Mandy Brown responds to Alan Jacobs, including a compelling peasant woodland metaphor borrowed from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (which I need to read). “A peasant woodland is one in which human participation and activity help the woods become more productive for humans and wildlife both—not through anything shaped like a plan but rather through a kind of call and response, an improvisation in which all the critters and creatures of the forest are players among us.” This way of thinking about the web seems healthy.
Helena Zhang’s Departure Mono, a monospaced pixel font. Fun.
Nathaniel Roy on Knopf’s logo variations. Also fun. I wish more publishers did this. (Maybe they do.)
Naz Hamid on being content with an older iPhone. I used to upgrade my phone consistently every two years, but this is the first year where I don’t feel like I need to. Freeing.
Devin Kate Pope on fearing home cooks. “The U.S. food system disconnects people from their food and each other. […] We, the people, are really remarkably capable of cooking everything and anything. Why am I more comfortable buying frozen tamales made by a corporation flown into my town than from the lady up the street? Who is the suspicion serving? Who profits when people are scared to eat food made by their neighbors?” Good point, one I hadn’t thought of much before. (Even though my favorite food in other countries is typically street food sold by small vendors, which is close to the same thing.)
Gareth Edwards on the imminent disappearance of the .io domain because of the sovereignty transfer.
Mandy Brown on staying in the gap, referring to Ira Glass’s taste gap story about creative work. I think of the original quote quite often and like this expansion of the idea. “The gap between your abilities and your taste is not a gap to be crossed but one to be cultivated.”
Mandy Brown on personal sites. Particularly this part:
A website is, among other things, a container. The shape of that container both constrains and makes possible what goes within it. This is, I think, one of the primary justifications for having your own website. Not just so you can own your stuff (for some meaning of “ownership,” in a culture in which any billionaire can scrape your work without permission and copyright only protects the rich). Not just so you have a home base among the shifting winds of the various platforms, which rise and fall like brush before the fire. Not just so you can avoid setting up camp in a Nazi bar. But also so that you can shape the work—so that you can give shape to it, and in that shaping make possible work that couldn’t arise elsewhere.
Alan Jacobs on POS instead of POSSE, for personal sites. This is largely where I’m at nowadays, though I do reluctantly post art to Instagram and Facebook (for now, anyway).
Tracy Durnell on the secret power of a blog. “If you only write when you’re sure you’ll produce brilliance, you’ll never write.” I need to remember this.
Katie Clapham’s lovely Receipt from the Bookshop newsletter. “I open the draft when I open the shop, detail the day’s customers and transactions, and then send it out to readers before I go home.” I love this idea, and the newsletter itself is good, too.
Richard Rutter on the problem with superscripts and subscripts. I didn’t know about font-variant-position, cool. Also see Richard’s TODS default OpenType stylesheet.
Dan B. on how to build anything extremely quickly via the power of outlining.
Steven Arcangeli’s oil.nvim, a Neovim plugin that lets you edit your filesystem like a buffer. Cool idea.
Robin on AI. “I want real things by real people.” Yes, exactly.
Anastasia Bizyayeva on how every online map of China is wrong, in the sense that the satellite images don’t line up with the street map vectors. Fascinating.
Marco Giancotti suggests you don’t have time to read books that won’t change your life. A high bar, but quality clearly matters far more than quantity, and perhaps there’s something to keeping the bar this high. I’m not quite this strict about my reading, but who knows, might be worth trying.
The Psmiths review Jonathan Sumption’s The Albigensian Crusade and Dennis C. Rasmussen’s Fears of a Setting Sun. Love these reviews, and the books they’re reviewing are super interesting, too.
Sean Voisen on Wendell Berry writing without a computer. This stood out to me, particularly the part about writing by hand for a more embodied process.
Greg Neville’s blog on Penguin book cover designs. Fun. I’ve enjoyed the posts on the Marber grid and the Penguin classics and the classics (again).
Alice Vincent on Coralie Bickford-Smith’s Clothbound Classics cover designs for Penguin. Loved this. The accompanying video is also good.
Ted Chiang on why AI isn’t going to make art, with his main argument being that art involves lots of choices. Agreed. (Truth be told, I haven’t been giving AI much thought lately. I know there are new developments — OpenAI’s o1-previews reasoning model, for example — but none of it is terribly interesting to me anymore.)
Christopher Bonanos interviews Robert Caro about The Power Broker. Also, the ebook will at long last be available (for real this time!). It goes on sale tomorrow on the Kindle store. Great book.
Jim Nielsen on sanding UI. I do this too, and clicking around a ton really is key.
Hamilton Nolan on taxing billionaires 100% over $1 billion. I’m not an economist and don’t know what ramifications this might have, but on the face of it I really like the idea.
