May 2010
6 posts
5 tags
Being available in response
Frank Chimero, a man full of good ideas, shared another one recently: a text playlist. Basically, it’s a selection of readings that he revisits on a regular basis, “almost a pep talk in text form,” as he describes it. Frank’s list included a ton of good stuff (I’ve done some thinking about “stock and flow” myself), and the wonderful Liz Danzico...
3 tags
Trapdoors and logic bombs
Taking a break to set my fear aside while reading this NYT review of former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke’s new book, I was reminded of how much I enjoy the language of hacking:
North Korea is suspected of being behind the cyberattacks of July 2009 that took down the Web servers of the Treasury, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department and is thought...
4 tags
The invisible tribe
As is now widely known, and as NYT reports, Twitter has donated the tweets from its public timeline to The Library of Congress. The data takes up much less physical and digital space than you’d think. Ten billion tweets occupy just 5TB of storage space, enough to easily fit on a desktop. But dealing with the onslaught of primary source material may require a new kind of historian:
A tool...
3 tags
Drugs for the body, books for the mind
Above: A “book forest” in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg, where old books can be left for new readers to discover. Photo by Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times.
Michael Kimmelman pens an ode to Germany’s “D.I.Y. Culture” in the NYT. He inquires about the high volume of bookshops:
Berliners looked nonplussed when I asked them to account for all the...
3 tags
Getting them to show up the next day
Today’s NYT has an interview with Lost’s Executive Producer Carlton Cuse that touches on Charles Dickens and the act of writing serially:
The thing that we actually do is we take the nemesis of network television — the act structure — and we try to turn it to our advantage. We have six commercial breaks in an episode of “Lost,” and so our goal is when we’re...
3 tags
RISD Wintersession Workshop
Above, from top: Vendors for Ooga Booga, Sister, and The Holster, at the 2009 NY Art Book Fair, PS1, Queens NY. Photos taken by Martine Syms, Golden Age, Chicago IL.
In 2004 the New York Times Magazine’s annual Year in Ideas issue included an entry for the “Anti-Concept Concept Store,” which detailed a series of “guerilla stores” Comme des Garçons had opened in “hip, yet-to-be-gentrified...
