Jeff Jarvis (media critic, journalism professor, co-host of This Week in Google, and warrior in the battle against Verizon’s LTE device activation policies) has abandoned local storage in the form of owning a traditional Mac/PC, and moved entirely to the cloud. Ding, dong, my personal computer is dead. I bought my first machine, an Osborne 1, in 1981. I turned off my last one 33 years later. … I asked whether for lots of people, we’ve moved past the idea of... Read more
Montaigne is a huge influence on my writing, as he exemplifies what I love best about the form of the “essay,” where certitude about a subject is put aside for self-reflecting deliberation. He’s also the prime influence of Andrew Sullivan, who also inspires my writing, and Sullivan is currently hosting at his site a book club series on a truly wonderful book: Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: A Life of Montaigne. Of particular interest to folks around these parts of... Read more
What happens if you play Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” as a slow, bluesy, pained, Neil Young-inspired number? Let me back up. Yes, I’m a musician and songwriter, and I don’t think I suck or anything, but the real musical powerhouse bearing the Fidalgo name is my dad Phil Fidalgo, a true savant with guitar and songwriting, and who knows more songs than a troupe full of Edemah Ruh. He regularly meets up with some musician friends of his... Read more
A few weeks ago I came upon perhaps my favorite website ever, Little Girls Are Better At Designing Superheroes Than You, where Alex Law and others are sent photos of real little girls in their own, self-designed superhero costumes, and illustrate them in full comic book glory. It’s one of those “I’m glad to be alive to see this” kind of websites, delightful for a number of wonderful reasons, like its rejection of girls’ stereotypes, its celebration of creativity and imaginativeness, and the pure joy that permeates... Read more
When I talk about humanism, I’m really talking about compassion. Whatever the tenets of a given strain of humanism, whether you think it should have religious elements or be utterly devoid of ritualistic trappings, whatever version of whatever manifesto one might subscribe to, for me, humanism is really all about compassion for other folks, acting on that compassion, and all without any supernaturalistic component to any of it. And heck, let’s throw liberalism or progressivism in there, too. For me,... Read more
Does Jony Ive, head of design at Apple, exist in the Perfect White Heaven of Industrial Design™, which I understand to be a higher plane of existence inaccessible to corporeal humans with their filthy, greasy, fingerprint-leaving flesh? Or is he, perhaps, in prison??? I stumbled upon this Change.org petition that hasn’t gotten much traction, with as of now only eight signatures over the course of nine months: “Free Jony Ive from his white room.” For years now all those who enjoy Apple’s products... Read more
People being assholes online is hardly new, though awful people using Twitter as a kind of heat-seeking missile to hurt people has only lately begun to rise to the level of a mainstream conversation. There seem to be three legs to this stool: The responsibilities of the perpetrators of Twitter abuse, what the target of the abuse is obliged to either tolerate or resist, and what Twitter itself ought to be doing. For leg 1, the people who use Twitter (or... Read more
There’s something particularly insidious about homeopathy, isn’t there? I can’t put my finger on it, but something about it gets under my skepto-atheist skin more than almost any other kind of pseudoscientific malarky. I think it has something to do with the fact that things like religion and faith are kind of vague and etherial, making claims about things that are overtly and almost-explicitly imaginary, while homeopathy makes a nonsense claim about something that is actually supposed to be physically... Read more
The tech industry’s cruel conspiracy for planned obsolescence has now gone too far. I wrote about the overblown hand-wringing over tech upgrades and paranoia about planned obsolescence in my previous blog, and you can hear a good discussion about the longevity of Apple’s products on John Gruber’s The Talk Show this week. The image is of course by Drew at Toothpaste for Dinner. Read more
I’ve at times felt some discomfort of the idea of the “genius,” maybe chiefly because I discovered I am not one, much to my delusional childhood chagrin. But the more one knows about one’s brilliant heroes, who despite having powerful creative and intellectual gifts are also rife with human flaws, one begins to see that for “genius” to flower and actually become something meaningful, someone else needs to work alongside the genius. Last year Hélène Mialet wrote at Wired about... Read more
iMortal
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In