fix? Think of all the ways our society could be made better, kinder. Well, I think the problem with all these wondrous futures and more perfect worlds is that they often make for not-so-lovely-books. Take Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, for example. Everyone reveres that...

Okay! Since I mentioned that the Kindle is a punk rock essay machine I’ve started to wonder...what if I gathered a bunch of my favorite posts from Adventures, bundled them up into a Kindle book and donated all the proceeds to charity? It would help me learn how ebooks really work under the hood, plus I could punch...

Arguments, political pamphlets, essays about civil rights; the longer I look at the Kindle this time around the more I see it as the perfect little punk rock essay machine. Sure, a lot of what I said about the Kindle is still true. But now I feel like this thing has been designed to radicalize me, a pamphlet thrown...

I just started reading Ijeoma Oluo’s ever so excellent book So You Want to Talk About Race. Her writing is laser-focused and this bit in particular where Ijeoma compares white supremacy to an abusive relationship jolted me awake: When I was in an abusive relationship, it was not just about one incident [...] before...