Technology-based gifts — while always welcome — can be a bit, well, boring. Here: some indulgent and unexpected choices. For someone with a big project … and a really big desk: The 30-inch Apple Cinema Display monitor. More than 4 million pixels of gorgeous flat-screen glory. Utterly indulgent, but worth every penny. $2499 at Apple.com […]
Time magazine gives the inaugural TED Prize Winner their big annual award. (Well, he has to share it with a Mr. and Mrs. Gates.) And if you missed the talk Bono gave at TED last year, there’s a transcript here, and link to Bono’s TEDTalk here. Well worth hearing.
A German TV commercial invokes the age-old question: It’s entertaining … but is it art?
Those of you who are already fanatical Jill Sobule groupies have likely signed up to be a member of her Secret Society Mystery Cult (aka, Jill’s mailing list). And if you are a Cult member then you have already seen this fantastic video of the proper way to fold a shirt (Jill learned of this […]
2005 was the break-out year for the Pre-Fab home. A BusinessWeek slideshow reveals the state-of-the-art.
Bruno Giussani and John Battelle swap Evil Search Engine Scenarios.
Ross Lovegrove has design the “iPod of toilets,” according to Swiss newspaper NZZ
Humans have a hard time picturing certain things: long-term consequences, very large numbers, global trends … For better or worse, our brains evolved to understand the immediate, “middle-sized” world that confronts us daily. We’re grateful then, to the designers and thinkers who make abstract concepts accessible. Case in point: Gapminder, a Stockholm-based non-profit. Their extraordinary […]
Steven Levitt defends his theory linking New York City’s falling crime rate in the 90s with the legalization of abortion in the 70s.
Well-produced package on Forbes.com celebrates the world’s most influential industrial designers
Gazillions of words have written this past month about one of my boyhood heroes C S Lewis, in the run-up to the release of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. (Trailer here.) Allegedly he was sexist, racist, sado-masochistic and, according to another favorite author of mine Philip Pullman, responsible for one of the most […]
A collection of inspired holiday gifts.
Bjorn Lomborg publishes a new essay, “The Relative Unimportance of Global Warming.”
Garr Reynolds offers excellent advice for improving presentations.
While studying computer music in the late 1980s, one of my classmates brought a tape into CCRMA, Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Accoustics. The tape had a snippet of music with a sound we had never heard before — a very pure flute like instrument played atop a deep and raspy drone. […]
Jill Sobule kicks off her holiday tour with Cyndi Lauper and Sandra Bernhard.