Some of the first people to be called “engineers” operated siege engines. A siege engine is a very old device used to tear down the walls of an enemy city. Depending on the century and the army it might have had a battering ram, a catapult, or even a simple ramp that would let soldiers jump over the…

J ustin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook . But even that wasn’t enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of…

Robert Jensen has spent his career restoring order after mass fatalities: identifying remains, caring for families, and recovering personal effects. Here’s how he became the best at the worst job in the world. A team stumbled and hacked its way through the jungle. The group had a vague idea of where…

Listening to Steely Dan’s Gaucho . 1. The cover of Steely Dan’s 1975 LP Katy Lied shows an out-of-focus praying mantis floating amid bulbous plants. I used to stare at it as a kid, listening to the record in my dad’s leather reading chair and wondering who this “Steely” was. He sounded sort of like…

Please note that this piece contains a bit of swearing. The seventh of May 1931 was a hot, dusty day in the mountain town of Corbin, Kentucky. Alongside a dirt road, a service station manager named Matt Stewart stood on a ladder painting a cement railroad wall. His application of a fresh coat of…

In his 1977 book “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction”,Christopher Alexander defined ways to architect physical spaces toenhance and support how people interact. This concept was veryinfluential in software development, leading to the popularization ofsoftware design patterns , which…

Something happens to a novel as it ages, but what? It doesn’t ripen or deepen in the manner of cheese and wine, and it doesn’t fall apart, at least not figuratively. Fiction has no half-life. We age alongside the novels we’ve read, and only one of us is actively deteriorating. Which is to say that a…

Relaunching a large-scale website is always quite an undertaking, especially if the task involves a huge political entity with content accumulated over a dozen years. In this article, we look behind the scenes of the responsive redesign of Kremlin.ru , Russia’s most prominent government website. We…

Agility is a good thing, no doubt, and the Agile Manifesto isn’t unreasonable. Compared to a straw-man practice called “Waterfall”, Agile is notably superior. Yet, so much of Agile as-practiced is deeply harmful, and I don’t really think that the Agile/Waterfall dichotomy is useful in the first…

Idle Words > Talks > What Happens Next Will Amaze You This is the text version of a talk I gave on September 14, 2015, at the FREMTIDENS INTERNET conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Good morning! Today's talk is being filmed, recorded and transcribed, and everything I say today will leave an…

We Don’t Sell Saddles Here The memo below was sent to the team at Tiny Speck, the makers of Slack , on July 31st, 2013 . It had been a little under seven months since development began and was two weeks before the launch of Slack’s ‘Preview Release’. It is presented verbatim, as written (including…

Page speed is increasingly important for websites. If you’re looking for a page load time benchmark for your site, this is it: users expect pages to load in two seconds, and after three seconds, up to 40% of users will abandon your site. Moreover, 85% of mobile users expect sites to load at least as…

Idle Words > Talks > Web Design: The First 100 Years This is the expanded version of a talk I gave on September 9, 2014 , at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC. Designers! I am a San Francisco computer programmer, but I come in peace! I would like to start with a parable about…

“HELL YEAH WE'RE USING @SlackHQ AT WORK I. LOVE. SLACK.” “Dear @SlackHQ, I love you. Yours, Dan” “@SlackHQ YOU COMPLETE ME” You’ve probably heard about Slack’s exponential growth. And you may have read how the internal-communication platform — now just two years old — is already used by more than…

“So much of our manufactured environment testifies to carelessness,” Ive says. Things are “developed to be different, not better.” Credit Photograph by Pari Dukovic I. Launch Day In recent months, Sir Jonathan Ive, the forty-seven-year-old senior vice-president of design at Apple—who used to play…

Eddie Huang Nathanael Turner for The New York Times On a cold, dark street in Tijuana, Mexico, I asked Eddie Huang a question that many people were sure to ask him in the months to come. “What did you expect?” For the past week in December, Huang had been venting about his tortured ambivalence…

Recommendations Like iOS 7 before it, Yosemite is an aesthetic one-way valve . Though the new appearance is not particularly radical, it’s so comprehensive that it quickly establishes itself as the new normal. Switching back to Mavericks after a week or two in Yosemite is like returning to iOS 6.…

This is the best art review I've read in a long while. Koons: "regurgitator of the obvious" http://t.co/WAjVo20Rkl

