Interview with the Vamp
Alcohol Why Camille Paglia hates affirmative action, defends Rush Limbaugh, and respects Ayn Rand | From the August/September 1995 issue Media Contact & Reprint Requests Hurricane Camille swept into American culture five years ago with the publication of Sexual Personae , a learned 800-page treatise…
Opinion | We Have Ruined Childhood
We Have Ruined Childhood For youngsters these days, an hour of free play is like a drop of water in the desert. Of course they’re miserable. Ms. Brooks is a writer. Credit João Fazenda According to the psychologist Peter Gray, children today are more depressed than they were during the Great…
Lynchian Doubles: 'Mulholland Drive' and 'Lost Highway'
Share Post Bookmark Lynch’s two films are filled with dualities, and they double each other as well. David Lynch is one of the most distinctive directors in film history. His visuals, themes, narratives, and soundtracks are instantly recognizable and have been so influential on other filmmakers that…
A creative person’s guide to feeling healthy
August 28, 2019 Part of: Feeling healthy Finding balance Copied link to guide! Our two brain hemispheres play inherently different roles when it comes to our state of mind: the right hemisphere is predominantly active during mindsets of creativity, intuition, and imagination, while the left side…
“Elliott Spencer”
Photograph by Oliver Chanarin for The New Yorker Audio: George Saunders reads. Today is to be Parts of the Parts of my Sure, Jer Please do Point at parts of me while saying the name of it off our list of Words Worth Knowing. Agespot Finger Wrist At wrist Jer says, This one’s been broken, seems like.…
Boredoms' YoshimiO - Modern Drummer Magazine
YoshimiO—“Just my name with a circle at the end,” the drummer explains—is a multi-instrumentalist and creative force at the center of a number of extraordinary musical powerhouses in Japanese experimental music. Drummer and MD contributor John Colpitts, who’s had the good fortune to perform with her…
In Praise of Samuel R. Delany
The Enthusiast The author of “Dhalgren” and dozens of other books “gives readers fiction that reflects and explores the social truths of our world,” the novelist Jordy Rosenberg writes. Samuel R. Delany’s work “combines space opera with neo-slave narrative, memoir, sword-and-sorcery fantasy,” Jordy…
A MeToo Mob Tried to Destroy My Life as a Poet. This Is How I Survived - Quillette
I’ll begin by confessing: I fucked up . I fucked up as a friend, an acquaintance, a stranger, a neighbor, and as a partner. I said cruel things; I said provocative things; I said obscene things; I said manipulative things; I said psychotic things—to men and to women. My language crossed boundaries…
Meditations On Moloch
[Content note: Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions!] I. Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem on Moloch: What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness!…
A Treasure Trove of Labyrinths | Tyler Malone
“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…
The art of DJing: Jeff Mills
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…
Rebecca Solnit on a Childhood of Reading and Wandering
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 Friendship That Made Google Huge
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…
After the Rhythm Nation
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…
Triple Canopy – Illness as Festival by Corrine Fitzpatrick
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…
Mark Fisher’s “K-Punk” and the Futures That Have Never Arrived
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…
Poet in the Pit: Slayer, Heavy Metal, and the Limits of Poetry | The Hopkins Review
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 rejected transistor at the heart of the iconic Roland TR-808.
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…
3M Healthcare: A Look Inside Design at the World’s Top Companies
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…
Trapped by the ‘Walmart of Heroin’
The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America
Exclusive: Tim Berners-Lee tells us his radical new plan to upend the World Wide Web
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…
How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?
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…
It’s hard to know why music gives pleasure: is that the point? – Roger Mathew Grant | Aeon Essays
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…
The agile manager
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…
Architecture and Modernism by Alain de Botton
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…
Emergent Productivity
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…
Becoming a team lead: a survival guide | Wildly Inaccurate
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…
The Real Product Market Fit
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…
Going to Graceland
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…
Just Do It - Lion's Roar
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…
Bringing XOXO Back
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.…
How to Network Without Losing Your Soul
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…
On Some Possibilities for Life as a Joke
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…
An Editorial Exchange: Donald Hall and George Plimpton
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…
The Emotions That Make Us More Creative
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…
Productivity for Precious Snowflakes: a Mood-First Approach to Knowledge Work
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…
Don't Eat Before Reading This
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…
Personal Sprints: Applying Design Thinking to Your Life
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…
A Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind
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…