Slot machines, magicians, and app designers
Around the turn of the century, people started talking about the “attention economy.” A natural outgrowth of the ad-supported Web, […]
Rough Drafts
Unfinished or quasi-finished prose that hasn’t been published elsewhere
My brain was begging me for relief from social media
Taking control of your social media use may be the most rewarding life hacking technique I know of, given its ratio of benefit to effort. I
31 days of writing
Like many people, my attention is fragmented and my concentration broken. I’m going to try working my way through this with the skills I know best: Writing and editing.
Rough Drafts
The people who believe themselves to be white
Ta-Nehisi Coates, in Between the World and Me, repeatedly refers to “the people who believe themselves to be white.” This curious phrasing opens up the possibility of hope in what for me, as the father of two black children, is otherwise a terrifying and disturbing book.
A future we may not want.
Kevin Kelly paints a disturbing vision of the next 30 years: A world governed by alien AIs, with screens on every surface, crowdsourced advertisements and influencer marketing campaigns assaulting us from all directions, and overwhelming flows of ephemeral data and “facts” making it impossible to judge the truth of anything. Is this really what we want?
Narrative specificity.
Narrative specificity means avoiding generalizations and using details to make your story come to life. Leave it out, and your
Alcatraz.
Yesterday I realized a dream I’ve had ever since I started open water swimming around 2010. I swam from Alcatraz back
Rough Drafts
Bay Parade Swim Report
Today’s Bay Parade swim went super well. It was a beautiful day on the Bay, the water wasn’t too cold (maybe
When a clickbait headline leads to national outrage.
So Gizmodo publishes a story whose headline reads “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News,” and the Internet goes predictably apeshit. There’s just one problem: The story doesn’t deliver what the headline promises.
Breaststroke.
The breaststroke has a faint sense of femininity attached to it these days. There’s the name, of course: Anything beginning