“Toward the evening of a gone world, the light of its last summer pouring into a Chelsea street found and suffused the red waistcoat of Henry James, lord of decorum, en promenade , exposing his Boston niece to the tone of things.” Hugh Kenner’s magnum opus, The Pound Era , begins with this rosewater…

Four turntables and a 909: Will Lynch talks shop with one of the very best. " I say it to this day, if you ain't listened to the The Wizard You ain't have a fucking clue what you was missing. " That's Eminem on the 2013 song "Groundhog Day," talking about Jeff Mills, a fellow Detroit musician once…

This essay is adapted from a talk given at California’s Novato Public Library earlier this year. There are ecological reasons to question how books are made out of trees but metaphysical reasons to rejoice in the linkage between forests and libraries, here in this public library, in the town I grew…

The company’s top coders seem like two halves of a single mind. Illustration by David Plunkert One day in March of 2000, six of Google ’s best engineers gathered in a makeshift war room. The company was in the midst of an unprecedented emergency. In October, its core systems, which crawled the Web…

With Janet Jackson's (woefully belated) acceptance into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it's well past time for a broader reckoning with her place in popular culture, and especially the way she's challenged narratives in pop music. To me, her evolution, and unique place in culture, can be summed up…

Are we our illnesses? At the Aspen Ideas Festival, thought leaders gather under the Koch Tent to pursue a “culture of health.” An essay on the kingdom of the sick in the age of biotech. Incomprehensibility has an enormous impact over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will…

Fisher feared that we were losing our ability to conceptualize a tomorrow that was radically different from our present. Photograph by Georg Gatsas / Verso Books Mark Fisher was a writer and academic from the English Midlands who, in the early two-thousands, felt at odds with many of the…

By Ernest Hilbert I amble down Walnut Street in Philadelphia, on lunch break from my job as an antiquarian bookseller on the top floor of the art-deco Sun Oil Building, when I develop a pronounced limp. I am not surprised. It is not my first affliction of the day. Welts and bruises rise along my…

The story of the special transistor at the heart of the world’s most iconic drum machine Throughout the 1970’s and 80’s, the golden age of synthesizer design, a few manufacturers stood out for their consistently high quality builds and their circuit design excellence and the Japanese companies led…

This is part 2 of a 3-part series where I take a look at the design process at some of the world’s top companies. 3M is a global company of scientists, researchers, and marketers with operations in more than 65 countries, 31 billion in annual sales, and ~90,000 employees worldwide. Their inventions…

The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America

Last week, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, asked me to come and see a project he has been working on almost as long as the web itself. It’s a crisp autumn day in Boston, where Berners-Lee works out of an office above a boxing gym. After politely offering me a cup of coffee, he leads…

The internet and near-costless scaling of digital has allowed the concentration of too much power in too few hands. Our systems for accountability can’t or won’t keep up. By building alternatives, the decentralisation of networks, governance and control are a promising antidote. That’s why it’s…

Can a melody provide us with pleasure? Plato certainly thought so, as do many today. But it’s incredibly difficult to discern just how this comes to pass. Is it something about the flow and shape of a tune that encourages you to predict its direction and follow along? Or is it that the lyrics of a…

Who manages in an agile organization? And what exactly do they do? The agile workplace is becoming increasingly common. In a McKinsey survey of more than 2,500 people across company sizes, functional specialties, industries, regions, and tenures, 37 percent of respondents said their organizations…

Villa Savoye [Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Alain de Botton ‘s new book The Architecture of Happiness .] In the spring of 1928 a Parisian couple named Pierre and Emilie Savoye approached the 41-year-old Swiss architect Le Corbusier and asked him to design a country house for them…

By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs The history of employment can be summarized as “companies vs. employees.” The history of employment This tug-of-war was always viewed as zero sum: any gain by labor was, by definition, a loss for management and shareholders, and vice versa. This mentality is captured in…

This post is a transposition of my Fluent talk Becoming a team lead: a survival guide . It’s been edited to better fit a blog post format. If you prefer to see the original format, you can view the slides with speaker notes instead. A video of the talk will be up some time in July 2018. A survival…

I often talk to founders who believe they’ve found product/market fit when they haven’t. This is a huge problem because they start hiring people, increasing burn, and optimizing their product before they’ve actually discovered what needs to be built. I’m writing this post to help you understand when…

The makers of the documentary “The King” turn to Elvis Presley with hopes of understanding something about the state of the country: what it’s been through, where it’s going. Photograph by CBS Photo Archive / Getty “The King” is a stirring new documentary that addresses Elvis Presley’s complex…

