Miniver Cheevy

A little while back I recorded a conversation with Jesse James Garrett and Peter Merholz about what we mean by “UX”, which you can now ...

A lot of Americans were brought up with the melting pot metaphor of American culture. But social justice folks rightly criticize th...

Geek culture has recently seen a series of heated and messy online conversations about the intersections of genre, cultural appropriatio...

No more Dr. Nice Krugman. Today's New York Times column, Disdain for Workers , hits the GOP with both barrels. I know a lot of peop...

Matroska Furniture makes a cunningly reconfigurable furniture system for small apartments. The video showing how things fold together i...

Listen to Lester Freamon from The Wire .

A bicyclist looks at bicycle ads and other bike media and talks about how one might answer the question “is this thing sexist?” Well sai...

With Mitt Romney having made the news for repeating the bullshit factoid that “47% of Americans don't pay any income tax”, article...

The Mother Jones piece about Mitt Romney speaking to a fundraiser of rich guys has rightly gotten a lot of play. I want to focus on one ...

I'm fond of telling a story about how fifteen years ago I read an article about how cellphones were much more prevalent in some East ...

A reader points me to a convenient brief overview of the Iraq war. Named Operation Iraqi Freedom, the original military operation las...

Nils at Small Precautions has a chilling summation of the challenge presented by the Rich Folks Who Own Everything separating themselves ...

I sort of grew up on the legend of Steve Jobs “stealing” the basics of the Mac interface from Xerox PARC. A while back I learned that the...

Democracy is not elections . Democracy is about all of us being in this together . We are forgetting that. Two read-the-whole-thing comm...

I had wondered, but now I'm sure. Examiner.com publishes absurd nonsense . They are not worthy of trust. One shouldn't read them ...

Benjamin Philips breaks out the psychoanalytic theory to consider what drives us in using social media. The truly fascinating aspect...

David Brothers at Superhero Alliance has a meditation on the sexualization of superheroines in comic book art. His objection is not jus...

Listen to Omar. Confused? This is a reference to The Wire . If you haven't watched The Wire , you really should check it out . ...

So if you're reading me, you probably know the Portlandia bit about the couple at the restaurant asking if their chicken was raised ...

So there's a theory that Clint Eastwood's bizarre, rambling speech at the Republican National Convention was actually a very cle...

So a bit ago I found this piece on Coding Horror about a fascinating paper demonstrating that the ability to program software depends u...

Cobb has a rumination on the way that the shape of the contemporary economy produces what Douglas Copeland calls “brazilification”, a sh...

Via Gong Szetzo , we have ten principles of good design from the legendary Dieter Rams. Good design is innovative makes a product u...

Recent conversations remind me to observe that I find that I have no difficulty at all holding all of these ideas simultaneously: Julian A...

With a bunch of “End The Fed” crackpottery floating around, I'm long overdue to assemble some materials about the Federal Reserve. He...

Corey Robin explains how the Democrats came to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Consider the two major presidential cycles of the l...

So in the update of the format of my blog, a number of old posts have just plain gone missing, with no rhyme or reason. I am not amused.

I've not been watching The Newsroom despite my unreasonably vigorous love for Aaron Sorkin's writing because HBO are numbskulls...

Living national treasure Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a vitally important meditation on race politics and Obama, Fear of a Black Presiden...

So I've done a major refresh of the design of this blog, which I've been meaning to do for ages. The old design was built using the...