Walter Becker (left) and Donald Fagen of Steely Dan in 1977. Becker died on Sunday, Sept. 3 at 67 years old. Chris Walter/WireImage Don't look for Walter Becker on those endless (ridiculous) listicles ranking the "Guitar Gods of the 1970s." He's rarely mentioned in the same breath as major dudes…

BUT BEAUTIFUL A Book About Jazz By Geoff Dyer 227 pages. North Point Press. $21. The subtitle of this marvelously literate, mostly fictional love letter about music and musicians could be "The Inherent Danger of Jazz," even if Geoff Dyer, an Englishman who has utterly mastered a peculiarly American…

Mal Waldron performing in Amsterdam in 1995. (Frans Schellekens / Redferns) Want to Fight Back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every Tuesday. Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation , check out our latest issue . Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!…

1. In the summer of 1917 Robert Grainier took part in an attempt on the life of a Chinese laborer caught, or anyway accused of, stealing from the company stores of the Spokane International Railway in the Idaho Panhandle. Three of the railroad gang put the thief under restraint and dragged him up…

A fifty year retrospective of trying to live with all of you on this goddamn planet. On my second birthday, we landed on the moon. Obviously, I have no actual memory of watching it happen. No memory of being huddled around a small black and white television in the family den. No memory of watching…

Rick Klau Partner @GVTeam (former Product Manager @YouTube, @Blogger). Board of Directors at @NCWIT. @rklau on Twitter. Jan 4, 2016 photo: Rick Klau Superpowers at work: OKRs O bjectives and Key Results — the process by which leaders and their teams set ambitious, measurable goals each quarter — are…

How Google sets goals: OKRs On the day Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner closed in 2007, it was also the first day of a new quarter at Google. My new manager at Google asked me to draft my OKRs for him to review. I had no idea what he was talking about. I’ve now gone through the process of setting…

Advertisement The Upshot Image Credit Agnes Lee We’re now more likely to tell our daughters they can be anything they want to be — an astronaut and a mother, a tomboy and a girlie girl. But we don’t do the same for our sons. Even as we’ve given girls more choices for the roles they play, boys’…

NEW YORK — The small, disintegrating painting - delicate flowers flaking off silk - is the work of a French master, but the story about it is pure Edward Albee. Hanging in his TriBeCa loft, almost unnoticeable amid a forest of African sculpture and walls of bold abstractions, it is, Albee said…

When I woke up on Sunday morning, I saw rumors of the news that I’d hoped to see for three years. Frankly, that I never thought would come. It was confirmed in an email to staff this morning: Emil Michael is gone from Uber. I’d heard rumors that he might choose to leave in recent weeks, getting out…

Welcome to the dawn of a new age in People Operations & HR D espite their stated function, the vast majority of Human Resources and People Ops-related programs are devoid of both humanness and people-ness. Leadership tends to overlook the key moments that matter with candidates, employees, and…

About 10 years after TVs began to be ubiq uitous in American homes, television broadcasting was a staggering financial success. As the head of the Federal Communications Commission observed in a 1961 speech to broadcast executives, the industry’s revenue, more than $1 billion a year, was rising 9…

Alex Tizon passed away in March. He was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self . For more about Alex, please see this editor’s note . T he ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put…

‘His characters are never likable, but they depict the true breadth of human society’ … Yoshihiro Tatsumi at Cannes in 2011. Photograph: Guillaume Baptiste/AFP/Getty Images Manga The graphic novelist, who died this month, illuminated the tensions and subtexts of postwar Japanese society Shares 28 28…

A long-ago letter, a lifelong fascination, a longing appreciation G uy Davenport died the same week as Susan Sontag, a few days on either side of New Year’s Day, 2005, and since there isn’t evidence to suspect that either thought much or often about the other, and their social milieus were certainly…

I trust Bowie, the way I trust Stevie or Miles or Aretha or Duke or Bach or Debussy or Ornette or Rahsaan or the recently departed Paul Bley. By Russ Gershon I have been asked by a number of people whom I respect, who are serious music lovers or players: “Why do you like David Bowie? What am I…

“User-Centric” by Bruce Sterling (1999) This story dates from 1999. It was the first story I wrote where all the characters — although they’re obviously in a science fiction story — seem to know a whole lot about industrial design. *”User-Centric” was originally published in “Designfax,” an…

19. Gulf of Evaluation and Gulf of Execution by The term 'Gulfs of Evaluation and Execution' were introduced in Norman (1986) and popularised by his book, The Design of Everyday Things (Norman 1988), originally published as The Psychology of Everyday Things. The Gulf of Execution The gulf of…

A Better Way to Code Introducing d3.express: the integrated discovery environment. If you’ve ever gotten frustrated trying to figure out why your code doesn’t work, or how someone else’s code works, you are not alone. This is for you. For the last eight years or so, I have been building tools for…

It’s 3am on a beach in Barcelona, six months from the end of a century. After a long night, the technoid throb from Sonar’s hangar-like venue is receding behind us, and there’s nothing left but the star-spangled sky, and the gentle caress of Mediterranean waves on the shore. Somewhere up ahead, a…

