Nevan Scott

IEH

2011-09-12T00:00:00-04:00

World Makers

2011-09-09T00:00:00-04:00

Root-1

2011-07-15T00:00:00-04:00

Beginners

2011-07-03T00:00:00-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I received this email from a friend:

Nevan,

Drop what you are doing, get yourself to a cinema¹, and see Beginners. (You can thank me later.)

[Redacted]

Now, it’s hard to say no to something like that, and I decided it was a great opportunity to go see a movie I had no pre-impressions of. (This method worked great several years ago when some high school friends dragged me to American Splendor.) So I put it in my mind that I’d go see it soon.

A couple of days later, I happened to walk by the poster for Beginners, somewhat ruining my plan to go in knowing nothing. All I took in were the actors. Oh!, I thought, trying not to look too closely at the poster for the movie I was trying to remain ignorant about. Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, and that actress from Cashback. Certainly sounds like a Britishy good time.

As luck would have it, I was already planning on seeing The Tree of Life that afternoon with another friend.² I called ahead to see if she’d rather meet for Beginners instead. That’s how I wound up at this movie.

I should point out here that “that actress from Cashback” is Emilia Fox, who also happens to not be in this movie. In fact, I had mistaken Mélanie Laurent (of Inglourious Basterds fame) for her. Just so we’re on the same page, I sat down expecting a British indie film.

The movie begins without speech, with a quiet montage of Oliver (McGregor) cleaning out his father’s (Plummer) house after he has passed away. Then Oliver starts speaking, and I realize that McGregor’s trying to do an American accent. OK, I think, this must be about Americans. Indeed it is. Even Plummer is playing an American as best he can. (For some reason, Old Man Voice seems to hold up fairly well in the transition across the Atlantic, but still has a bit of uncanniness, cf. Ian McKellen in The Shadow.³)

We start to get some background. Oliver’s mother died a few years back, leaving his father, Hal, to come out of the closet and live his final five years as an older gay man. At this point I look over to my friend and acknowledge that we had seen the trailer for this together.

The movie starts to weave together two stories (or so). One is of Oliver and Hal after their mother/wife has died. The other is of Oliver after Hal has passed away. Still upset by his father’s death, Oliver is coerced into going out with some friends to a costume party, dressed as Freud.⁴ This is where Anna (Laurent, not Fox) enters the picture. She looks like she’s dressed as Charlie Chaplin, and after another patient gets up, plops herself down on the couch in front of Oliver Freud, ready for a session. She doesn’t speak and instead starts to write in a notebook, blaming it on laryngitis. (At first I think she’s just trying to stick to the silent movie look of her costume. I also still think she’s Emilia Fox.) She has Oliver pegged immediately, asking him why he’s come to a party if he’s so sad. This insight into him is the basis of their developing connection.

It’s an exciting way for a relationship to start: one of the partners able only to nod and write little bits in a notebook, the other doing his best to make out what he can of her personality. They fall asleep together the first night in her hotel, and when she speaks a little the next morning, I start to piece together that she’s Laurent. The development and growth of their relationship is the high point of the movie.

We start to get a third story as well, of Oliver and his mother when he’s just a boy, his father always off doing work at the museum. I don’t want to give much more of the story away, but it starts to become clear that Oliver undermines his romantic relationships in part because his parents never seemed happy, and that there is something of his mother’s off-kilteredness in Anna.

The movie is quite beautiful and at times moving. I felt like it slowed toward the end, but is still worth seeing. Mary Page Keller’s performance as Georgia, Oliver’s mother, is especially fun. Beginners will appeal most strongly to romantic young people who want to keep hope for love alive, but perhaps haven’t quite found it or figured it out yet.⁵

She has spoken roughly like this since she became an Anglophile. (She’s specifically enamored with Ireland, but I can’t find a word for that, so it’s a parenthetical in a footnote instead.)↩
Next time I’ll make up names, I promise.↩
Or don’t. It’s really not a good movie. Tim Curry’s American accent is also pretty uncanny in The Shadow, and downright bizarre in his performance as Dale the Whale in the Season 2 finale of Monk, “Mr. Monk Goes to Jail”.↩
His fake Austrian accent is a bit better than his American accent.↩
This applies to most of my friends, and I don’t think my Anglophile friend will mind me pointing out that it applies particularly well to her.↩

Super 8

2011-06-10T00:00:00-04:00

Let’s get the monster business out of the way first. This world needs another monster movie like it needs another Michael Bay movie. And the monster in this movie is really no exception: it’s some kind of snoozy huge alien spider thing, basically the kind of thing you’d only be into if you’re just into monster movies. Abrams doesn’t quite succeed in giving the beast some humanity, but he tries. I can’t decide whether forced sympathy is better or worse than blind fear and hatred.

