I find myself often having to explain to people how our reaction to certain events or actions depends a lot on the existing context where we were relating to s...

Back in the latter part of the 20th century, a lot of subcultures held onto a concept called "selling out", a nebulously-defined idea based on a nega...

Security reports from other sites are welcome. Why aren’t safety reports? One of the most fundamental triumphs of the last few decades of open source culture...

It is almost impossibly difficult to explain Robin Byrd to anyone who was not an adult living in NYC toward the end of the last century, though everyone who...

“You can’t say anything anymore! You can’t even make jokes!” There’s a constant complaint from people in positions of power, mostly men, who keep making the...

Tech is more important than ever, deeply affecting culture, politics and society. Given all the time we spend with our gadgets and apps, it’s essential to unde...

Printers: They don’t work. Here’s my wishlist for one that might. If you’ve followed my work for any time, you know I’m fond of pointing out that printers do...

Graham Crackers were created to stifle the libido. Marshmallows are a sickly-sweet, cloying blob that, when properly heated, becomes a sort of confectionery na...

For a dozen years, I’ve been trying to document where I am relative to where I was, but this year I’m tired. I’m finding the weaponized grievances and the comm...

When I used to fly a lot, people would ask me why I was such a big fan of Virgin America. Some of it is the usual stuff — they have wifi and power outlets, and...

The idea of “public space” used to be pretty simple; There were places that we all agreed would be maintained by, and for, the public good. But the past few de...

Last week, I was thrilled to see the launch of Mixel . If you aren’t familiar with it, go grab the iPad app , and while it downloads, take a look at this vid...

For the past several days, Apple’s stock has been rising high enough that the company has flitted between being the first and second most valuable company in t...

This morning, I was extraordinarily excited to get to witness Mayor Bloomberg and our city’s new Chief Digital Office Rachel Sterne unveil New York City’s “Roa...

A few months ago, I wrote about fat pages , the unbearable burden of clutter that often makes reading on the web so much less pleasant than it ought to be. It...

In the world of business, and especially the world of technology, we have some archetypical stories of entrepreneurs in the garage, working to create new produ...

An application that appears cluttered or illogical is harder to understand and use. Aesthetic integrity is not a measure of how beautifully your applicatio...

Dunstan Orchard is a really nice, talented (and attractive!) man who is a terrific designer. But he has no sense of taste . Discuss....

Here’s some examples of how graphic artists are trying to save people’s lives. Prince Pickles is the manga-style cartoon character who represents Japanese...

Okay, these are the links you should be reading on the Internet today. A smart diagram is the new clever writing : LeisureArts charts out my favorite snow...

About a month ago, Fortune ‘s Jeffrey O’Brien interviewed Seagate CEO Bill Watkins , and pulled the conversation’s most memorable quote for the headline: “Le...

When we were unpacking the delightful Nintendo Wii a few weeks ago, I was marvelling at how well-thought-out the process was. Beautiful, pleasant, and of cou...

Erin McKean , frock star and lexicographer, offers some wisdom : You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co...

This is the first post in a series where I’m pointing out some nice little touches that take up less than a 100×100 pixel square on a screen. Today’s is the N...

I almost never think anything in business is a zero-sum game, least of all intangible things like branding or aesthetics. But some part of me thinks that a lot...

When the site first appeared and all the cool kids were using it, I could forgive the logo. I thought, hmm, ugly and dumb but they’re just starting out and t...

I am thinking of creating an award for each week’s best display of intellectual dishonesty. That’s not people who are lying, but rather people who are delibera...

Michal Levy reminds us what we love about the web. With Giant Steps , Levy took Coltrane’s masterwork and set it to Flash in a beautiful interpretation. Nothi...

Today, as an exercise, we will contrast Peter Merholz’s ruminations on Konfabulator with the lyrics to Ghostface Killah’s feelings about the Sun , as expres...

I’m supposed to be convinced that red is somehow better than purple by the images in this post. But instead, it makes me think how much cooler life could b...

Instead of Rocking the Vote, disappointed Kerry voters can just sit around and wait for the baby boomers to die . As a side bonus, we’ll also get to stop hear...

“ Half the country is not stupid. We’re all stupid. ” Were I a true political blogger, I might add “Indeed.” as my comment here. Instead, I’ll add that I still...

