Last year, the celebrated New Yorker writer David Grann spoke with Nieman Storyboard about his book, The Wager. The interviewer asked Grann how he manages to keep coming across the kind of stories that most writers would dream of finding, even once in their lives. Here’s how Grann responded: “Coming…

Saturday, November 29, 2025 Poetry Comics Month, Day 29 Happy holiday reading! Older Post Home Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Poetry Comics Nothing Ever Happens On a Gray Day One Boy Watching The Art of Living There Is A Rainbow My Words What Sound Is Morning? I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf…

You’ve heard of the 10x engineer, but I am here to tell you about the Wolf. They are an engineer, and they consistently exhibit the following characteristics: They appear to exist outside the well-defined process we’ve defined to get things done, but they appear to suffer no consequences for not…

Back in 2012, as a young assistant professor, I traveled to Berkeley to attend a wedding. On the first morning after we arrived, my wife had a conference call, so I decided to wander the nearby university campus to work on a vexing theory problem my collaborators and I had taken to calling “The…

I have been writing this column for 15 years. That means there have been 180 of them, filled with wisdom, insight, whimsy, prejudice, contradiction and sometimes just outrageous stupidity, all of it interrogating the way we cook and eat now. As this is my last of these columns I thought, as a…

September 22, 2025 • 2 min read I was lucky enough to make a few friends my first semester of college. We ended up hanging out quite a bit during those early months. We’d all get excited for the weekends because Friday nights meant going out to party. Everyone except for Anna, that is. Anna was…

Before joining Pixite I spent several years as a freelance Android developer. Being 100% remote for all of those years, I learned many things about the process of hiring and employment. The biggest eye-opener for me was the realization that when you apply and interview for a job, you are selling a…

Opinion Finding Beauty Visuals by Lee Mary Manning Aug. 8, 2025 This essay is part of Finding Beauty, a series on discovering joy in the unexpected. There is a grate on Rue Danton in Paris, not too far from the university campus where I teach during the summer, that emits a particular smell: sweet,…

A feature added for no other reason than to draw management attention and be removed, thus avoiding unnecessary changes in other aspects of the product. I don’t know if I actually invented this term or not, but I am certainly not the originator of the story that spawned it. This started as a piece…

Cinq Personnes. A place to find ideas for living better smarter. By Reece · Over 1,000 subscribers By subscribing, I agree to Substack’s Terms of Use and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy

The reason the kitchen is a mess is not because the kitchen is poorly designed, it’s because we didn’t do the dishes after every meal. Michael Feathers recently wrote an eerily similar entry about the professional chef’s concept of working clean: One other thing that I liked about the Pastry Chef’s…

Indian pot belly: From status symbol to silent killer 2 hours ago Soutik BiswasIndia correspondent•@soutikBBC Getty Images The Indian pot belly - once a badge of prosperity, indulgence and aging respectability - has long been a target of satire and social commentary. In literature, it quietly…

Listen to this story with Steven Kurutz’s commentary about why he wrote it. In “Generation X,” the 1991 novel that defined the generation born in the 1960s and 1970s, Douglas Coupland chronicled a group of young adults who learn to reconcile themselves to “diminishing expectations of material…

My dad used to say, “Slow down, son. You’ll get the job done faster.” I’ve worked in many high-tech startup companies in the San Francisco Bay area. I am now 52, and I program slowly and thoughtfully. I’m kind of like a designer who writes code; this may become apparent as you read on :) Programming…

There's been a recent resurgence on twitter and the like about how teams should divide up their testing efforts. In particular, Tim Bray argues compellingly in favor of taking automated testing seriously. Anyone familiar with my writing will know that I'm very much in agreement with him. One of the…

Obituary | One man on his island The hermit-guardian of Italy’s loveliest beach died on January 3rd, aged 85 Photograph: BILD/Stefano Laura To Polynesia! That was where Mauro Morandi wanted to go. By 1989 he had the means to get there, a 16-metre seven-cabin catamaran, “a Ferrari of the seas”. Flat,…

Cycling to work is not only good for people's health, but also good for their wallet – or in Belgium, at least. Employees receive compensation for every kilometre they ride, with some cyclists earning up to €810 per year. All employees in Belgium who cycle to work are entitled to a bicycle allowance…

Over the past 18 months or so, many people have had more time to think about what they want from their jobs, and the kind of conditions they are willing to accept. The concept of the Great Resignation tends to gloss over “essential workers,” who are still somehow not essential enough to merit a…

Credit: Pexels At DuckDuckGo, there’s an expression: “You are the DRI of your career” (DRI: Directly Responsible Individual). I like this, both as an individual who has always felt like the DRI of my own career, and I like it as a manager because I think it makes the boundaries of what you can and…

When I made breakfast this morning, I didn’t begin by making the blender. Someone else, a team with more skills, resources and scale, built the blender. I simply bought it. That seems obvious–no one expects a from-scratch baker to make their own baking powder. And yet, our projects are rarely fine…

In this post I discuss how to use a new Git rebasing feature, --update-refs, which was included in Git 2.38, in October 2022. This makes working with "stacked" branches a lot easier. I'm a big fan of small git commits. Especially when you're creating a big feature. I like to create a "story" with my…

En français svp In the twisting vaults of a subway, metro, or U-Bahn, there’s often no reliable cell service, wifi, or GPS. Which means you had no good way of keeping track of your stops or ETA when underground. You had to look out the window for signs on the platform, listen for station…

Drop the Hyphen in Asian American On the historical divisiveness of an unnecessary punctuation mark. By Henry Fuhrmann • January 23, 2018 Ed. note: The Associated Press Stylebook and BuzzFeed Style Guide have credited “Drop the Hyphen in ‘Asian American'” as the impetus for changing their guides. In…

Published inDesigning Atlassian · 6 min read· Apr 7, 2022 -- People illustrations by Storyset Cross-discipline collaboration can be challenging. Especially if your team is remote or taking a hybrid approach to time in the office, it can be easy to fall into a rhythm of validation. Collaboration, in…

Published intech-at-instacart · 9 min read· Jul 31, 2018 -- Two years ago, the customer engineering team at Instacart began working on a new API for our customer-facing apps. We took a look at our existing API, which was a traditional data API, and found that we were implementing a lot of domain…

Our 20th most-read article of 2024. - - - “Mr. Trump’s first term was better than expected… the authoritarian rule that Democrats and the press predicted never appeared. Mr. Trump was too undisciplined, and his attention span too short, to stay on one message much less stage a coup. America’s checks…

I’m writing this post about eighteen hours before the first polls open on Election Day, and it feels tense out there. The New York Times, for example, just posted an article headlined: “How Americans

Sustainable travel—meaning the share of trips by walking, cycling, and public transport—is one measure of the health of a transport system. By that measure, taking Chennai as an example, sustainable t

Ferenc Puskas played pregnant, teammate Amancio Amaro liked to say. The day he arrived at Real Madrid in 1958, he was 31 years old, 18kg overweight and, banned by Fifa for defecting after the Hungaria