We’ve discussed the affordance of paper in this space before—the unique abilities that the medium gives you: you can shuffle pages, mark up and highlight, fold down corners, etc. One of my favorite affordances is the ability to flip quickly between two pages at once, which is not so easy with digital texts. In light [...]
I am disappointed in Pat Leahy. The good senator from Vermont and I probably agree on more issues than disagree. But we do disagree on his Protect Intellectual Property Act, also known as PIPA. You may have heard of PIPA, or its more notorious House counterpart, SOPA. Many notable web sites have gone dark or [...]
김정일 사망 —South Korean headline, 19 December 2011. “Kim Jong Il Dead” Two days ago, we learned that Kim Jong Il had died two days earlier. This morning, I was struck by the photo below of the Kims in a stark, imposing hall, looking at a scale model of a Pyongyang neighborhood. Students of the [...]
Fine, fine we’ve all beaten up on Comic Sans at one point or another. It’s inspired loads of discussion online, most of it quite ferocious ridicule. (You can see some hilarious examples at Comic Sans Criminal.) Still, we’re all pretty accustomed to it, no? In LOLing e-mail forwards and cobbled-together personal websites, that kind of [...]
For years, we’ve been making cars that turn into boats when we should have been making boats that turn into cars. It’s the Sealegs amphibous vehicle.
Like many, I find the Occupy encampments incredibly interesting—if perplexing at times—and I think there’s a lot of merit in the larger “We are the 99 Percent” concept, which will surely last longer than the occupations. I think both efforts have done much to highlight questions of economic inequality, political corruption and collusion, and state [...]
Happened yesterday, when the ruling party rammed the legislation through the National Assembly. Not exactly tears of joy; an opposition lawmaker set off a teargas canister:
As an addendum to the previous post, I discovered that the Seoul city council had a brawl of their own over the very school lunches that triggered the latest political turmoil in the country: And a bonus example of politicians behaving badly from 2009 when opposition were upset at the GNP’s relaxing media ownership rules:
Probably not, but a controversy over mid-day meals makes it a little more complicated for Korea. Earlier this month, the president of South Korea visited the United States. Remember that? They went to a General Motors plant. They had a state dinner featuring Texas rib eye. Harold (of Harold and Kumar) sat across from Barack [...]
I’ve been reading a lot of good things about Jack Shafer. Most, it seems, can be written in fewer than 140 characters. Nothing wrong with that! Among the people I follow on Twitter, a perhaps unsurprising number of accomplished journalists have worked with—and owe significant aspects of their career to— Jack. I haven’t worked with [...]
A couple weeks back, I compiled a little infographic for Longshot Magazine. And they took it! Thus the badge embedded here. I put together a chart of examples through history of the price tag we’ve put on human life. The chart isn’t online, but you can see it if you buy the magazine, formatted with [...]
No problem. Let me know if you have any questions. 
