The first thing I noticed when opening up Good Tape, a new print magazine for the audio industry put together by my friend Alana Levinson and crew, was how BIG it is. Broadsheet format. Newsprint. This is how we used to read the news! But there’s a lot you can do with those huge spreads, and they have a lot of fun with it. There’s not a lot of information online about its contents, so […]
Humans do. It’s how we operate; a fundamental part of what makes us. We shape the world around us. We observe. We try to be interesting. We act. Every action is a protest against what was there before. Every creation is a moment of optimism. Doing is how we are built. Sometimes we do with our bodies. Remember covid lockdowns? Remember when a new and potentially deadly disease stalked the planet, when nobody was even […]
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.
Start here 