My pal Jez Burrows is working on a new project and a week ago he asked me to build what ended up being a rather lovely teaser site. It’s called And Introducing and I hope you sign up for the newsletter to learn more about it in the future. I really want to spoil the whole thing but all I’ll say for now is that you...

I’m not sure if you’ve heard about this but The History of the Web newsletter is simply outstanding and you ought to sign up immediately if publishing, web design and development is in your wheelhouse. One of my favorite posts is this one: imagine a time before images on the web. For years there was nothing but a...

Kris Sowersby has posted the transcript for his talk, 10,000 Original Copies, which happens to be all about copying and original ideas when it comes to designing new typefaces: Erik van Blokland ran a small experiment: he scanned a lowercase ‘n’ and asked about 80 designers to digitise it. All we had to do was wrap...

For Vanity Fair, Lisa Brennan-Jobs has written about her father, Steve: By then the idea that he’d named the failed computer after me was woven in with my sense of self, even if he did not confirm it, and I used this story to bolster myself when, near him, I felt like nothing. I didn’t care about computers—they were...

I think about this post all about dogmatism by Chris perhaps twice a week: Hardly a day goes by I don’t see a dogmatic statement about the web. I was collecting them for a while, but I won't share them as there is no sense in shaming anyone. I'm as guilty as anyone. The dogmatic part comes from the way an opinion is...

“I am compulsive about that,” Merlin explains of his obsession with punctuality and trying to teach those lessons to his kid: You can’t explain how important it is that if we need to leave the house by 7:30 […] if we made it by 7:31 then [...] Apollo has crashed. That’s it. You don’t get another chance at this....

You can see the climate crisis everywhere, in everything. On the drive down you can see it in the signs that are posted in the dirt by farms on the edge of the freeway: “BUILD DAMS!” they scream. “WE NEED WATER, NOW” another sign begs in giant sans-serif letters next to it. You can see the climate crisis in the...

Over the past week or so I’ve been slowly watching The Vietnam War, a documentary on Netflix by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, and it’s just completely, impossibly brilliant. I’m not sure if this has ever happened in war documentaries before but the show interviews all sides, Americans as well as North and South...

Ingrid Burrington’s Networks of New York begins with a simple enough question: “How do you see the Internet?” Ingrid then explores just how shortsighted our understanding of that question quite probably is. I’ve heard the distinction made before that the web sits on top of the Internet; we use the web via URLs and...

It’s 2007: I’m sat in the kitchen watching a family friend and her four year old son talk to my mom. Over the course of a few minutes I notice how this kid, Jack, is starting to get bored; his eyes roll into the back of his head and all of his limbs begin to fidget independently of the host as if he’s possessed by...

In this non-fiction account of the last five apolayptic scenarios our planet has endured, Peter Brannen writes in lucid detail in The Ends of the World about what led to each of them and, potentially, how we might be entering a new apocalypse of our own making. The Odorvician, Devonian, and Permian mass extinctions,...

Back in 2012 Matt Taibbi wrote this incredible piece about who Mitt Romney is and his revolutionary political aspirations. The whole piece is both infuriating and terrifying: Forget about the Southern strategy, blue versus red, swing states and swing voters – all of those political clichés are quaint relics of a...