Shaun McGill recounts his two decade experience and history with mobile computing devices, beginning with the Psion PDA and ending with the iPhone 5. His essay is both oddly specific to his personal relationship with devices and generically broad to the industry as a whole. It’s a long read, but worth it.
Ben Yagoda: So when should you use the dash? Writers who deploy this mark comfortably and adeptly (rather than haphazardly) are conscious of the rhythm and dynamics of a sentence. A well-placed dash adds energy and voice. The period is sometimes referred to as a “full stop,” and I think of the dash as fully [...]
Lynn Beisner, writing in the Guardian, offers a thought-provoking perspective on abortion: I make even my most ardent pro-choice friends and colleagues very uncomfortable when I explain why my mother should have aborted me. Somehow they confuse the well-considered and rational: “The best choice for both my mother and me would have been abortion” with [...]
Filmmaker Casey Neistat wrote about his experience in late July of losing $13,238.86 worth of property in the back of a cab. Neistat writes: “before you call me an asshole for forgetting my stuff in a cab consider i’d been traveling for 10 days straight always with a producer who was responsible for the gear. this [...]
What makes the youth culture of today tick: “Here’s what I see around me, in the city and the culture: food carts, 20-somethings selling wallets made from recycled plastic bags, boutique pickle companies, techie start-ups, Kickstarter, urban-farming supply stores and bottled water that wants to save the planet. Today’s ideal social form is not the [...]
The LA Times just published an incredibly fascinating five-part series about how our world is coping with the causes and consequences of a world with seven billion people and rapid population growth. There’s video, photos, articles — really enough content to keep you reading and thinking for a week. I could point out a few highlights, [...]
From Outside Magazine: “When Robert Wood Jr. disappeared in a densely forested Virginia park, searchers faced the challenge of a lifetime. The eight-year-old boy was autistic and nonverbal, and from his perspective the largest manhunt in state history probably looked like something else: the ultimate game of hide-and-seek.” Guaranteed the best thing you read all [...]
The New York Times Magazine has released it’s annual innovations edition, focusing upon 32 innovations that will change your tomorrow. Here’s BoingBoing’s Maggie Koerth-Baker on innovation: We tend to rewrite the histories of technological innovation, making myths about a guy who had a great idea that changed the world. In reality, though, innovation isn’t the [...]
