When you’re not a professional film reviewer, when you don’t live in New York, when the only advance screenings you attend involve a doctor doing something untoward—when these things are true, trying to write about a new film can seem…
David Sklar’s claim that “people don’t care about URLs” (via Full Stop Interactive) seems like a wild overstatement, even taking “people” to mean “average” people.
At one point, he might have been right, but people who know what’s up with URLs have long…
The piece below first appeared in April 2005 on One Blog Two Blog, a concept blog that featured Jay Fanelli and me each responding to a prompt in 600 words or less. The prompt for this piece was “Best 86ed Idea…
Metaphilm saw fit to publish my piece on Pixar’s Up (2009), more or less on the occasion of the film’s release on DVD and Blu-Ray. In the piece, I argue that Up presents a kind of statement, by Pixar, on the role of…
My write-up of Knowing (2009) made it into Issue 66 of Bright Lights Film Journal.
In the piece, I describe Knowing as challenging viewers to think about the September 11th attacks with critical distance, rather than with the usual emotional charge. I’m thrilled…
A New York Times piece that’s made the rounds in the last week or so takes up the idea that the Large Hadron Collider might not work for reasons involving to the grandfather paradox.
(If you’ve never heard of the grandfather paradox, head over to the…
The verses sound like a nursery rhyme or military hymn, with a melody like primary colors. But the chorus goes all apey and provides zero resolution. It’s like somebody giving you a gentle massage punctuated with stabs from a meat…
In his latest essay for the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell writes about one of the greatest dangers football players face: long-term brain damage from all the impact. It’s a grim, worthwhile read.
Gladwell doesn’t discuss the element that most disturbs me:…
In his latest AlertBox entry, Jakob Nielsen effectively shows that “usability suffers when an organization puts its website content on social sites without adapting it to the particular site’s features.” This is true enough: One should no more use YouTube…
I see a new combination of punctuation emerging, and demanding formal recognition. Consider an example in which the writer of an email, say, asks the recipient about possible meeting times. Some options for punctuation:
A Theory: Joe Jackson, threatened by what his son Michael’s oncoming puberty might have done to that cash cow of a singing voice, secretly has him chemically, or even physically, castrated. At first, the procedure drives Michael Jackson to an…
In a post at The Frontal Cortex on television’s ability to stave off loneliness, Jonah Lehrer writes:
I imagine we’re even more likely to form attachments to characters on reality TV shows, since the characters are purportedly “real.”
It’s a minor point in…
Pick up that little section of lead pipe; feel it in your hand. It’s heavier than you might’ve thought, maybe? It’s dense, in other words, right? Right.
Now, pick up that chunk of pumice, about the same size. What do you…
A quick note on Seth Godin’s response to Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Chris Anderson’s book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price:
Godin predicts that The New Yorker will go out of business a few dozen words before noting:
People will pay for content if it…
Earlier today, I received a Facebook friend request from a user account named for a web-based software product. Before dismissing the request, I sent a message to the account that read:
A business or product having a regular FB account instead…
In a recent post on his excellent blog, The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer responds to David Denby’s review of State of Play. In accord with Denby, Lehrer remarks:
Ever since Pulp Fiction, and certainly since The Usual Suspects, there’s been a segment of filmmakers…
On 27 April, 2009, I tweeted as follows:
Sometimes, use 60 chars or less. 140’s too easy. #lessthan61
The idea: If we’re going to take microblogging seriously as a mode of composition, let’s take it, well, very seriously.
So, call it nanoblogging, if you…
The way interface designers use the word “intuitive” has never set well with me. It’s a good way to get people to know why an interface works well, but it’s inaccurate. Over on Johnny Holland, Vicky Tenacki writes:
Digital devices can…
In written fiction, if a story, novel, etc., is narrated in the third person, then the story has no narrator—only a narration, composed by an author and read by a reader.
More precisely, unless a character in the diegesis narrates, there…
There’s a Shepard Fairey discussion starting on the Facebook page of Arts on the Block, a community arts organization for teens in Montgomery County, Maryland.
AOB leads off the discussion:
The author of a New York Times article on Shepard Fairey – the…
Quick post on a frustrating aspect of Google Docs. For all this platform is supposed to be about collaboration, it certainly makes collaborating inconvenient. The instructions for checking the RSS feed for a doc’s changes:
To see a document’s feed, open…
Thanks to networked time servers, I only change one clock when daylight savings rolls around: the one in the car. Changing car stereo clocks usually works one of two ways; each one presents the human interactor with a different kind…
In his most recent column at nytimes.com, The Ethicist, Randy Cohen, responds to the following reader-submitted question:
A friend, retired military, works at a bookstore chain. A naval officer in uniform asked him if the Rosetta Stone CD language course was…
A recent review at Scientific American covers “new and ingenious ways to measure consciousness” in noncommunicative (i.e., vegetative) patients:
[A researcher] placed the noncommunicative patient in a magnetic scanner and asked her to imagine playing tennis or to imagine visiting the rooms in…