Big however, this movie is a lot of fun, and the monster business is really beside the point.¹ This movie is about a bunch of awesome middle school kids living in a boring town in Ohio in 1979. Following them around and enjoying their antics is the principal pleasure of the movie. In one utterly relatable scene, the five boys sit around the one cool girl in a diner, all more or less trying to impress while genuinely having a grand time. Says one (the pyromaniac of the stable): “We need another order of fries because of my fat friend.”

The adults in the story are not interesting, which is good because they generally seem to be disposable as monster food. Elle Fanning and newcomer Joel Courtney have some great moments, and their blossoming flirtations are surprisingly mature without getting all kissy. Abrams is probably one of the few directors who can write indie-movie characters into a mainstream flick.

Oh, and stay for the credits.

Although not as excisable as, say, the shitting scene in Bridesmaids.↩

NYU Enterprise Learning

2011-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

Living with the Web

2011-01-24T21:00:00-05:00

When I wake up, I check my email and a few websites. Sometimes I listen to a podcast or flip through something on my iPad. Sometimes (rarely) I make an effort to read the news. I often hop on Adium pretty soon after I wake up to see if anyone is online to chat with. I spend the majority of most days with my laptop, and it sits next to me as I fall asleep listening to a podcast or audiobook, and then wakes me up with an alarm in the morning. During the day I sometimes entertain myself by watching a TV show or two. I make a lot of phone calls most days to stay in touch with friends and family on the other coast, and even then I often have the computer open in front of me.

I don’t think this is particularly unusual for people my age, or for most ages at this point in time. Even if I didn’t primarily do my work by making websites, I would probably be on a computer for a good chunk of the day at any other sort of job I could get. And I don’t even consider myself to be that bad with how much I’m in front of a computer and connected to the web. I spend hardly any time at all on Facebook, which I always hear about everyone spending gobs of time checking out. Ditto with Twitter. I have a lot of high-minded opinions about why social networking websites are bad or stupid or whatever name I come up with that day, but the truth is probably more like I just get bored easily with them.

I consider myself lucky to say that I generally feel like a productive contributor to the web, and a productive person in general. I’ve had my hand in a number of websites, none of which have probably changed the world or made it a better place. But there is something to the feeling that I know how to make something on the web, which to me feels like something beyond posting aphorisms to Twitter every so often.

I spend a lot of time on the web, and I think for that reason alone, I want it to be a really great place. I personally started interacting with the web through an AOL account my family got in 1994, when I was 9. I hear about people making interesting contributions to the medium as early as high school or middle school, and at this point I’m sure that means there are a lot of meaningful contributors to the web who grew up in a world where the web has always existed. I’m sure a lot of people who interacted with various precursors of the web would say that I’m already a member of that group. I believe in some ways I’ve watched the web grow from a subculture into mainstream culture. I wonder if there is any remaining doubt that it is probably here to stay and has simply become a part of humanity in the way that books are the primary record of our history. Books aren’t a subculture, they are a part of our culture, and the web seems to be as well.

How Many Spaces After the Period?

2011-01-24T01:10:00-05:00

This issue gets batted around every now and then, and seems to bring out a lot of polemicizing. I think that there is a distinction to be made between typing and typesetting, similar to the difference between composing and editing. For most writers, drafts are probably riddled with typos, spelling errors, poor sentence construction, etc. At some point in the editing process, before a piece of writing is published, these are meant to be ironed out.

The one-space/two-space issue is similar in my mind. Published writing, meant for reading, should be set with a single space between sentences. It doesn’t matter at what point in the process this happens, and drafts need not adhere to the rule. This is similar to how apostrophes, quotation marks, dashes, and ellipses are treated. At some point prior to publication, the single and double primes (generally reserved for feet and inches, minutes and seconds) must be replaced with apostrophes and quotation marks; some hyphens and double-hyphens must be replaced with en- and em-dashes; triple periods must be replaced with ellipses.

With unpolished type-written prose – such as an email or text message – it is much more up to the individual where to set a tolerance for variation in spacing, spelling, grammar, etc. Conventions will probably emerge, but these casual forms of type-written exchange are still fairly new, and more time is needed.

However, with more and more writers having access to a “Publish” button, we’ve had to adjust some of our expectations surrounding writers’ ability to edit their own writing either on the fly or prior to hitting “Publish”. It is not unreasonable to add proper typography to the list of quick checks writers routinely make. Its kinda like checking for “its” and “it’s”.

Managing Change

2011-01-05T00:00:00-05:00

Growing up, my grandmother always told me, “Nevan, I’ve lived in a different world.” She was talking about the changes in technology over her lifetime, which made her feel as though the world had changed significantly enough to be as new. This always sparked my imagination, and I often tried to fill her in on what I thought were the remarkable developments going on – often things with which she had little to no first-hand experience. She was born in a log cabin in 1910, rode to school in a buggie, and didn’t have access to telephones. As a young woman starting out as a teacher, she was asked by the principal to spend half her time as secretary because she had taken quickly to the typewriter.

