08.20. 2011 I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called…

Next post Previous post Last week’s obituaries of Dennis Ritchie focused, naturally, on his creation of C and his co-creation, with Ken Thompson, of Unix. I want to talk about something else: the remarkable clarity of the writing done by Ritchie and the other early Unix developers at Bell Labs. The…

I was fired by Google this past Monday for a document that I wrote and circulated internally raising questions about cultural taboos and how they cloud our thinking about gender diversity at the company and in the wider tech sector. I suggested that at least some of the male-female disparity in tech…

By now, most of us have heard about Google's so-called "anti-diversity" manifesto and how James Damore, the engineer who wrote it, has been fired from his job. Titled Google's Ideological Echo Chamber, Mr. Damore called out the current PC culture, saying the gender gap in Google's diversity was not…

Editor’s note: This story contains explicit language. And some spoilers. The goal was for the aggression to stay on the blacktop at Baltimore’s neighborhood-famous Cloverdale Courts . Proposition Joe’s Eastside squad was going up against Avon Barksdale ’s Westside unit. The losing team would have to…

Y ou were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. Books still in print you’d have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of…

I am reprinting this from an email I received from Malidoma Some , a west African Shaman whom I’ve had the privilege to meet, drive around Boulder, and work for for two days. Since I am going through what I believe to be a spiritual emergence , I am reading a lot on the topic. I want to continue to…

“It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning,” Lincoln Steffens wrote in his beautiful 1925 essay . Piercingly true as this may be, we’ve known at least since Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave that “most people are not just…

What comes to mind when you think of the French Foreign Legion? Most likely men struggling through the desert in heavy blue coats and white peaked caps. Men who joined up after a lifetime of crime, fighting valiantly, then leaving the Legion to become tough, faceless mercenaries trading on their…

Daniel Dennett’s naturalistic account of consciousness draws some people in and puts others off. “There ain’t no magic here,” he says. “Just stage magic.” Photograph by Irina Rozovsky for The New Yorker Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted.…

A good sign of a philosophically sound interactive Unix tool is the facilities it offers for interacting with the filesystem and the shell: specifically, how easily can you run file operations and/or shell commands with reference to data within the tool? The more straightforward this is, the more…

It’s human nature: I over-value where I have influence. Since I am a designer, this frequently means placing too much emphasis on how things look and work rather than the direction they are pointed. But reflecting on the other side of the issue is also interesting: I find that the more input I have…

Housing prices have soared in fashionable Berlin neighborhoods like Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. Under pressure from a growing grass-roots movement, the city has put in place measures to fight gentrification. Gordon Welters for The New York Times BERLIN — When visitors want to experience this city’s…

Icinori Jet lag makes everyone miserable. But it makes some people mentally ill. There’s a psychiatric hospital not far from Heathrow Airport that is known for treating bipolar and schizophrenic travelers, some of whom are occasionally found wandering aimlessly through the terminals. A study from…

Christian Boros (German advertising maestro) and Karen Lohmann Boros (art historian). Berlin Mitte, 2015. When I lived in West Berlin during the last days of the wall, the historical image of the Berlin apartment had for me two facets, both familiar from literature, film, and art. The working-class…

I recently found myself facing a vending machine in a quiet corridor at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. I was due to speak at a conference called ‘Reinvent Money’ but, suffering from jetlag and exhaustion, I was on a search for Coca-Cola. The vending machine had a small…

On the evening of November 9, having barely been awake to see the day, I took the subway to Sunset Park. My objective was to meet a friend at the arcade Next Level . In size, Next Level resembles a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant. It does indeed serve food — free fried chicken and shrimp were…

Illustration by Jasu Hu The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was born a slave, around 55 A.D., in the Greco-Roman spa town of Hierapolis—present-day Pamukkale, Turkey. I first encountered his teachings in 2011, shortly after moving from San Francisco to Istanbul. I lived alone on a university campus in a…

Trump’s younger supporters know he’s an incompetent joke; in fact, that’s why they support him. An Italian newspaper reporting on Donald Trump retweeting himself depicted as Pepe the Frog in September of 2016. credit: Serena Danna / Corriere della Serra . 1. Born from Something Awful A round 2005 or…

The vaunted human capacity for reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight. Illustration by Gérard DuBois In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In…

A Conversation With Brian Eno About Ambient Music The unceasingly curious composer on chance, minimalism, and the politics of form. Photos by Shamil Tanna by Contributing Editor Interview Experimental February 16 2017 Visiting Brian Eno ’s studio in London’s Notting Hill neighborhood, there’s plenty…

