We’re Banning Facial Recognition. We’re Missing the Point. The whole point of modern surveillance is to treat people differently, and facial recognition technologies are only a small part of that. Bruce Schneier The New York Times January 20, 2020 Communities across the United States are starting to…

Aaron North eases his dirty silver truck onto Sunset Boulevard and tells me how this is going to go. “I don’t want to be interrogated,” he says on this mid-summer night, sliding into Hollywood traffic. “We’ll drive for a while, and I can just talk. Are you a rock’n’roll fan? I know so many stories.…

Instead of fantasizing about future worlds, Gibson sets his novels in the ongoing, alarming realm of the present. Photograph by Benoit Paillé for The New Yorker Suppose you’ve been asked to write a science-fiction story. You might start by contemplating the future. You could research anticipated…

Inner sleeve of Mkwaju Ensemble’s Ki-Motion Words by: We Release Whatever the Fuck We Want Records is one of the key players in today’s thriving reissue culture, releasing everything from B movie soundtracks to Midori Takada’s debut Through the Looking Glass. The label does, well, exactly as the…

The Japanese composer and percussionist Midori Takada released “Through the Looking Glass” in 1983. Three decades later, a YouTube algorithm introduced it to a world of new listeners. Credit... Rozette Rago for The New York Times YouTube is known for shining a spotlight on viral stars, but sometimes…

I t is the end of June, and I am wandering about my small island in Maine. I’ve been thinking about the materiality of the world. Today, I just want to experience the fleshiness of this island. I run my hands along the bristly branches of a spruce tree. I could identify that prickle blindfolded. My…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

[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!…

“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…