She never used a computer, and it was clear she couldn’t form a coherent understanding of the internet based on my abstract descriptions. I generally lapsed to explanations like the ability to store all of the text of Shakespeare’s plays on a single disk, and the idea that entire libraries of information could be stored electronically in something that could sit on a desk or be accessed over a telephone line by request.

Technology brings with it the allure of greater efficiency and therefore productivity. Some innovations, like the telephone, make possible the previously impossible. Others, like the telegram and email, speed up the previously slow. It’s important to remember that our minds don’t actually work any faster than they used to, and training one’s mind still requires a kind of effort that cannot really be artificially expedited. It is one thing to learn how to use a telephone, send an email, create a user account, publish a web page or blog, type on a keyboard, type on a mobile phone, fill out and manipulate a spreadsheet, use a camera, assemble a slide deck. It is another thing to learn how to reason, how to hold a conversation, how to write, how to express one’s feelings, how to describe ideas, how to watch for special moments, how to give a presentation, how to read. To some extent, learning the former can aid the learning of the latter. It can also distract. Negotiating a balance in a high-tech world is an individual process that depends on an understanding of both kinds of things, and of one’s self.

Ridelust

2010-12-15T00:00:00-05:00

The Well

2010-11-15T00:00:00-05:00

Roundup No. 5

2010-10-29T00:00:00-04:00

Easy A

I can’t think of better way to start than to whole-heartedly recommend the movie Easy A, currently out in theatres. Emma Stone is a pleasure, and the entire supporting cast is fantastic. Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson are particularly great as two parents clearly in love with their children. The movie plays homage to its roots (Ferris Bueller, Say Anything, etc., but also Huckleberry Finn and The Scarlet Letter) without getting too heavy about it, or too meta. Interestingly, the movie is framed with a YouTube confessional, which combined with the new electronic ways that gossip flits about the high school does a great job of showing us that times have changed but teenagers have not. A lot of fun, and required viewing for anyone who needs a bit of escape from the realities of Christian extremism.

Write a Letter

I used to write letters to friends in high school, and I have recently taken up doing so again. This subject matter probably deserves some more extensive consideration, but I wanted to plant the seed with anyone who may be reading. Writing a personal letter for an audience of one gives me a great feeling that is impossible to justify, but clearly exists. My writing feels sharper and more focused in letters because I know exactly who I’m writing for, and the pressure to write well is gone because a genuinely caring friend will be the only one with an opportunity to criticize.

There’s also something really soothing about a bit of written communication going out to a friend that isn’t leaving digital traces all over a bunch of servers in God knows how many places in the world. Letters can be intercepted, but they give me a feeling of privacy. I’m not one to crave privacy in the sense that I don’t want others to know what is going on with me. But I do relish that privacy of shared intimate moments, and as odd as it may sound, a letter is one of those moments.

So I encourage you to write someone a letter. If you feel so inclined, you can even write me a letter. I just might write back.

The Fork Test

My friend Rebecca has started a new food blog called The Fork Test. In her first post, she writes:

Cooking, for me, isn’t just a necessity anymore. It isn’t something I have to do because I don’t make enough money to do otherwise. It is now an active choice, something I want to do, time to myself I truly and utterly enjoy.

I have personally never developed any passion whatsoever for cooking, and am capable of making only two dishes: chili and pasta. I will be reading.

David Foster Wallace, Continued

In November 2003, The Believer published an interview with David Foster Wallace which is a really great read on the whole, mostly about his book Everything and More. This one part in particular is probably one of my favorite points I’ve come across yet in Wallace’s writing:

…The big difference is that things are vastly more compartmentalized now than they were up through, say, the Renaissance. And more specialized, and more freighted with all kinds of special context. There’s no way we’d expect a world-class, cutting-edge mathematician now also to be doing world-class, cutting-edge philosophy, theology, etc. Not so for the Greeks—if only because math, philosophy, and theology weren’t coherently distinguishable for them. Same for the Neoplatonists and Scholastics, and etc. etc. (This is a very, very simple answer, of course, maybe right on the edge of simplistic.) By the time Cantor weighed in on ∞ in the 1870s, it was part of an extremely specialized technical discipline that took decades to master and be able to do advanced work in. For Cantor and R. Dedekind (and now this is all just condensed way down from the book (sort of the same way the question is)), the math of ∞ is derived as a way to solve certain thorny problems in post-calc analysis (viz., the expansions of trig functions and the rigorous definition of irrational numbers, respectively), which problems themselves derive from K. Weierstrass’s solutions to certain earlier problems, and so on. It’s all so abstract and specialized that large parts of E&M end up getting devoted to unpacking the problems clearly enough so that a general reader can get a halfway realistic idea of where set theory and the topology of the Real Line even come from, mathematically speaking. The real point, I think, has to do with something else that ends up mentioned only quickly in the book’s final draft. We live today in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract and technically complex and context-dependent that it’s next to impossible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments) have much relevance to her actual life. Where even people in two closely related sub-sub-specialties have a hard time communicating with each other because their respective s-s-s’s require so much special training and knowledge. And so on. Which is one reason why pop-technical writing might have value (beyond just a regular book-market $-value), as part of the larger frontier of clear, lucid, unpatronizing technical communication. It might be that one of the really significant problems of today’s culture involves finding ways for educated people to talk meaningfully with one another across the divides of radical specialization. That sounds a bit gooey, but I think there’s some truth to it. And it’s not just the polymer chemist talking to the semiotician, but people with special expertise acquiring the ability to talk meaningfully to us, meaning ordinary schmoes. Practical examples: Think of the thrill of finding a smart, competent IT technician who can also explain what she’s doing in such a way that you feel like you understand what went wrong with your computer and how you might even fix the problem yourself if it comes up again. Or an oncologist who can communicate clearly and humanly with you and your wife about what the available treatments for her stage-two neoplasm are, and about how the different treatments actually work, and exactly what the plusses and minuses of each one are. If you’re like me, you practically drop and hug the ankles of technical specialists like this, when you find them. As of now, of course, they’re rare. What they have is a particular kind of genius that’s not really part of their specific area of expertise as such areas are usually defined and taught. There’s not really even a good univocal word for this kind of genius—which might be significant. Maybe there should be a word; maybe being able to communicate with people outside one’s area of expertise should be taught, and talked about, and considered as a requirement for genuine expertise…. Anyway, that’s the sort of stuff I think your question is nibbling at the edges of, and it’s interesting as hell.

I think Wallace was tapping into something we all feel a need for. Listen to this stuff: “clear, lucid, unpatronizing technical communication.” I certainly could use more of that myself.

Annals of Type

I finally picked up an English translation of The New Typography, Jan Tschichold’s attempt in 1928 to descibe recent movements in typographic and design practice to illustrate the need and way forward for a new approach to typography, taking into account technological changes in typesetting and printing. The translation seems to pick up what I imagine must even in the German be Tschichold’s intense and engaging style. In some ways, his mode of describing the past, present, and future in The New Typography remind me of some of Nietzsche’s writing on what he called the “new philosophers” and “philosophers of the future” in Beyond Good and Evil. For example:

Critical discipline, and every habit that conduces to purity and rigour in intellectual matters, will not only be demanded from themselves by these philosophers of the future, they may even make a display thereof as their special adornment— nevertheless they will not want to be called critics on that account. It will seem to them no small indignity to philosophy to have it decreed, as is so welcome nowadays, that “philosophy itself is criticism and critical science—and nothing else whatever!” Though this estimate of philosophy may enjoy the approval of all the Positivists of France and Germany (and possibly it even flattered the heart and taste of Kant: let us call to mind the titles of his principal works), our new philosophers will say, notwithstanding, that critics are instruments of the philosopher, and just on that account, as instruments, they are far from being philosophers themselves! Even the great Chinaman of Konigsberg was only a great critic.

Tschichold himself was a cultural critic:

At the same time, new kinds of publications made possible by the new inventions, such as magazines and newspapers, emphasized the confusion in typographic design. When finally the process line-block was invented, and reproductive wood engraving, then at the highest point of its development, had to give way to it, confusion was complete. This state of affairs in printing was however only parallel with a general cultural collapse.

Germany especially, emerging victorious from the Franco-Prussian war, was flooded with machine-made substitutes for craftsmanship, that suited its megalomania which the victorious end of a war brought with it, and were enthusiastically taken up – indeed, people were actually proud of this tinniness. Like the profiteers of our own postwar period, people of that time had lost all sense of what was genuine; like us, they were blinded by the phoney glitter of those horrors.

The whole era is characterized on the one hand by a slavishly and entirely superficial copying of every conceivable old style, and on the other by a capriciousness in design without precedent. A town hall, for example, might be built to look like a pseudo-Gothic palace (Munich) or a “Romanesque” villa.

Sometimes it is nice to realize that technology, design, and culture have gone hand in hand (in hand) since well before computers or the web were really even imagined. How many pieces of modern software or websites can you think of that could be “characterized on the one hand by a slavishly and entirely superficial copying of every conceivable old style, and on the other by a capriciousness in design without precedent”? This text is still very much alive. See Khoi Vinh talking about bringing magazines to the iPad only days ago:

The Adobe promise, as I understand it, is that publications can design for one medium and, with minimal effort, have their work product viably running on tablets and other media. It says: what works in print, with some slight modifications and some new software purchases, will work in new media. It’s a promise that we’ve heard again and again from many different software vendors with the rise of every new publishing platform, but it has never come to pass. And it never will.