Ornette Coleman was not scheduled to perform at the all-star concert held in his honor, back in the summer of 2014. That celebration, at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, was chiefly organized as a way for fans and associates to pay tribute to the saxophonist’s legacy as an American composer and innovator .…

Did you know...? LWN.net is a subscriber-supported publication; we rely on subscribers to keep the entire operation going. Please help out by buying a subscription and keeping LWN on the net. February 1, 2017 This article was contributed by Eddie Kovsky 2016 was a big year for project anniversaries.…

In 1999, the Roots were in limbo. The Philadelphia hip-hop band had released three critically acclaimed albums but were still considered something of a novelty act, featuring a big guy with a big Afro on drums ( ?uestlove ), a sharp but unshowy MC (Black Thought), two beatboxers (Rahzel and…

The Interstellar Style of Sun Ra How the space jazz icon’s radical and regal garments projected a hopeful realm outside of the very troubled real world. Photo by Paul Bergen/Redferns/GettyImages by Contributor From the Pitchfork Review Jazz April 18 2016 This story originally appeared in our print…

We do this to our philosophies. We redraft their contours based on projected shadows, or give them a cartoonish shape like a caricaturist emphasising all the wrong features. This is how Buddhism becomes, in the popular imagination, a doctrine of passivity and even laziness, while Existentialism…

Albrecht Dürer’s “The Rhinoceros,” 1515. From the National Gallery of Art It is a Sunday afternoon in a provincial town in France. Two men meet at a cafe. One of them, Berenger, is half-drunk. He is being berated by his companion, Jean. All of the sudden, they hear a great noise. When they and other…

January 2016 Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonderabout this. Is life actually short, or are we really complainingabout its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life wasshort if we lived 10 times as long? Since there didn't seem any way to answer this…

No JavaScript frameworks were created during the writing of this article. The following is inspired by the article “It’s the future” from Circle CI. You can read the original here . This piece is just an opinion, and like any JavaScript framework, it shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Hey, I got this…

The “future” — or a dumb gimmick? Last night’s Apple event was bizarre — I had been anticipating this show for a while, mostly looking forward to being able to stop telling people not to buy a Mac, because everything was so outdated. But, even though what I saw was interesting, it really feels like…

Extras: layers Paul Kalanithi Time at home. Time well spent A resident’s surgical skill is judged by his technique and his speed. You can’t be sloppy and you can’t be slow. From your first wound closure onward, spend too much time being precise and the scrub tech will announce, “Looks like we’ve got…

The following is a guest post by Damon Bauer . There has been a growing sentiment ( for instance ) that using node packages directly, with the command line interfaces they provide, is a good route to take. As opposed to abstracting the functionality away behind a task runner. Partly: you use npm…

Home | 2014-09-29 | (c)2014 James Hudson Follow @JamesSHudson RSS Feed This post doesn't have anything to do with running a business (except perhaps which startup ideas to avoid), but it's something lots of people seem interested in discussing. With the recent buzz about Ello ( and signs of its…

Wohnräume wirken belebend wie eine Theaterkulisse Die Ausrichtung des Grundrisses zur Straße hin ist bestimmend für die Anteilnahme der Bewohner am städtischen Straßenleben. Der Grundriss eines Mietshauses, an dessen Straßenfassade aus vermeintlich funktionalen Gründen ausschließlich Treppenhäuser,…

W e designers love to complain. It’s our nature. After all, if we were satisfied with the way things work, feel, and look, we wouldn’t have become designers in the first place. But lately, particularly among web and interaction designers, our griping has taken on a grim and despairing flavor.…

I’m not the most talented coder in the world. No, it’s true. So I try to write as little code as possible. The less I write, the less there is to break, justify, or maintain. I’m also lazy, so it’s all gravy. ( ed: maybe run with a food analogy? ) But it turns out the only surefire way to make…

Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful things so that people can do stuff. He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has…

She was just staring at me. She had something to say, and I could tell she was curious about the Free Listening sign, but she didn’t seem to have to courage to speak to me. Yet. So, I waited. Nowhere to be, and all day to get there. It was so hot outside. Finally, she walked up, and like a young…

The classic ed editor is a really good example of a sparse, minimal, standard Unix tool that does one thing, and does it well. Because there are so manygood screen-oriented editors for Unix, there’s seldom very much call for using ed , unless you’re working on very old or very limited hardware that…

A calendar can only be drawn next to a freshly made macchiato Tips for mapping your life Sometime in the fall of last year I began to draw my calendar. My weeks were packed with a series of interlocking jobs and I couldn’t keep them straight. Tiny calendars on my computer weren’t cutting it. I…