Links
A regularly updated collection of things I find worth reading, watching, or listening to. Subscribe via RSS.
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Flounder Mode
№ 70
If this is a way of living and working that’s available to all of us, why do we fetishize the white-knuckling and pain?
More of an essay on than a profile of Kevin Kelly, written by Brie Wolfson, for Colossus Review. Reading the piece is like seeing Brie’s eyes being opened by Kelly’s way of living, working, and being.
I wasn’t so familiar with Kelly, and this has made me want to dig deeper. A fascinating and inspiring person, whose working methods I think I very much agree with.
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First shared with me by Timo, Christoph Niemann confonts his fears about A.I. art, using smart illustrations and storytelling, in The New York Times Magazine.
My survival as an artist will depend on whether I’ll be able to offer something that A.I. can’t: drawings that are as powerful as a birthday doodle from a child.
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The Onion’s process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday.
A great chat with Ben Collins, chief executive of The Onion, how they’re “thriving by saying what others won’t—and why human-created satire matters in a media landscape increasingly saturated by noise and A.I. slop” on Status.
You have to subscribe (for free) to read it, and it’s worth it.
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The open web can be the future of publishing if we put our minds to it!
Mathew Ingram on publishing tools versus publishing platforms, and why Substack shouldn’t be seen as the future of online publishing. He also quotes from Ana Marie Cox’s recent piece, Substack Did Not See That Coming, which has been lingering in the back of my mind for a while.
Everything suspect about Substack stems from a desire to be more like a sticky destination and less like a publisher. You can ignore their posturing about free speech and just look at how they’re leaning harder and harder into audience capture and engagement. They’re offering audio, video, short-form posts, “discoverability.” They want to keep readers in their app listening, watching, interacting—anything but reading newsletters in their inbox as God intended.
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The world’s most popular book on art is the topic of my book club this month. I’ve never read it (shame on me), and had to choose between a paperback version or this large, clothbound luxury edition. Easy decision.
This luxury edition, with its bespoke cloth cover and preface by Professor Gombrich’s granddaughter Leonie, is the ultimate gift purchase for all art lovers – a keepsake to treasure, and to inspire future generations.
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The Economist app’s Home tab layout will change depending on whether it’s a week or weekend day, in an attempt to fix their “relatively leaky bucket” and retain subscribers.
During the week, the app will lead with a horizontal top stories bar called “The World in Brief,” followed by the day’s latest stories and vertical videos. On the weekends, “The World in Brief” will be pushed further down and the Home tab will promote longer, in-depth stories and opinion and culture writers while a Weekly tab will highlight stories from the week’s print edition.
I’m curious if this approach will work. I seek out longer reads on weekends (in whatever news apps I’m using), but I also save them for the weekend throughout the week, and I can’t admit to ever having achieved inbox zero.
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Words of Type brings together the terms used in typography, illustrated and explained in multiple languages. It’s a multilingual encyclopedia for typography, initiated by Lisa Huang. She noticed a lack of consistency or availability of typographic terms. In translating them, she aims to create a useful and accessible tool for everyone interested in typography.
Here, I’m linking to her essay on its creation, available on Fontstand.
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Every day is filled to the brim with appointments, meds, needles, bills and pain. The brushstrokes of my illness are suffocating.
Giorgia Lupi, an information designer, on three years of long Covid. I encountered the piece because it was nominated for a Webby for Best Datavisualization. What has become of her life sounds horrendous; how she has chosen to present that horror, is admirable.
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Fontstand is becoming a cooperative. They will be “owned and governed by independent type foundries” and are committed to creating a “fair, transparent and sustainable platform for font distribution”.
I’m curious to see how this shakes out. They’re running a Font User Survey which, if you ever license fonts, you might want to fill out.
As part of the process we are rethinking how fonts are licensed—aiming to design something simpler, clearer, and more intuitive for users—and this is where we need your input. We would like to hear about your experiences using fonts: What works? What’s confusing or frustrating? What would you change? Your answers will help us decide how licensing works within Fontstand Cooperative.
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I recently stumbled upon Dropbox’s (new?) brand guidelines, and the site they’ve put together for it is incredibly well done. Every chapter has its own interactive elements, the animations are perfectly executed, and none of it is overcooked. Impressive!