Roundup No. 4

2010-10-10T00:00:00-04:00

General Education

I’ve been reading Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas. So far my favorite part is this:

Historical and theoretical knowledge, which is the kind of knowledge that liberal education disseminates, is knowledge that exposes the contingency of present arrangements. It unearths the a prioris buried in present assumptions; it shows students the man behind the curtain; it provides a glimpse of what is outside the box. It encourages students to think for themselves. Liberal educators know this, but sometimes they make the wrong inference. They think that showing the man behind the curtain subverts the spectacle. But merely revealing the contingency and constructedness of present arrangements does not end the spectacle, and subversiveness is not the point. The spectacle goes on. The goal of teaching students to think for themselves is not an empty sense of self-satisfaction. The goal is to enable students, after they leave college, to make more enlightened contributions to the common good.

I’ll repeat: “But merely revealing the continency and constructedness of present arrangements does not end the spectacle, and subversiveness is not the point.”

“Grandaddy Justice”

Back in September, Charlie Rose had on Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who I have decided is my new best friend. Some highlights:

Charlie Rose: Why are things that you read like literature important to a judge?

Stephen Breyer: I told a group of undergraduates here in New York a few weeks ago when I was asked that question. And I said it’s like knowing a foreign language or reading a novel. We only have one life. And we only really know our own. But by reading novels and by reading what other people have written about life, and about different ways of living, you can lead more lives than your own. And you can understand how people could have lived a quite different life. And that’s a wonderful privilege to be able to do that as well as I think a necessity for someone who’s going to affect the lives of other people.

[…]

Charlie Rose: So, somebody comes to you and says George Bush was not really elected president. The court simply issued a decree. You would say yes, he was, because the Supreme Court said he was.

Stephen Breyer: I would say better read the decisions, and I would also point out that one of the virtues that we have in this country is accepting decisions even when they’re very important and even when they’re wrong, rather than try to fight with guns to overturn them. And there are a lot of countries where that latter is a real alternative.

And that’s what I see in my office. I said, I’ve said this many times, but I see people of every race, every religion, every point of view. Every point of view and my mother used to say there is no view so crazy there isn’t somebody doesn’t hold it in this country. And these people who have very different points of view, outlook, et cetera, will decide under law. If you are going to decide under law, that means some people called judges will make these decisions. In difficult cases of interpretation, on the borders, all right. They’ll make mistakes sometimes.

So you have to decide you’re going to support an institution that will do things that are sometimes very unpopular. You have to decide that. I have to decide that. Very unpopular. And sometimes the judges will be wrong. And are you prepared to do that? And what I want to show people in this book is why they might be prepared to do it. And that’s — I tell some stories. And I try to explain how these decisions, many of them, current, how they look through my eyes. I can’t say I have the secret. I can say this is how I approach different areas and try to decide them. And I don’t call it politics. And I don’t call it just doing the good. And I certainly don’t call it deciding everything on the basis of some historical fact, you know, history is relevant.

[…]

Charlie Rose: You were willing to give the Congress some latitude.

Stephen Breyer: Uh-huh. Well, I put — this is not a real case. But I’m talking about statutes, I found a French railroad man, because there was a story in a French newspaper. And it said a biology — a teacher in a high school was bringing some snails, live snails in a basket on a train to Paris.

Charlie Rose: Yes.

Stephen Breyer: And the conductor came up and said you have to pay for a ticket, buy a ticket for the snails. And he said what? And the — he said read the tariff. It says you cannot bring animals unless you bring them in a basket and if you bring them in a basket, you have to buy a ticket. He said they didn’t mean snails, he said are snails animals? All right. There you have a statutory interpretation question.

Charlie Rose: Yes.

Stephen Breyer: Not so obvious. And why didn’t he make them buy 20 tickets? There were 20 snails. But I mean …

Charlie Rose: It is a way that you would approach that, so let’s assume that decision facing you.

Stephen Breyer: Right.

Charlie Rose: The way you would approach that is you go back and see what legislative intent was.

Stephen Breyer: That’s right, I try to figure out why did they write this into the manual. What was the purpose of this rule. Didn’t it have something to do with insurance? Did the insurance have to do with snails? I mean, didn’t they really mean house pets?

Charlie Rose: Yes.

Stephen Breyer: And who wrote it and what they have in mind.

I think the subtext of the conversation is, spend 16 years on the Supreme Court and you, too, will be able to speak in paragraph form.

