Anthony Blasko Updated at 3:32 p.m. ET on December 17, 2019. I knew nothing about Cole before meeting him; he was just a name on a list of boys at a private school outside Boston who had volunteered to talk with me (or perhaps had had their arm twisted a bit by a counselor). The afternoon of our…

I sexually identify as an attack helicopter. I lied. According to US Army Technical Manual 0, The Soldier as a System, “attack helicopter” is a gender identity, not a biological sex. My dog tags and Form 3349 say my body is an XX-karyotope somatic female. But, really, I didn’t lie. My body is a…

Y ou have a mind-shattering headache. You’re standing in the aisle of your local CVS, massaging your temples while scanning the shelves for something— anything —to make make the pain stop. What do you reach for? Tylenol? Advil? Aleve? Most people, I imagine, grab whatever’s cheapest, or closest, or…

Om du inte får den du älskar, får du älska den du får. Setting My previous MacBook Pro was a mid-2014, 15-inch model, purchased somewhere shortly after the introduction of the ill-fated USB-C MacBook in 2015. In the first few months, I saw the butterfly keyboard essentially crash and burn in the…

“I wanted to smooth the edges off my marriage” https://t.co/Yf8kPJ76yp

D isclaimer: Disclaimer: All individuals and examples in this article are inspired by experiences in my career; any resemblances to real people, organizations, or situations are in no way associated with my current employer. The views represented here are my own and don’t reflect those of my…

When Raffi turned two, someone told us that the truly difficult part was just beginning. It was hard to believe. Illustration by Audrey Weber Our son Raffi has always been a handful. He is wild, willful, easily frustrated and disappointed. He is also curious, adorable, and full of joy. These…

Please, please read this: https://t.co/qv99Wrqf7b. https://t.co/ojI2NRo9ks https://t.co/sbsxjlZ5xG

We all have this little voice inside our heads, chattering away behind the scenes. Stuff like, “You’re too fat. You’re not good enough. You’ll never get promoted. You don’t have what it takes. No one will like it. Why do I try? Who cares?” It’s a sadistic, negative little voice. Other times, a dose…

Jessica Lester started dating Matthew Boynton when she was fifteen. After they were married, her grandmother said, “it was almost like her personality got squished out of her.” Photograph by Danna Singer for The New Yorker Jessica Lester’s friends persuaded her to date Matthew Boynton, a boy in the…

Lung cancer, rampant. No surprise. I’ve smoked since I was sixteen, behind the high-school football bleachers in Northfield, Minnesota. I used to fear the embarrassment of dying youngish, letting people natter sagely, “He smoked, you know.” But at seventy-seven I’m into the actuarial zone. I know…

Top highlight For the better part of three decades, I have struggled with the twin-barreled blast of depression and anxiety. I don’t remember when it started. I don’t remember how. Around the time of the Gulf War and the Buffalo Bills’ Sisyphean Super Bowl run, our classroom sent handwritten letters…

December 2019 Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point Ifelt about kids the way the young Augustine felt about livingvirtuously. I'd have been sad to think I'd never have children.But did I want them now? No. If I had kids, I'd become a parent, and parents, as I'd known…

In 2017, I was told the best gaming story I'd ever heard. I'm very happy to say that I'm now getting to tell it myself, as a feature and a little documentary. This is The Lie That Helped Build Nintendo. Written: https://t.co/vQRuxWyR9c Video: https://t.co/Br56SxKmLF https://t.co/hobd5BHeYL

This is the first installment in The Design of Y2K , a series telling the stories behind the most influential products of the late 1990s and early 2000s. “I’ll be honest, and this is a funny story to tell. Initially in design, we didn’t want the chin.” Today, Paul Pierce is a distinguished designer…

System administration is in a sad state. It in a mess. I’m not complaining about old-school sysadmins. They know how to keepsystems running, manage update and upgrade paths. This rant is about containers, prebuilt VMs, and the incredible mess theycause because their concept lacks notions of “trust”…

David Wisnia at his home in Pennsylvania. Credit... Danna Singer for The New York Times Was she the reason he was alive today? David Wisnia at his home in Pennsylvania. Credit... Danna Singer for The New York Times The first time he spoke to her, in 1943, by the Auschwitz crematory, David Wisnia…

Far Cry Every theory of aesthetics must be able to explain what is commonly known as "The Paradox of Tragedy". The paradox goes as follows: if tragedy causes an unpleasant response in a subject, how is it that we ultimately derive pleasure? Several theories have been posited by philosophers ranging…

Enlarge / The final release of OS/2, version 4.0. Even colored tabs and wavy logos weren't enough to save it. os2museum.com The long twilight struggle IBM would no longer develop new versions of OS/2, although it continued selling it until 2001. Who was buying it? Mostly banks, who were still wedded…

Say you run a new team. You have carte blanche to implement any policies you want to make the people more productive and the code less buggy. What do you do? Careers have been built selling the answer. Take up pair programming! Switch to Haskell! Use UML for everything! These techniques get their…