Photo by Layla Burford. Whether you’re learning to meditate or ride a bike, says Ajahn Jayasaro, it’s not about how good you are or how far you get. The point is simply to practice with a sincere and consistent effort. As I remember, the majority of the teachings that Ajahn Chah gave were not…

This is a deeply disturbing time in American history. The basic rights and protections of the country’s most vulnerable are under attack, distrust in every institution — education, science, journalism, and of course, government — is at an all-time high, and every day’s headlines brings new horrors.…

I hate to break it to you, but to make it in the UX profession, you have to network . I’ll be the first to admit that I hate large networking events. I’m deathly afraid of rejection, and even think the term “networking” feels slimy. All of that is still true except for one thing: how I feel about…

Sarah Perry is a contributing editor of Ribbonfarm. If we hear the metaphor “life is a joke,” our usual inference is a negative one: that a joke is a pitiful and sad thing for life to be, that life should be more than a “mere” joke. It seems to be a negative judgment of both life and humor. Here I…

George Plimpton and Donald Hall. Donald Hall served as The Paris Review ’s first poetry editor from 1953 to 1961. His vast knowledge of contemporary poetry and demand for excellence helped set the Review ’s poetry standards high from the beginning . In this undated letter, which is an ars poetica of…

Artists and scientists throughout history have remarked on the bliss that accompanies a sudden creative insight. Einstein described his realization of the general theory of relativity as the happiest moment of his life. More poetically, Virginia Woolf once observed, “Odd how the creative power…

image via Alexey Kljatov By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs We’ve been told for years now that what our parents and kindergarten teachers told us is not, in fact, true — we are not each and every one of us special unique snowflakes destined for greatness. In this essay I want to offer a new theory of…

Monday’s fish has been around since Friday, under God knows what conditions. Illustration by Adrian Gill Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young…

There are many practices that have emerged in recent years to accelerate progress at work: daily stand-ups, weekly review meetings, and my favorite – sprints . In this context, a sprint is a set period of time that is dedicated to achieving a goal. Many tech companies have adopted this method in…

In 2006, inventor Ray Kurzweil released the book The Singularity Is Near , with a bold prediction that by the year 2049 we’d enter a “technological singularity.” Around that time, he argued, the pace of improvement in technology would become a runaway phenomenon that would transform all aspects of…

Due out Fall 2018 It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work By Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson Preorder the book from Barnes & Noble “It’s crazy at work.” How often have you heard that? Or said it yourself? Probably too often. For many, “it’s crazy at work” has become their normal. But why's…

In the Meditating on Psychedelics podcast series my intention is to gain a deeper understanding of the relative merits and dangers of the mixing Buddhist contemplative practice and ritualized psychedelic use. In order to do this, I’ve found it necessary to first get clear on the scope of this…

May 17, 2018 | In Magazine | By “Meditators are psychonauts,” says Vincent Horn, a Buddhist teacher and podcaster who has lately explored the common threads in Buddhist and psychedelic communities and practices. “There is that general interest in exploring further reaches of one’s consciousness that…

I’ve written about René Girard’s ideas once before , to try my hand at identifying mimetic crises in the world of George R. R. Martin. Today I’d like to apply Girard’s ideas to another world in which people are driven to conflict over small differences and personal slights. (Rather than attempting…

Bret Victor / July 3, 2013 Doug Engelbart died today. His work has always been very difficult for writers to interpret and explain. Technology writers, in particular, tend to miss the point miserably, because they see everything as a technology problem. Engelbart devoted his life to a human problem,…

I want to tell you a story today. A sprawling epic mess of a story which began with two histories intersecting awkwardly just over a hundred years ago in a small tribal village nestled in the dense forests of one of the richest mining regions of the world. It is the kind of story that has multiple…

[Note: I have a nagging feeling I’ve spent a few thousand words spelling out something completely obvious. Still, I hope there’s value in actually spelling it out.] It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. —William Jefferson Clinton He was right, you know. A few months ago I argued in The…

It will soon be three months since the Metropolitan Museum of Art instituted its new admissions policy: pay what you wish for New Yorkers and tristate students, a discount for the elderly and groups, and twenty-five dollars for everybody else. From 1970 to 2018, the Met’s policy had been a more…

A lot of people are waiting for something dramatic to happen, some line to be crossed, an epic event like the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller III that will allow them to say that now we have had a coup and now we are ready to do something about it. We already had the coup. It happened on…

The sweetest sounds I’ve ever heard are still inside my head. — Richard Rodgers We discussed the widespread contempt in which ukulele players are held – traceable, we concluded, to the uke’s all-but-exclusive employment as a producer of chords – single, timeless events apprehended all at once…