There are many valuable lessons to glean from Code Red_, Steven Brill’s Time Magazine cover story on the rescue of healthcare.gov. For those calling out Silicon Valley for its apparent narcissism, there is a reminder of those who dropped everything to work practically 24/7 to save the Affordable…

Even 28 years after his last hit, Michael McDonald can still trigger laughter and tears. Though he's still a fixture on the R&B/soft rock nostalgia circuit ( catch him with Toto and Kenny Loggins this summer), that sui generis voice has been touring without him, so to speak, for decades. Recently,…

On the Nature of Digital Transformation: 10 Observations A few things I’ve noticed about how technology works I’ve had a long relationship with digital technology. First simply as a user, then as a novice developer and designer, and always as a curious observer. Over that time I’ve become…

“I Pretty Much Grew Up Going To Sun Ra’s House”: an Interview With Fhloston Paradigm | Thump The VICE Channels words May 28, 2014 4:45 PM By Lauren Martin As cult UK label Hyperdub celebrates its 10th birthday this summer, even a cursory look back through the years shows up some of the most…

Sensational story about Luis Suarez & the role of myth/truth in our heroes http://t.co/NL2rNPH8zw Did he head-butt the ref?

The Art of Fiction No. 64, Kurt Vonnegut (via @Pocket) #longreads http://t.co/xrMnwXa6n0

What Heartbleed can teach us about marketing: http://t.co/CDq2olB3Q4

RT @txtcoin @guardian open sources its new front-end code. https://t.co/wRiMeQqcEh

I am sat in the basement of a hotel on the outskirts of Munich; the sort of hotel that must have sprung up fully-formed overnight, a massive swelling of glittering commerce emerging from the abandoned building sites and car parks and motorways that ring the city.

My review of OS X 10.9 Mavericks: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/

In the months leading up to the hunt, Dylan Mayer trained twice a week in his parents’ swimming pool, asking friends to attack him, splay their arms and grab him, drag him to the surface and shove him below it, pull off his mask, snatch his regulator, time his recovery. By last Halloween, he was…

The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is one of the best places in Silicon Valley to spot a…

Here's Peyton Manning's legacy among writers: He's so good that he turns metaphor against itself. You look at his stats and you have no choice but to deploy weapons-grade verbiage. Peyton Manning shreds the Eagles for 327 yards and four touchdowns in three quarters. Peyton Manning torches the NFL…

The raid on Sal Culosi was merely another red flag indicating yet more SWAT team mission creep in America. It wasn’t even the first time a Virginia SWAT team had killed someone during a gambling raid. In 1998 a SWAT team in Virginia Beach shot and killed security guard Edward C. Reed during a 3:00…

this is a quote from a philip sherburne piece on spin dissembling all the rhetoric from daft punk and boards of canada and everyone else about the relationship between computers and electronic music lately. ultimately i don’t really want to get super into that because it feels like it’s kind of a…

Learning to See Essay 19 March 2013 Learning to design is learning to see , an adventure that gets more and more captivating the further you go. A love letter to my profession. Our mind is not a camera. Seeing is not a passive act. We see what we expect to see , or, as Anaïs Nin put it so…

"Embrace, extend, extinguish: How Google crushed and abandoned the RSS industry" http://t.co/ps6bYi20vI

Design Wants to Be Free The New MakerBot Replicator Might Just Change Your World How Nerf Became the World’s Best Purveyor of Big Guns for Kids Don Stookey knew he had botched the experiment. One day in 1952, the Corning Glass Works chemist placed a sample of photosensitive glass inside a furnace…

Reynier was hoping to have a vineyardesque experience: a friendly proprietor, an extended tour, plenty of opportunities for firsthand research. Instead, he was greeted by a padlocked gate, a welter of hazardous-chemicals warnings, and a sign with a brusque message: “plant closed. no visitors.” He…

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Dan Harmon Thirty-six hours on the road — and in the bar — with exiled TV genius Dan Harmon Don’t cry for Dan Harmon. Yes, he’s still the most famously unemployed writer in television. Yes, two people who are not Dan Harmon are now running Community, the cult sitcom Harmon created in 2009 and was…

At our first official interview earlier in the day, Ocean spent the first five minutes staring down at his phone. He didn’t so much as look up at me, as I made small talk with his managers and awaited his attention. Eventually he said, “Here’s what I think about music and journalism: The most…