There’s lots of business books that say we should learn from the wisdom of children, and I completely agree. During meetings, you may find the following two ph...

Jeff Veen asks, What do these pictures have in common? Ooh! I know! I know!...

There is only so much room for innovation or creativity within these design constraints, it seems....

...

It wasn’t until well after I graduated high school that I started to understand the point of combing my hair. I had somehow gotten the idea that the purpose of...

Now that we’re in the last few months of the Era of Pop-Ups on the web, I’m kind of curious what the annoying ad format means. I think pop-ups are distinct fro...

I grieve for Mandy Moore. The poor girl has been unfairly lumped in with lesser lights of girl pop stardom, barely staying above Willa Ford levels of obscurity...

The current bane of my existence? Spoiler queens. "Don’t tell meeeeee!" they shriek. You know you’ve got one, too, someone who insists that the wor...

I never cease being amazed at the sheer beauty of some of the Photo Albums TypePad users are creating. Here’s one of the best yet ....

Today I saw Hirata-san ‘s new Movable Type book in person for the first time, and I know it’s tacky to say since it’s about our company’s products, but the...

I love the design and colors on this garden blog ....

The cereal that I eat most days has a big blurb on the back of the box that says, "Just two bowls a day for two weeks and you can lose six pounds!" a...

There’s a couple of things I ought to share with you. "Charlotte’s Web 2"? I think I’ve already stated my opinions on unneeded sequels, but what...

Given that Oprah is reviving her book club and featuring a host of classics that are mostly, one presumes, in the public domain, it seems like a tremendous o...

It’s an odd little peeve of mine, but I am constantly mystified by the captions on Associated Press photos that feature young black celebrity males. First, let...

I redid the way my Daily Links work, so I’ll be able to do a lot more with them. For the 99% of you who don’t know what those are, the sidebar here is what’s...

There’s a good bit of information that I think my readers should know. To those who come here for the silliness, the ramblings about New York, the pontificatin...

This could happen to me , and it probably wouldn’t happen to you. They didn’t mention the appearance of the guy who was actually the source of the problem. Ye...

It’s not that we must have bendy straws, it’s that we can have them. There are simpler ways. There is the "good enough" of a utiltitarian assis...

I am going to make a bad action movie about the Internet and it’s going to be called "Inbox: Klezstorm!"....

Jeff Jarvis revisits some copy desk stories from his days in the paper business in Chicago: On my first day at Chicago Today, I made the mistake of going...

One of the interesting things that’s emerged from the last year is the propensity for people to use the word, and the concept of "evil" again. I ha...

How precious did that Grace appear, the hour I first believed....

Cat and Girl still rocks my world....

No one has ever, ever said, “Hey baby, I like the way that skort looks on you.”...

I find corporate marketing mumbo-jumbo to be much more entertaining if you replace key phrases (like the company’s name) with the phrase “My Butt”. This can le...

I am no expert on genetics, but I suspect we are only one generation away from East Asian hipsters having kids who are born with their bangs already bleached....

The interesting thing about the fact that everybody objected to Smart Tags back when Microsoft wanted to include them as an option in Internet Explorer 6 is th...

“ Heart sits on friendship, with a roof above. “...

I don’t do the New Year’s Resolution thing, but if I did, I’d use Stan’s . Addendum: And he keeps it all the way real by breaking down white folk smell . W...

Boring....

What kind of girl do you think I am ?...

All I ask, friends, is that games, or art, be elegant. That’s I all aspire to. These , then are both games and art. With elegance to spare....

And now for a bit of time travel: There was a high school in Mississippi that used to have two separate homecoming elections, with two kings and two queens. Th...

null...

Oh, by the way, Manties ....

Just in case you’re curious, or in case you like ugliness, you can [disable style sheets](javascript:for(i=0;i<document.styleSheets.length;i++)document.styl...

All we are saying is: Free TV’s Wil Wheaton !...

It makes me happy when people do the right thing....

Linked as a Cruel Site of the Day , August 24, 2001. Just a note to let you know: I already saw it. That forward? I got it. I've gotten it. I do not w...

I’m tired of reading articles that say things like “Microsoft will start inserting links into pages where there were never intended to be links in the first...