Annals of Type

Hrant Papazian and Nina Stössinger have started a new website devoted to Armenian Type called Armenotype. Looks really promising, and the script is really beautiful. From Stössinger’s “Type and Culture”:

Some Government officials in Yerevan call me their «ambassador» as I’ve been trying to raise the profile of the Armenian alphabet in «type circles» – with some success – and the last two issues of Baseline magazine feature my articles on the Armenian alphabet and type design – subjects never contained within this international journal in thirty years. I’ve assisted with some exhibitions in the UK of achievements in this field and was a judge in 2008 for the first «Granshan» international Armenian type design competition, held in Yerevan. This year the third Granshan was held in Dublin at the ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale) conference – the forum for the world’s type designers and typographers since 1957. There is talk of the 2012 conference being held in Yerevan…

Looking forward to more.

Roundup No. 3

2010-09-12T00:00:00-04:00

The Social Sciences

Jim Manzi offers an interesting critique of the social sciences:

Over many decades, social science has groped toward the goal of applying the experimental method to evaluate its theories for social improvement. Recent developments have made this much more practical, and the experimental revolution is finally reaching social science. The most fundamental lesson that emerges from such experimentation to date is that our scientific ignorance of the human condition remains profound. Despite confidently asserted empirical analysis, persuasive rhetoric, and claims to expertise, very few social-program interventions can be shown in controlled experiments to create real improvement in outcomes of interest.

He writes in fairly broad strokes, but I find myself wishing that there was more available constructive public debate over what the social sciences are, how they work, what they can tell us, and what the limitations are.

Sarah Palin

Vanity Fair has published a piece on her by Michael Joseph Gross called “Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury”. Not much new here, but worth the read to get a better sense of how removed she is even from her own neighbors.

Current History

Another September 11th has come and gone, and McSweeney’s has again published John Hodgman’s “Welcoming Remarks Made at a Literary Reading, 9/25/01” by way of remembrance:

Every year, we wonder what might be appropriate on this day, and we can never think of anything more appropriate than this piece, which Mr. Hodgman originally delivered at a literary reading shortly after September 11, 2001.

I hadn’t read the piece before this year, but I’m inclined to agree.

Everything is OK, really.

A gentle reminder courtesy of my friend, Cori.

Annals of Type

I missed this last month: Hoefler & Frere-Jones announced a new font called Forza, based on rounded rectangular shapes. As usual, I love the colors on the specimen page. I’m especially fond of the slanted setting in the 9th frame. Seems like it would be a natural fit as a display face for a magazine. (Actually, it reminds me of Wired for some reason.)

Also, don’t miss the interview with Roger Black on The Big Web Show about web type and templates. Some of the fonts available through his new project Webtype look really great, especially the Clarendon-esque BentonModernRE. It would be nice if the specimens were set at a more comfortable reading width and with more breathing room between lines.

Roundup No. 2

2010-08-24T00:00:00-04:00

Education

I’ve been watching and rewatching Sir Ken Robinson’s 2006 TED Talk on creativity in schools. Like most TED speakers, Robinson is very engaging, and blends in a good deal of humor with his commentary. His diagnosis is that our schools are designed with a hierarchy, with subjects like math and language at the top, and the arts at the bottom. Looking to the future, he vaguely points out that creativity is an asset we need to develop, more or less insinuating economic consequences for neglecting creative development. I think he is right that creativity needs more nurturing, but there is probably more to education than creating an economically viable society. We’re also people and individuals who need to navigate the waters of our humanity, and I don’t know a better companion than creativity.

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman talk about the realities of teaching creativity in “The Creativity Crisis”, and make some good points. Math and science require a kind of creative thinking as well, and Bronson and Merryman outline a process of creative problem solving:

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.

Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.

Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

The idea of problem solving is an intriguing one, as it applies to creativity, and one common justification for edifying creative education is that all problems worth solving require a great amount of creative effort, whether they be social, political, scientific, or economic. Again, however, I wonder where creative work that is not as obviously about solving problems fits in. A wonderful dance piece may not be intended to solve an obvious problem. In my view, the problem being solved by a choreographer has to do with communicating something to another person.

Bronson and Merryman offer an inspiring story of a charter school in Akron, Ohio where students are set on a group project to propose plans for reducing noise in the library, learning about the relevant science and people skills along the way. The results are remarkable:

Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.

This kind of work requires dedicated educators, but as I recall it, my greatest learning experiences growing up had similar qualities. I learned material better when I was working on something that required that I understood it, rather than simply memorizing it for a test. The best way to learn Shakespeare is to perform it, the best way to learn programming is to write working programs. The best way to learn about ideas is probably to have to explain yours to someone else.

As far as math goes, Dan Meyer has some good ideas along similar lines: make problems real (for real), and give students less of a framework to solve problems in so that they can build the framework themselves – an important step in solving hard problems is guessing how to break them down into pieces. Meyer calls it “patient problem solving”:

So I hope you can see. I really hope you can see how, what we’re doing here is taking a compelling question, a compelling answer, but we’re paving a smooth, straight path from one to the other, and congratulating our students for how well they can step over the small cracks in the way. That’s all we’re doing here. So I want put to you, if we can separate these in a different way and build them up with students, we can have everything we’re looking for in terms of patient problem solving.

