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.
Here is a beautiful, beautiful thing. A piece of technology ("TeleCrapper") that allows you to fake a conversation with a telemarketer… without ever answering the phone. You record some random conversation snippets, and the software plays them back to the marketer every time there’s a silence on the line. So you have the pleasure of […]
The world seems to bursting right now with big ideas. Lots of people have twigged that in an interconnected world, any individual can make a difference. So why not try to set up something online to facilitate this. Of course, the large majority of these efforts will fail to get to critical mass… but you […]
Each year I make a pilgrimage to the E3 conference. E3 is the largest annual conference for the "interactive entertainment industry" — also known as the video game industry. The conference is one of the most tumultuous and cacophonous gatherings you could care to experience (I learned my lesson after the first year and now […]