Pretty and pixels and perspective… QuickHoney . See and view SeaView....

Mmm… pixelly. Khorborg ....

Alan’s done a beautiful thing with 300 Miles High . It’s a collection of photos of Earth, taken from space. But the wodnerful part is that the photos are chos...

The Wall Street Journal Lies when it says, “ New Windows XP Feature Can Re-Edit Others’ Sites “. I know Mossberg’s usual slant is a of a layman approaching...

I know the last thing that the world needs is to have people pushing ads at each other, but I’m going to break my own rule and link to the Lucky magazine thea...

The wonderful thing about spring is possibility....

Hope, alas, springs eternal....

go to conclave obscurum ....

For future reference, the AT&T att.com Style Guide . I wish I could find the style guide for CNet, but my link to that seems to have disappeared....

Over at Disturbing Search Requests , Dan blogged requests for “Anil sex photos” which I actually get a lot of. In fact, I could have my own subsite on DSR f...

Quick take on Action Engine , whose product got blurbed on the news wires today: They make software to translate web-based interaction, especially transacti...

There’s a skywriting airplane going around up in the sky outside my apartment. Only instead of writing "Will you marry me, Ishamel?" or "Eat at...

Sometimes I get upset that my page is ugly and I haven’t redesigned. Sometimes I don’t . (Yeah, yeah, I know… cheap shot.)...

I know, I know, I’ve linked to explodingdog before. Multiple times. But there is something so profound and evocative about these drawings that I just can’t...

This is a weird thing: On the side of a phone booth outside my office building, there’s an ad from a company called Streetbeam . (Warning: Wacky Flash anima...

Pretty ....

Hmmm … From the makers of Flash?...

I’ve been getting hype from the record label about Nelly Furtado for months, so I had mostly ignored it. But it turns out she seems pretty cool. I can see th...

How Kozmo Works . Read it while they’re still around....

So I’ve been playing around this week with extracting the bitmaps out of all the programs on my computer and seeing what little graphical surprises lie in st...

I like the bright, pretty colors on takarajimasha ‘s site. Especially on the little animated phone....

Liquid Audio : See also Sand, Head in the ....

Tomato Nation reveals the truth about beauty… and it’s funny !...

Does anyone know the name (or even better, the URL) of the cabal of designers who dictate each year/season’s color palette? Every year, I read some obscure P...

It’s actually accumulating now, so today’s theme song is Sometimes it Snows in April …...

A moment of Zen ....

I’ve been saying of all the recent too-good-to-be-true offers of services and products on the web, "Get ’em while they last!" and now someone has act...

Now this is a truly bizarre and convoluted story . And don’t get me wrong, I’m as anti-Scieno as the next guy, but shouldn’t the Germans be working a litt...

Courtesy of usr/bin/girl , please to be seeing C-SPAM , spam as art. Kind of soothing, really, like a fishtank filled with slowly swimming junk mail....

We’re going to see Fantasia 2000 tonight. Despite some misgivings I have about Mouse, Inc. I think that the original Fantasia was one of the closest things...

Glad to see Jason agrees with me on OS X . He also incidentally points a link to Aberro , which features Levi’s Flat Eric spots, which I only recently be...

Shhh! Don’t tell the geeks! If everyone knows it, how come nobody talks about it? The big, dark secret: Slashdot is ugly. Must Linux geeks fit the stereoty...

I like the plastic spoons Columbo yogurt puts in its lids. Snap, click, eat!...

On a much lighter note, anyone who’s lived in, or spent appreciable time in, New York City, is familiar with the vagaries of alternate side of the street par...

Coincidence? Right after Columbine, the WB cancelled their episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer because of parallels in the high school violence theme. Now, s...

Dirty Little Secret: The Internet Sucks . My partner in crime Helen wanted to replace a little black dress she accidentally shrunk. Nothing special, a rayon,...

So for every "rule" of web design, there are of course necessary exceptions . I hate animated GIFs for the most part. I hate pointless uses of brigh...

Of course The Weather Channel is useful . But I’m discovering increasing numbers of people for whom the channel has some sort of hypnotic, addictive effect...

Little bit of not-quite-wisdom which I have realized is very, very true: We hate most in others that which he have failed to see in ourselves . Or, as I like...