I love blogging, but i also like writing email. It's a different medium. I have a Tiny Letter, a little newsletter-ish thing that's closer to my talking voice than my blogging one. I won't abuse your time or sell your name or any of that.
In a country in which you can be fired solely on the basis of your sexual orientation and on a planet in which some nations will imprison, beat, or kill you for it, Tim Cook publicly writing about being gay is a powerful thing. And it has nothing to do with Apple as a firm; rather, it's that he's the chief executive of one of the largest and most profitable companies on the planet, one that does business in almost every country. He didn't just say in public what he says was known more privately; he wrote that he was proud to be gay, "among the greatest gifts God has given me."
I was in tears reading his essay, not for myself, because I have a lot of checkboxes ticked off in my life that let me sit above the routine harassment, discrimination, and abuse that many people experience every
A few days ago, our neighborhood mailing list lit up with a report of a violent crime. The location was in a park near our house on a paved road that is no longer open to cars, and on which I walk nearly every day to and from my co-working office. The first account was from a neighbor, who forwarded a note from "a friend" who had happened upon the police response to the crime. A woman was choked by a black assailant, tumbled down a slope, and fell unconscious.
This struck me as initially dubious. We were already at a thirdhand-ish account (neighbor's friend relating conversation with victim after assault) which involved a black man in a hoodie in a relatively well-trafficked area in the middle of the day. Perhaps in the Ferguson era, where details are scant except a black man (who hasn't been found) in a very
I love Kevin Kelly's work and life, and had a great talk with him months ago for my podcast, The New Disruptors. But during his talk at the 2014 XOXO festival a week ago, I felt a distinct chill when, in describing his book Cool Tools, he said it was the work of two people over a few months, and then went on to note their use of Elance and other distributed work tools.
Tim Maly felt the same chill, and wrote a very interesting essay riffing on that and related issue: independent creators are dependent on the work of so many others, most of whom aren't afforded the same opportunities at advancement and independence. Tim followed the thread of labor down to the Chinese workers referenced in another talk by the creators of the NeoLucida; the two guys behind that project traveled to China and spent two weeks
Update! The auction is over. One fine person bid $150, and Matt Bors offered to donate the artwork. That $150 is now in Sloane-Kettering's hands, and I matched that with $150 of my own money.
You can still and always donate in many places to help fund cancer research. I'm donating to Sloan-Kettering right now through Lisa Adams fundraising page as a mark of respect to her.
Original post:
This last week, Emma and Bill Keller separately wrote horrible Op-Ed essays in the Guardian and New York Times, respectively, shaming cancer patient Lisa Adams about her openness in documenting her progress and about her medical decisions. The pieces were also riddled with factual errors, and the Guardian has retracted Emma Keller's article. I'm not even going to link to them.
To make delicious cancer-research fund lemonade out of these two lemons, I have purchased the original artwork from Matt Bors
Last year, inspired by Joe Kissell, I wrote a summary of the enormity of what 2012 had encompassed. It was freaking huge. Joe enumerated for years all the words, books, articles, and such like he worked on. This year, I'm inspired again by Joe: he decided to stop the extensive documentation of his year, having felt he'd proven his productivity. I'm somewhere in between: less documentation than last year, but still quite a bit to share.
In June, I bought The Magazine from Marco Arment. It's been one of the greatest things I've worked on in my life, and it's a constant joy of collaboration with contributors both before and after the purchase. We just put out Issue #33 — we produced 26 issues during 2013, and now have some subscribers who are paid up though the end of 2015. We'd better deliver.
I launched the weekly podcast The New Disruptors
I had email from a college friend a few days ago who I did not remember one bit. He was memorable, just not by me. I sent him what is by now a standard explanation (and sort of apology, even though it's out of my control) for forgetting him.
I was treated successfully in 1998 for Hodgkin's Disease: six months of chemo and a few months later 20 days of radiation. That year remains a blur. "Chemo brain" is a known phenomenon that affects memory and cognition. Somehow, I managed to keep working that year, but I don't recall much of it specifically. Lynn and I went to see The Truman Show one weekend, and a few days later I told her I'd like to see the movie. Freaked her out. In my memory, it was as if I'd seen a bunch of preview scenes; I couldn't remember being in