The Biodiversity Heritage Library has made a huge stock of archival illustrations and imagery available on Flickr, as Josh Jones mentions in Open Culture: The first stream, currently at 122,281 images, has been carefully curated, and includes searchable galleries and albums divided by book title or subject, such as...

Ali Smith’s potent and luminous novel How to be both has been sitting on my desk for several days as I wait to return to it and write something even remotely coherent. But I realize now that will be impossible: How to be both is the hand-waving, self-stuttering kind of book where I cannot possibly hold myself back....

The NYT has a great post about Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey, but here’s a snippet of the opening lines of the poem from a real good thread that I can’t stop thinking about: Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and...

The more I learn about design, and the more experienced I become in the field, the frequency with which people ask for this sort of advice increases: Can you review my code? How can I improve the UX of this feature? How would we implement something like this in our design system? What about the copy? The icons? The...

A moment; brief, and fabulously memorable. Three of us were sat in a restaurant in the Haight enjoying drinks and a fine bookish conversation when it struck me: this was a moment that I’ll remember for the rest of my life. It’s not as important as a wedding, true. And it’s not as electric as when you meet someone...

Helena Fitzgerald on kudzu, money, sex and the color green: I look for greens, teasing them out of photos, trusting them too much when I find them, giving far too much credit to any place that will offer me the greatest possible abundance of green. Like anything I love, I mistrust the color down to the...

I still come back to this post by Merlin Mann called Making the Clackity Noise, years after I first read it, where he asks us all to write a little bit about our lives every day. Like small things; what we’re struggling with today, what we saw and felt, and the things that are making us happy: I mean, Jesus Christ,...

After more than a year of working on Adventures in Typography, a weekly newsletter that I write about typography and design, I’ve figured out what it is or really what I want it to be. And so now I thought it’s as good a time as any to make a record of why I’m working on this side project, what’s successful about...

There’s this troubling belief when just starting out as a writer that your favorite texts aren’t just bits of paper strung together but are instead works of art; ethereal and everlasting. This is constantly reinforced in popular culture, at university and even by many of the authors themselves. There are Fine Ages...

I often think about a post that Mandy Brown wrote way back in 2009 called Ways of Reading. In that post Mandy argues that we should “always read with a pen in hand” and “think of the text as the starting point for your own words” – which, of course, I adore: Reading and writing are not discrete activities; they...

Robin Sloan’s Sourdough is a precious thing. It’s a novel set in the Bay Area about the making of a mysterious bread and the programming of an artificial intelligence for a robotic hand. I would mention something more about the protagonist or the main drive of the plot but I don’t want to spoil even a moment of the...

I’ve been reading James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time over the past week and it’s surprising to me that I don’t find his work as celebrated as it ought to be. I’ve watched some of his debates and read a couple of his books and each time I’m in complete awe of Baldwin’s prose and the eloquent way in which he tears...