Based on his talk, I’d say it’s possible the best way to learn the fundamentals of math (arithmetic, algebra, and calculus) is through explaining physical phenomena.

Vanity Press

I’m performing right now in a nice outdoor production of Susanna Centlivre’s The Busybody, which has been very rewarding so far. (We close this weekend.) Richard Grayson came to last Saturday’s performance, and wrote a wonderful overview and review. My friends Raney Cumbow and Meaghan Cross put together this venture, with Raney directing and Meaghan performing, along with more friends old and new. It has been a delight.

Pleasure Viewing

If you haven’t seen it, “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury” is something special. Bradbury himself seems to think so.

Annals of Type

I recently came across this essay on ESPN, “The Franchise” by Patrick Hruby. The essay itself is interesting, but I was excited to see a mainstream publisher like ESPN throwing their weight behind web-based editorial design. Outfits like Fray published online this way before the advent of content management systems hit full swing. Efforts have been going to revive it for a few years now, including Khoi Vinh and Liz Danzico’s A Brief Message and Jason Santa Maria’s current website. In introducing his new site in 2008, Santa Maria said:

We’ve made so many advancements in how we publish content that we haven’t looked back to what it is we’re actually creating. Many of us see the clear separation between things like print design and web design, but I’ve really been questioning the reality of why things are this way.

I don’t believe it has as much to do with time and capabilities—the notion that it takes too long to achieve the same design fidelity we enjoy in slower print endeavors—I think it has more to do with us merely having convinced ourselves it does. We’ve developed so many ways of creating and coding websites faster, but we really haven’t scratched the surface for art directing them in that same light.

David Cole and Tag Savage started Sleepover in the past year as “a very earnest attempt to make the world of online publishing better.” One service they offer is editorial design:

Sometimes content demands new forms, sometimes content is just so special it needs an extra layer of love. Sleepover can design individual articles or serial features to make the most of your content. We’ll work with your publishing system and draw on your existing design to expand the possibilities of your content.

Seeing so many of these art-directed essays (see here, here, here, here, here, and here) under ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” certainly encourages me to think that the “extra layer of love” may not be just a micro-niche of web design work for much longer.

Roundup No. 1

2010-08-17T00:00:00-04:00

Creep

I’m not a big fan of Facebook, and I haven’t been too interested in the upcoming movie either. However, the trailer grabbed me, I think mostly due to the use of a really great cover of Radiohead’s “Creep”. Thankfully, Zeldman had my back, and found the group that did the beautiful choral cover:

If you’re intrigued, as I am, by the trailer for David Fincher’s upcoming The Social Network, and if part of what compels you about the trailer is the musical score – a choral version of Radiohead’s “Creep” – you’ll be happy to know you can purchase said song via emusic.com: On The Rocks is the album, “Creep” is the track, and Scala, a Belgian all-teenage-girl choir, are the artists. Highly recommended.

There’s something really wonderful about a song about loneliness and apartness being performed in unison by a group of singers. The sound is haunting in a way, and some of the melodic changes create great tension.

This is Nice

Jason Kottke took a vacation for a couple of weeks, and had Tim Carmody of Snarkmarket stand in the past week. (I kind of love that Jason does this.) Tim absolutely tore it up. My favorite recent find, though, was in a guest post the week before by Aaron Cohen. Aaron posted video of a talk Kurt Vonnegut gave at Albion College in 2002. (On Youtube starting here.) The great takeaway line from the speech is a gem of optimism: “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

David Foster Wallace

Continuing on a David Foster Wallace streak, “Federer as Religious Experience” and “Host” are both good reads. From the Federer piece:

By way of illustration, let’s slow things way down. Imagine that you, a tennis player, are standing just behind your deuce corner’s baseline. A ball is served to your forehand — you pivot (or rotate) so that your side is to the ball’s incoming path and start to take your racket back for the forehand return. Keep visualizing up to where you’re about halfway into the stroke’s forward motion; the incoming ball is now just off your front hip, maybe six inches from point of impact. Consider some of the variables involved here. On the vertical plane, angling your racket face just a couple degrees forward or back will create topspin or slice, respectively; keeping it perpendicular will produce a flat, spinless drive. Horizontally, adjusting the racket face ever so slightly to the left or right, and hitting the ball maybe a millisecond early or late, will result in a cross-court versus down-the-line return. Further slight changes in the curves of your groundstroke’s motion and follow-through will help determine how high your return passes over the net, which, together with the speed at which you’re swinging (along with certain characteristics of the spin you impart), will affect how deep or shallow in the opponent’s court your return lands, how high it bounces, etc. These are just the broadest distinctions, of course — like, there’s heavy topspin vs. light topspin, or sharply cross-court vs. only slightly cross-court, etc. There are also the issues of how close you’re allowing the ball to get to your body, what grip you’re using, the extent to which your knees are bent and/or weight’s moving forward, and whether you’re able simultaneously to watch the ball and to see what your opponent’s doing after he serves. These all matter, too. Plus there’s the fact that you’re not putting a static object into motion here but rather reversing the flight and (to a varying extent) spin of a projectile coming toward you — coming, in the case of pro tennis, at speeds that make conscious thought impossible. Mario Ancic’s first serve, for instance, often comes in around 130 m.p.h. Since it’s 78 feet from Ancic’s baseline to yours, that means it takes 0.41 seconds for his serve to reach you. This is less than the time it takes to blink quickly, twice.

