Do nothing The unreasonable effectiveness of doing nothing. A typical interaction. I had a colleague send me a message the other day: 12:13pm colleague: hi copple Me: spend 2 minutes pondering how to

I routinely make a fool of myself when I tell friends I want a Martin Baker ejection seat as a chair in my living room. Of course, with the pyrotechnic charge removed. Seriously, I would totally buy i

Cultural differences create a lot of misunderstanding in communications between Westerners, particularly Americans, and Russians. In this mini-ethnography I present the main differences in perception

March 2021 Summary: I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for

× Have you seen the yellow-purple posters for all over Berlin? This Saturday the campaign to nationalise Berlin’s biggest landlord begins. Photo: Nathaniel Flakin What happens with the rent you pay ev

Simple Mining

If you want an overview of everything new in Panther, the best resource I’ve seen, by far, is Mark Pilgrim’s “What’s new in Panther” — 11 pages, 100 screenshots, and pretty much a point-by-point overv

I’ve long been impressed by shell one-liners. They seem like magical incantations. Pipe a few terse commands together, et voilà ! Out pops the solution to a problem that would seem to require pages of

Microsoft is cool again, or so the trends would have you think. Microsoft is not an okay company, despite their deliberate efforts to improve their reputation in recent years. Collaboration with US mi

Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret "And as for this non-college bullshit I got two words for that: learn to fuckin' type" — Mr. Pink This is another one I've wanted to write forever. Man, I've tried

This story is assembled from contemporaneous first-person accounts. As such, quotations contain some antiquated spellings, grammar, and phrasing. In the Earth’s extreme southern latitudes, where the P

To read an annotated version of this article, complete with interviews with scientists and links to further reading, click here . I. ‘Doomsday’ Peering beyond scientific reticence. It is, I promise, w

In August of 2015, my hands stopped working. I could still control them, but every movement accumulated more pain, so every motion came with a cost: getting dressed in the morning, sending a text, lif

More people should do what I’m doing right now. They should sit at their computers and bat the cursor around — write full sentences about themselves and the things they care about. I have a selfish re

Open-plan offices offer few pleasures; one of them is snooping on other people’s browsing habits. When, years ago, I began working for tech companies in San Francisco, I noticed that my co-workers were always scrolling through a beige, text-only Web site that resembled a nineteen-nineties Internet…

The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mi

07.28. 2019 Australians have an odd relationship with Antarctica. The fact that there's an even less hospitable piece of territory further to the south seems to soothe the young country, reassuring th

Last New Year’s Eve was my first in Berlin. We live at the edge of Wedding, a neighborhood just north of the city center that, counter to what its name evokes, is gritty and sprawling, studded with public housing and betting parlors. A photo of our block from August, 1961, when it was part of West…

A long, long time ago, that is, in days of film photography, it was a rather difficult task to learn how to produce properly exposed pictures. There was no instant feedback and the only way to see how

How to assess the quality of garments: A beginner's guide What's the number one prerequisite to building a high-quality wardrobe? Exactly: You need to be able to recognize a quality garment when you s

How to assess the quality of garments part II: Seams, tailoring, linings & details As promised, here comes part II of the quality beginner's guide: all about assessing seams, linings, tailoring and de

I think I amat least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me forproductivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place. Compoundgrowth gets discussed as a

André Staltz The Web began dying in 2014, here's how 30 Oct 2017 Before the year 2014, there were many people using Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Today, there are still many people using services from

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-wee

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 rema

Former Google software engineer James Damore. Photo: Peter Duke By James Damore Aug. 11, 2017 3:54 pm ET I was fired by Google this past Monday for a document that I wrote and circulated internally ra

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

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’

meshaphoto / Getty / Konstantin Orlov / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic Y ou were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. Books still

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

How to become an “antischolar” in a culture that treats knowledge as “an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.” “It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world

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, fi

Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted. Slowly, that changed. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks; near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and

A good sign of a philosophically sound interactive Unix tool is the facilitiesit offers for interacting with the filesystem and the shell: specifically, howeasily can you run file operations and/or sh

Plainness and Sweetness March 27, 2017 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

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 gentrifica

Yes, Your Sleep Schedule Is Making You Sick Credit... Icinori Jet lag makes everyone miserable. But it makes some people mentally ill. There’s a psychiatric hospital not far from Heathrow Airport that

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 Berl