Instead of impressing focus groups, designers should do a thought experiment: Imagine what Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive would have to say about your interface.
March 2, 2010
February 5, 2010
January 30, 2010
CORNISH, NH—In this big dramatic production that didn’t do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud. “He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers,” said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don’t have to look at them for four years. “There will never be another voice like his.” Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it’s just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything.
December 4, 2009
A grammar worksheet by David Foster Wallace. (via kottke)
I would use this, were I teaching next quarter.
∞December 1, 2009
Wake up, wake up.
To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you — from the cradle to the grave and beyond — which it would be easy, fatally easy!, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up — before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whiskey, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.”
—Christopher Isherwood (via Dave Smith, via Dave Pollard and communicatrix.
November 28, 2009
Challenge: The Roethke-Hugo Exercise
ADILEGIAN | “Stray Thoughts on Roethke and Teaching” by Richard Hugo
At length, a quote from The Triggering Town, in which Richard Hugo lays out a really cool exercise from Ted Roethke’s poetry classes, fiendishly appended by Hugo.
November 20, 2009
City resident Mark Little said he’s so genuinely tantalized with Palin and her book that he said ‘it will be the first book I’ve ever read.’
This makes sense.
Fort Wayne News-Sentinel: Palin makes connection with ‘common folk’ during visit
(via zachklein)
November 18, 2009
My eight-year-old son, Joel, comes into my office to ask if there’s a worse swearword than fuck. “No,” I say.
There’s a silence. “You’re lying,” he says.
“There’s none worse than fuck,” I say.
Joel narrows his eyes. “I know you’re lying,” he says.