Matthias Endler on moving slow and fixing things and the harmfulness of the Paul Graham VC mentality. “As it turns out, I’ve always been drawn to the exact opposite: sustainable growth, robust solutions, and a long-term mindset. That’s why I’ve been contributing to open source for 15 years, why I only run small, bootstrapped businesses or non-profits, and why I focus on writing and knowledge sharing.
Matt Webb on not privatizing essential parts of the economy. Yes, this. I wish this were already true.
Adam Mastroianni’s blog extravaganza winners, with several interesting linked blog posts.
Alex Tabarrok quotes Vaclav Smil on how many workers it might have taken to build the Great Pyramid of Giza. Fewer than I expected.
Adrian Roselli’s semiannual reminder to learn and hire for web standards, wherein he quotes Alex Russell: “Never, ever hire for JavaScript framework skills. Instead, interview and hire only for fundamentals like web standards, accessibility, modern CSS, semantic HTML, and Web Components. This is doubly important if your system uses a framework.”
Mark Simonson’s Type Design Like It’s 1987 demo. I’ve only watched little parts of this so far, but it’s fascinating.
Victoria Gill on the reservoir of liquid water found on Mars. Exciting!
Benj Edwards on researchers crafting lifelike robotic skin from living human skin cells. This is weird and kind of disturbing in a few different ways. (I’m over here imagining a fleshy Roomba whose skin starts decomposing after a software update fails. Zombie robots, anyone?)
Victor Tangermann on scientists creating a robot controlled by a blob of human brain cells. And hey, another disturbing step forward. Ha. Part of me wonders, by the way, how far advances like these will get before global climate change regressions become a blocker to progress.
Ted Gioia on doctors raising a patient from a deathlike state with ultrasound electronic music. Fascinating.
Sara Hendren on sending kids to college. “This is the first of many parenting presuppositions that make up the cultural water we’re swimming in and therefore can’t see. We imagine our children as maybe-slightly-immature but essentially fully-formed selves. Our job is framed as clearing the obstacles only; we’re tasked with whatever passive supports will help our children optimize themselves on their own terms.” Which is how I’ve seen it. Her point here, though, is that this isn’t enough, and that these kids still need to be formed. “But formation is in short supply everywhere! I don’t get very far, even among fellow professors, when I bring this up. The autonomy-led, buffet-style, platform-burnishing model for higher education is thoroughly internalized in most places. You have to look pretty far and wide to find a strong sense of mission for forming young people into their free future selves.” Interesting throughout.
Teenage Engineering’s medieval EP-1320. Ha. Love this.
Tanner Greer on Patrick Collison’s canonical Silicon Valley reading list. While I’ve admittedly soured a fair bit on SV technologists in general and I have zero interest in becoming more like them, the books on this list that I’ve already read (The Power Broker, Dealers of Lightning, The Dream Machine) were good, and I suspect there are a few others here worth reading. (I’ve long wanted to read A Pattern Language, for example, and Seeing Like a State and Titan and The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt are on my list as well.)
C. D. Cunningham on the CES Letter not actually being the sincere questions of an honest truth-seeker. Not a huge surprise.
Eleanor Konik on themed logs being more useful than daily ones. Agreed.
Steven Luu on using enums instead of booleans. A good point.
The Open Press Project looks cool, especially their new postcard printing press, which I am trying very hard not to covet.
Ted Gioia’s reading list on stupidity, starting with Thucydides. “This book is absolutely the place to start—and it marks an important moment in human culture. For the first time in the Western world, a historian turned to his own society and said: ‘This is stupid.’” I’ve started reading Thucydides because of this article and it’s surprising how modern it feels in some regards.
The Center for Latter-day Saint Arts is publishing a Latter-day Saint art critical reader.
Hamilton Nolan on public ownership of public goods. “When you take a vital service and privatize it, you ensure that it will run according to a private profit motive rather than running with the goal of providing the best service to the public.” Agreed. More generally, capitalism (at least the late-stage growth capitalism we see at scale, the surveillance capitalism, the crush-the-poor capitalism; I’m not talking about small business here) more and more seems to me to be at odds with the gospel. (Which I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by, given that a philosophy of selfishness was always destined to be at odds against a philosophy of selflessness.)
USGS showing all the earth’s water as a single sphere. Much less than I realized!
Procreate does the right thing and pledges not to add generative AI features to the app. The right thing in my mind, anyway. What a wonderful breath of fresh air. When I see apps add generative AI, it makes me want to avoid them. (So this is what it feels like to become a cranky old man.)
Ytch. Mashup of YouTube and old-school TV. More fun than I expected it to be.
