Rough Drafts

I’ve been listening to Ry Cooder’s album Chavez Ravine for about half a year now. It’s an amazing album — an impressionistic, lively, even danceable historical tour through the Chavez Ravine neighborhood of Los Angeles — a predominantly Mexican neighborhood that was bulldozed in the 1950s to make ro

Set among the servants and masters in a huge, old Irish castle during World War II, this is a masterfully-written, very modern, short novel (published 1945) with beautiful, restrained description and pitch-perfect dialogue. There’s very little interiority–you almost never learn what the characters a

Seven years ago, I started a company called Utipia with two other people: a fellow journalist, and a talented developer who happened to be my brother. We wrote a business plan, raised some money from friends and family, incorporated, and built a working demo to show how our clever content could be c

My story on the Sony Reader and the e-book market is the lead story on Wired News this morning. Check it out! Wired News: Screening the Latest Bestseller Electronic books have traditionally gone straight from the manufacturer to the remainders bin — but the market has never gone away entirely, despi

Bound to Please, by Michael Dirda What can I say? I haven’t felt this transformed by a collection of essays since I read Jeffrey Steingarten’s first book, The Man Who Ate Everything. Like Steingarten, Dirda has an infectious enthusiasm for his topic (for Dirda it’s literature, instead of food); an i

“Stardust,” NASA’s comet dust-collecting satellite, will return to Earth Jan. 15. Its flight path will take it over northern CA and NV, but should be visible almost as far south as Las Vegas and as far north as Portland (though it will be pretty low in the sky at the northern and southern extremes).

Hypothesis: Over time, BoingBoing and The New York Times will gradually converge in style and coverage, until they are nearly indistinguishable. I’m not as crazy as you may think. For this to happen, the Times would have to start acting more blog-like. Many newspapers and magazines are already doing

The following “comment” appeared on one of my posts recently. Bizarrely poetic. Where the heck do they get this stuff? The puissant Lord was somewhat of the form of Vishti.[1828] He besworne in some respects the biscainers of the sub-title, and in some a mass of strong-blooded phenternine. We inspan

Here’s what it looks like in Pacifica today: rock stacks and surfers!

Jeremy Zawodny points out that Gmail’s spam filtering has gotten pretty good. (Using Gmail as My Spam Filter (by Jeremy Zawodny)) Combine its spam filtering with the ability to download your Gmail messages into an ordinary mail client (like Thunderbird) via POP, and what you’ve got is a pretty kick-

As bloated as I’ve gotten on christmas cookies and candy over the past few weeks, I’ve started yearning for a better snack food. OK, honestly, I’m not all that bloated, despite the huge quantities of delicious treats that our many loving friends and family members sent to us. It’s just that I can’t

Buddhist Tradition Thickens Parts of the Brain Brain imaging of regular working folks who meditate regularly revealed increased thickness in cortical regions related to sensory, auditory and visual perception, as well as internal perception — the automatic monitoring of heart rate or breathing, for