Great series on Threads from a small publisher on the destruction of Twitter and what it means for them. I am not currently using Twitter or any diaspora service, although you may see me parked on them as either @bobbie or @bobbiejohnson. I don’t trust the ones set up by people who have gotten it wrong before (see Threads, Bluesky) while federated services like Mastodon just aren’t there yet and I don’t want to invest […]
Startup world has plenty of hustle guys: people who admit that Silicon Valley’s appeal to them is essentially get rich quick. It also has a lot of true believers—people who are deeply attached to a vision or a feeling or driven by sheer possibility—even if only a handful actually turn out to be able to deliver what they believe. What it also has in abundance is people present as the second group but are, in […]
I’ve been a fan of The Open Notebook for a long time—a great resource for science writers specifically, but full of useful, practical advice for anyone who is trying to share complex information with non-academic audiences. They recently ran a roundtable conversation as “A writer’s guide to being edited”, which is stuffed with information and wisdom. Things I absolutely agree with: talk it through up front, don’t be defensive, think of editing as a conversation—not […]
From a piece on the French organization trying to create urban forests at high speed: Previously on the blog: Tree aesthetics
I haven’t read Going Infinite, the new Michael Lewis book on Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX. I’ve enjoyed some of his past work. Clearly there have been some major questions raised about previous stories, and I do wonder about the speed at which these semi-biographical tomes are being turned out across the industry: for example Lewis’s pandemic book, The Premonition, came out in May 2021… which feels a little early to be declaring […]
When I posted recently about fakes and forgeries and my shock that United Airlines had discovered counterfeit parts in aircraft engines, one commenter pointed out that there is a long history of fraudulent parts in the airline industry. (A friend in the trade would tell him about “fake brake liners in authentic looking boxes”) Well, that’s even more terrifying. But to get an idea of the scale of where things are at right now, it’s […]
Alison Gill and Peter Smithson were just a couple of kids from Northern England when they met as architecture students at university in Durham in the 1940s. They had a lot in common: their obsession with buildings, of course, but also their politics and their vision for the future. Their attraction and mutual sympathies turned into love; enough to draw them together, to get married and have three children; enough to drive them to become […]
File this under niche jobs: Camera operator and former pro rollerblader John Lyke has a specialist skill: filming while on skates (per Trung Phan). You can see his work in HBO’s Winning Time. He has a YouTube channel. And he’s talked about the process too, in this podcast.
Writing is many things, and one of them is channeling. As a writer you are a conduit, a crucible. You are a voice, whether you are interrogating your own ideas, bringing life to characters fictional or real, or simply reporting what you have seen so that others can understand. When you write you are often channeling other people directly, and when you are not it is because you are doing it indirectly: building on the […]
As somebody with no real ability to visualize, I am fascinated by the fact that other people can actually see things in their imagination: the existence of an actual mind’s eye. (Those of us with some form of aphantasia always remember when we discovered that this wasn’t just a metaphor, but a lived experience for some people—usually when they read this New York Times piece that went viral in 2015.) And I’m not the only […]
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