In the fall of 2015, a rash of posters appeared around Copenhagen. One, in pink letters laid over an image of chicken eggs, asked, “Have you counted your eggs today?” A second — a blue-tinted close-up of human sperm — inquired, “Do they swim too slow?” The posters, part of a campaign funded by the…

One of the best ways to learn and come up with new ideas is to focus intensely on a problem, then let your mind wander. I’ve enjoyed doing this when problem solving and learning, and recently I’ve been thinking about how weird it is to build trust in your unconscious to do the work for you,…

In his seminal book Seeing Like a State , James Scott describes what he calls “high modernists:” lovers of orders who mistake complexity for chaos, and rush to rearrange it from the ground up in a more centralized, orderly fashion. Scott argues that high modernists end up optimizing for a system’s…

Nobody wants to leave their apartment anymore. That’s the prevailing sentiment on the internet, anyway. Mean Girls memes and Viola Davis gifs celebrate the joy of canceling plans. Essays offer neuroscience-backed explanations of the relief that comes with bailing on drinks, while listicles and trend…

If you ask him where he went to high school, he likes to boast that, actually, he went to an all-girls school. That was sort of true—he was one of five males at a progressive private school that had gone co-ed just before he’d enrolled. People always reply: Ooh la la, lucky guy! You must’ve had your…

The majority of meetings are a waste of time. And in my opinion, one flavor of meeting that tops the charts in uselessness is the “status update” meeting. You know this meeting— the meeting where everyone gets together to share what they’ve been doing. It’s ironic that meetings like this exist…

Those who know about us have power over us. Obfuscation may be our best digital weapon. There are still ways to carve out spaces of resistance, counterargument, and autonomy. Image: Lianhao Qu, via Unsplash By: Finn Brunton & Helen Nissenbaum Consider a day in the life of a fairly ordinary person in…

Top highlight A plain language word list for UX writing and help content to make your writing sound more human. Illustration by Anne Smith At SurveyMonkey, we write words that are simple, direct, and human. These basic content principles align with most style guides for writing on the Internet, and…

Jasmin Merdan / Getty Images Nominate a nonprofit for The Renewal Awards. Help a local organization win $40,000 in funding and make an even bigger impact. Nominate now “I cheated on my ex during our relationship and she found out shortly after we broke up,” a Reddit user posting from the burner…

Engadget investigates: Is it "iPod shuffles" or "iPods shuffle"? https://t.co/XFHYsqQunn

How Pebble’s watches have stuck around is a fascinating story. A crazy dedicated community reverse engineered their servers and set up their own infrastructure. The watches are still running strong, three years after the company failed. https://t.co/AyA6LOVURb

Photo by Sabri Tuczu/Unsplash We are being lazy if there’s something that we ought to do but are reluctant to do because of the effort involved. We do it badly, or do something less strenuous or less boring, or just remain idle. In other words, we are being lazy if our motivation to spare ourselves…

Photography Voigtlander Glass Someone reached out to me via a comment on my last post and the more I considered it, the more I thought it would be best to take a quick dive into my camera and lens choices, something that I think deserves more than a “because its cool and takes nice photos” kind of a…

Most of the ideas in this post come from the book Being A Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell by Alexandra Horowitz, which is my favorite nonfiction book I’ve read in a long time. She, in turn, took much of what I discuss from Kate McClean, an artist who makes sensory maps of urban…

It’s hard for me to write about the differences between Android and iOS, and I struggle to comprehend how people go about it. So if you are looking for that kind of overview you are going to be disappointed, I simply wanted to talk about some thoughts I had in using the two operating system without…

neuroscience By Jordana Cepelewicz September 24, 2019 A brain circuit that suppresses distracting sensory information holds important clues about attention and other cognitive processes. 3 Read Later We attend to only a fraction of the sensory data available to us. New results are helping to explain…

11 Answers 11 active oldest votes 46 This is a topic near and dear to my heart... This makes me think there's something systemic that's contributing , something that works against good people trying to do good things. That thing is people . I'm not saying here that people are inherently evil and any…

Orlando Ferguson's Flat Earth Map of 1893 mocked 'round earth believers' as seen in this detail from the map's margins. Public Domain Cory Doctorow is the co-editor of Boing Boing and a writer whose books include Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free . He will be appearing at 6 Degrees Toronto . A…

Rebecca Nelson / Getty In the past year, I’ve been on a mission to pester as many people in my life as possible. The first victim was my editor, whom I abruptly asked one morning to stop messaging me about story ideas on our office’s chat platform, Slack. Instead, I said, let’s talk the ideas out…

I had my fair share in designing and building large systems. I've taken part in rewriting Uber's distributed payment systems , designing and shipping Skype on Xbox One and open-sourcing RIBs , Uber's mobile architecture framework. All of these systems had thorough designs, going through multiple…