George Saunders on the art of fiction writing: A guy (Stan) constructs a model railroad town in his basement. Stan acquires a small hobo, places him under a plastic railroad bridge, near that fake campfire, then notices he’s arranged his hobo into a certain posture – the hobo seems to be gazing back at the town. Why...

Kory Stamper on the use of the word “shithole” by #45 and what it means for lexicographers: ...the American press has traditionally been loath to print unseemly language like cusswords in full, and this has been a problem for lexicographers on a number of levels. As we all know, dictionary entries need to be based...

We published Tools for Thinking and Tools for Systems the other day and I reckon it’s the beginning of a much larger rant that’ll get round to writing one day. The gist of my argument is this: I think we’ve spent an awful amount of time building systems-based design tools (such as styleguides and pattern libraries)...

I’ve read this piece about design by Dean Allen multiple times and yet I can’t appear to shake it. Every time I read it I find something new that perfectly summarizes that moment in my career. Here’s a list of design rules from the piece that is, right now, effectively my life: An Entirely Incomplete List of Things...

Before newsletters and social networks there was RSS, a tool that helped us keep up to date with our favorite websites. And it was relatively simple, too: through a web app such as Google Reader, you could effectively subscribe to another website’s content feed and get an alert whenever something new had been...

In a lovely post about the relationship between fiction writing and machine learning, Robin Sloan discusses how he wrote songs for his novel Sourdough with the help of artificial intelligence. However, Robin has some issues with that phrase in this context: I’ve taken pains to call this “machine learning,” not...

Bond is a new conference set in San Francisco this March 9-10 that “examines how creators make a living through the internet.” I just picked up my tickets and yet I have no idea what to expect, besides the fact that this is a project by Andy McMillan and so there is only one thing to expect really; an event that...

Waiting for the moment when it all goes to hell is exhausting. In a relationship, I mean. Each bad joke and every forgetful act, it all has to add up, right? I imagine it’s all counted in a ledger; every single one of their friends that you don’t get on with, each turn of phrase that failed. Every time you looked at...

I was chatting with my pal Jules Forrest earlier today—she happens to be one of the best designers and developers that I know—and she mentioned something really interesting that I’ve been rolling around in my head all day. We were talking about design systems and how to incentivize good systems work across an...

Supposedly TinyLetter won’t be shutting down in 2018 but it seems like it’s being sunsetted and/or merged into the larger MailChimp suite of products. Although that’s probably okay for most TinyLetter fans I’ve always wanted to experiment with a new setup that’s optimized specifically for writing Markdown and that’s...

Ever since Brandon Smith’s post about how CSS is Awesome was published in mid-2017 I’ve been entirely obsessed with it. I think it puts into words something significant that hasn’t really been said before about the language: CSS is hard because its properties interact, often in unexpected ways. Because when you set...

The other day the programmer Bret Victor released a series of private emails with Alan Kay (the famous computer scientist) where Alan discusses how we require public, unfettered research to truly innovate because businesses are trying to solve pre-existing and visible problems, and aren’t looking for them. But I...