Mike Grindle on his one big text file. I don’t know that I’ll do this, but it’s still fun to read about. (At work I have a handful of text files — a to-do list, a backburner list, a log, a list of what I did each day. For personal stuff, I use my home-crafted apps since I want to be able to use my phone.)
Steph Ango on knowing what to remove. Yes!
Robert Birming on timeline pages (via Tracy). Hey look, convergent evolution. Fun to see.
Maxime Heckel on dithering and retro shaders. Nice writeup, and the final result is nostalgically fun.
Andrea Anderson on ope, which turns out to not be from the Midwest after all. (Until I read this article, by the way, I had no idea that I myself say ope. I do.)
Suw Charman-Anderson on genre-hopping as a writer and on being a generalist. This is good.
Times New Roman regular vs. bold. I had no idea the bold is so different structurally! (Flat serifs, etc.)
David Epstein interviews Evan Ratliff about AI voice clones and Evan’s Shell Game podcast.
Ziyang Chen, Daniel Geng, and Andrew Owens on visual spectrograms that look like images but can also be played as sounds. Ha. These are cool. (Gimmicky, sure, but there’s room in the world for cool gimmicks.)
Mandy Brown on kinworking instead of networking. I like this reframing — much more human. “Think of the work of checking in on people, arranging gatherings, keeping up the group DM, providing emotional and material support.”
Tim Andraka’s art. Love these.
Utah bans some books in public schools statewide. Embarrassing, and a slippery slope. Utah is bonkers sometimes.
Jeremy Keith on reading patterns. I loosely try to balance my reading between nonfiction and fiction and between female and male authors, but I’m not rigorous about it, and I’m sure I could do better at diversifying my reading.
Yanko Design on Monoli’s crystal that makes things look like pixel art. Ha.
The Church is creating a BYU medical school, focused on teaching with research in international health issues and worldwide humanitarian efforts. Cool.
Slime Mold Time Mold on the case for lithium possibly being the main cause of the obesity epidemic. The evidence does look somewhat compelling, at least on an initial glance. Seems worth investigating further.
Andrea Pitzer on how Trump’s massive deportation plan would effectively turn into concentration camps. I’m glad the American people seem to be rejecting Project 2025, because yikes.
Matt Haggard on paper planners. I’ve been all-digital for a while, but this intrigues me. (Both the idea of returning to paper and the idea of designing my own planners.)
Johnny.Decimal, an interesting organization scheme. I don’t know that I’ll ever adopt it in full, but some of the ideas seem useful, and (for now) I’ve started using a similar categorization scheme for cataloging projects.
Heather Cox Richardson on Biden stepping down from the race. “In a time of dictators, Trump tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and install himself in power against the wishes of the people. President Joe Biden voluntarily turned away from reelection in order to give the people a better shot at preserving our democracy. He demonstrated what it means to put the country first.”
Dave Karpf on Biden and Harris. “I believe Kamala Harris is going to win. The party is excited and unified. She is positioned to exploit every one of Trump’s glaring flaws. Many of the attacks that Trump will use against her will backfire, revealing that the Republican Party is currently run by crooks and creeps who hate a lot of America and a lot of Americans.”
Jason Kottke on Peter Ablinger’s talking piano. Wow. That’s…crazy.
Behdad Esfahbod on the state of text rendering in 2024. (Esfahbod is the author of HarfBuzz, the predominant open source shaper.) Fascinating read. I also liked Some Font Tools, his presentation with Marianna Paszkowska on some new fonttools features.
GT Academy, a series on how to design a sans serif typeface.
Benjamin Reinhardt on what it takes to get new materials out of the lab and into mass production. “Despite university teams regularly announcing triumphantly that they’ve created a material with seemingly magical properties like artificial muscles made out of carbon nanotubes or ‘limitless power’ from graphene, new materials-enabled human capabilities have been rare in the past 50 years. Why is there such a gap between headlines and reality when it comes to new materials? Is there anything we can do about it?”
Marcin Wichary’s talk on pixel fonts at Config 2024. Way good. The effects on his slides (made with JavaScript and Canvas) were amazing, too.
And the font editor is fun. Also see his segmented type demo.
Fontra, a newish browser-based tool for variable typeface design. Very cool. Looking forward to trying this out. (Also, I found Just van Rossum’s video from October to be helpful as intro documentation of sorts.)
Simon Cozens’ HarfBuzz WASM shaper demos, including one for Nastaliq and one for Egyptian hieroglyphs. Love this.
FontGoggles, a better way to preview fonts, including .ufo and .designspace files, with automatic reloading.
Rob en Robin’s F.C. Variable, an illustration variable font. Ha.
Robin Sloan on designing a script for his new book. It does look good. I don’t know that I’ve ever really thought about designing a conlang script, but now I totally want to.