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Colum McCann, George Saunders, Emma Donoghue, Michael Chabon, and more. Doug McLean Two hundred and fifty pages in, Hannah Tinti finally admitted things weren’t working out with…

U.S. Maple In 2016, the St.Louis-based label SKiN GRAFT quietly celebrated its 25th anniversary. To commemorate the milestone, the label re-released the very first full-length LP it issued back in 1991: Dazzling Killmen’s impossible-to-categorize underground rock touchstone Face of Collapse .…

Most of us know the story. You start your career as a front-line designer, researcher, coder, or writer. You love what you do. You love being a part of the process of making new stuff. Or making old stuff better. By some random series of events – some might say misfortune – someone eventually…

As startups grow and succeed, employees with no management experience are asked to become managers. Some dread the opportunity. Some relish it. But all ask: “how do I get started?” A few high performing designers and researchers – and freshly minted UX managers – at Google have asked me this…

This piece is adapted from “Men Explain Things to Me,” a collection of essays that will be published on May 6th by Haymarket Books. “ The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think ,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal on January 18, 1915, when she was almost thirty-three…

Startups, like the male anatomy, are designed for liquidity events. Consider the metaphors: “seed” funding, “up and to the right” trajectories, “acceleration,” “exit.” Paul Graham’s seminal essay “ Startup = Growth ” argues that explosive growth is the only measure of success. “Making it” means one…

The voice comes out of a laptop-computer speaker like a ghost with attitude: the familiar bone-dry monotone of Lou Reed , accompanying himself on acoustic guitar as he sings about body counts and an unjust war. It is a rare marvel in the avant-rock legend's half-century canon: a Bob Dylan–style…

Laurie Anderson in her studio in New York. Philip Greenberg for The New York Times Last week, I sat down with the artist Laurie Anderson at her office in TriBeCa for what I expected would be a fairly short interview to discuss the archive of her late husband, Lou Reed, who died in 2013. We wound up…

My last two pages pointed out the good news: there are no spiritual problems . The bad news is that there are no spiritual solutions . Spirituality tries to sell you the idea that everything will be peachy-keen forever , if only you apply an all-purpose spiritual solution. Somehow, that is supposed…

Discussing ‘Desperate Characters’ With Paula Fox SHARE By GINIA BELLAFANTE October 10, 2012 9:30 p.m. | Updated Our live conversation about “Desperate Characters” by Paula Fox has ended, but you can still add your thoughts in comments section below, which I’ll check in on over the next few days.…

Follow @rwieruch Follow @rwieruch “A state of flow can be achieved by deep work”. The subjects flow and deep work are covered in the books Deep Work by Cal Newport and Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I read both books, personally I can say that they are outstanding, and they can be well combined…

‘A very primal, earthy person’ … Kirchin in the studio in the 70s.Photograph: Hull2017 W hen Brian Eno met Basil Kirchin for the first time, in a London recording studio in 1974, he realised that he was encountering a true outsider artist: someone doggedly oblivious to the wider world as he pursued…

Interesting things are afoot in legislative redistricting! Over the past ten years, Republicans have enacted partisan gerrymanders in a number of state houses in order to establish and maintain control of U.S. politics despite their unpopular policies. I’ve been learning what I can about…

...as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened. Download an EPub edition of this post courtesy of redditor agonnaz Some time on Friday, IMDb announced that they intended to shut down their message board system, permanently.…

On the front lines of Syria with the young American radicals fighting ISIS On the morning of his first battle, Brace Belden was underdressed for the cold and shaky from a bout of traveler's diarrhea. His Kurdish militia unit was camped out on the front line with ISIS, 30 miles from Raqqa, in Syria.…

A national debate on freedom of speech has sparked since the night of Feb. 1, when a Breitbart hatemonger’s speech was cancelled because of radical acts against replaceable property at my school, UC Berkeley. Most of the arguments across the nation attempt to have a conversation on freedom of speech…

On Fri­day, May 3, 1968, sev­eral hun­dred rad­i­cal stu­dents stared down a con­tin­gent of fas­cists out­side the Sor­bonne, in Paris. The day before, the neo-fas­cist group Occi­dent torched the offices of a left­ist stu­dent orga­ni­za­tion, leav­ing behind their call sign, the Celtic Cross. In…

The Peripheral by William Gibson Tara Walton/Toronto Star/Getty Images William Gibson at the Royal York Hotel, Toronto, January 2012 William Gibson has spent his career in the shadow of his first novel, Neuromancer , which was published in 1984 and greeted as at once a punk revolt against…

Joan Didion, ca. 1977. Courtesy of the Associated Press It is usual for the interviewer to write this paragraph about the circumstances in which the interview was conducted, but the interviewer in this case, Linda Kuehl, died not long after the tapes were transcribed. Linda and I talked on August 18…

“When we hook up with another, in sex or love (or, more rarely, both) we prove that our isolation is not permanent,” Dorion Sagan — son of Carl — wrote in his fascinating history of sex . And yet that very quest to end our isolation has been subject to centuries of stigma and incessant friction with…