February 2012
47 posts
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The twilight of the color photograph →
By DUSHKO PETROVICH
One hundred years ago, one of Paris’s richest men had a quixotic dream. Returning from a personal trip to China and Japan, the banker Albert Kahn decided to build a huge visual archive of the planet. Kahn believed that mutual misunderstanding was the source of world conflict, so in 1909, he began funding scores of photographers as they set out across five...
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William Gibson, on inspiration →
I very seldom compose anything in my head which later finds its way into text, except character names sometimes – I’m often very much inspired by things that I misunderstand. Have you ever seen Brian Eno’s deck of Oblique Strategies? One of them is “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” That’s my favorite. [At a] hotel in New York a couple of days ago, the young woman who checked me in said...
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Internet Freedom Fighters Build a Shadow Web →
By JULIAN DIBBELL l Scientific American March 2012
Just after midnight on January 28, 2011, the government of Egypt, rocked by three straight days of massive antiregime protests organized in part through Facebook and other online social networks, did something unprecedented in the history of 21st-century telecommunications: it turned off the Internet. Exactly how it did this remains...
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The Value of Making Reading Hard →
By ALAN JACOBS l The Atlantic Feb.8, 2012
One of the really tough questions to answer in relation to any technology is: When do you make something easy and when do you make it hard? This problem is perhaps most obvious in the realm of game design, since people get bored by games that are too easy and get frustrated by games that are too hard. So game-makers have to learn to split the ...
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Fail Worse →
By NED BEAUMAN l The New Inquiry Feb.9, 2012
Ranked 104th in the list of the most highlighted passages on Amazon’s Kindle website is a short clipping from The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris: “ ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.”
The...
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Alicia Svigals - Gasn Nign
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Composers as Gardeners →
By BRIAN ENO
About the time when I first started making records, I was also starting to become aware of a new sort of organizing principle in music. I think like many people, I had assumed that music was produced, or created in the way that you imagine symphony composers make music, which is by having a complete idea in their head in every detail and then somehow writing out ways by which...
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When to Quote Poetry or Moan Like a Moorhen →
By DWIGHT G. GARNER l NYTimes Jan.31, 2012
“Genitals,” Malcolm Bradbury, the British novelist and academic, wrote, “are a great distraction to scholarship.” They’ve been a distraction, too, to our understanding of the Kama Sutra, the classic study of society and sexuality written in India nearly 2,000 years ago.
The book resides in the popular imagination as kitsch, as if it were a series of...
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Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas →
By BENEDICT CAREY
Like any other high school junior, Wynn Haimer has a few holes in his academic game. Graphs and equations, for instance: He gets the idea, fine — one is a linear representation of the other — but making those conversions is often a headache.
Or at least it was. For about a month now, Wynn, 17, has been practicing at home using an unusual online program that prompts him to...
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“In desiring so aggressively to create ‘one beautifully simple and intuitive...”
– World Wide Webs
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Japanese Design Group Nendo Hones Its Unusual... →
By ALICE RAWSTHORN l NYTimes Jan.29, 2012
“There is a playfulness in Nendo’s work, and a formal simplicity, which is deceptive, because the birth of the products can be extremely complex,” said Jana Scholze, curator of contemporary furniture and product design at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. “I don’t know many designers who have produced such an astounding number of new works in...
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