Full of great stuff. “Host” covers a conservative radio host, and as usual Wallace applies an impressively even hand without hiding his personal opinion. Especially interesting considering this is journalistic coverage of another medium, and it would have been easy to fall into a lot of traps. He seems to super-humanly avoid them by being strikingly human.

Life Sucks, Let’s Laugh

From the I Can Relate Department, Owen Morris’s “The 27 Levels of Compatibality I’m Looking For” and Brandon Lueken’s “A Diary of Unemployment”.

I’ve also been working recently with playwright Isaac Oliver on a project. Turns out he has a great blog, He Who Laughs, or The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Intimacy. I especially like his dialogue-heavy posts, both real (“New York Moment”) and imagined (“Half-price”). Given my own dislike of Inception, I really appreciated Isaac’s masterful takedown, “Totem-poled”.

I Love Denis O’Hare

He’s playing the power-hungry vampire Russell Edgington on this season of True Blood. It is possibly worth watching the entire show just for his spectacular performance. (He’s up there with my other recent favorite bad guy performance, Hans Landa played by Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds.) O’Hare plays the part with such energy and relish, it is sheer joy to watch him work. The speech he gives at the end of this week’s episode was a special treat worth rewatching.

No Words

This week’s episode of Radiolab, “Words” is pretty great. Up there with “Musical Language”. Definitely some thought-provoking material, although I always find myself wishing they would tie the ideas presented in the shows back to some philosophical or historical or other text, since usually the ideas aren’t what’s new, the evidence is.

Annals of Type

The big news is that Adobe has partnered with Typekit. I’m excited to play around more with Chaparral, Minion, and Myriad in particular. This is definitely a mjor score for Typekit, but there was another big win for them that made smaller waves. Mandy Brown announced today that she is joining the Typekit team. Congratulations to her and to Typekit. (Looks like her site is down as I write this, I imagine she’s swapping out Cufón for the newly-available Typekit-served Chaparral.)

Obscurity

2010-07-18T00:00:00-04:00

Obscurity is far more popular and widespread than popularity. Most, even we, the obscure, will, in a moment or more of popularity, never point this out and probably have a difficult time recalling its truth. But there it is.

To each an obscurity unto herself. Popular ideas can be uninteresting simply because their shared nature has shaved off all the interesting bits. Others are so interesting, and feel so profoundly connected to all of us, that we imagine they are hardly ideas at all, at least not those of individuals. What popular person could have invented forgiveness, passion, understanding? If these ideas came from us, maybe they came from many of us at once, maybe the seeds grew in all of us, maybe they regrow in each of us to this day. Maybe one of us had a bit of a notion, and shared it with a few more who worked and molded and shared with more, who rephrased and reshaped and inserted their own selves before passing it on yet again.

Plato may have described the jewel beneath the rough surface, whose nature we can infer, but I think our attempts to understand only make the idea rougher, exposing new crevices and tributaries, cracks and holes, outgrowths and sharp edges. The beauty is not buried deep within, and we are not digging. Instead each is piling on, adding ugly refinements to the whole.

Magical

2010-06-27T00:00:00-04:00

The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s last plays. It begins with a storm that shipwrecks a boat on an island and ends with the ship setting sail for a voyage home. We learn that the storm was conjured by an exiled noble turned sorcerer named Prospero; one of the passengers, Ferdinand, falls in love with his daughter Miranda. Prospero has a famous line toward the end which goes “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on.” But I think there is an action that speaks louder than these words. Prospero proclaims:

[…] But this rough magic
I here abjure; and, when I have required
Some heavenly music,—which even now I do,—
To work mine end upon their senses, that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.

As he is set to regain his dukedom and, returning from exile, rejoin his world and fellow man, Prospero determines to break his magic staff and drown his book of spells and incantations.

Magic is not an explanation of, but a shorthand for the unexplained or inexplicable mysteries of the world around and within us. Months ago in Los Angeles, I stopped with a friend at a carnival in our neighborhood to ride rides and eat cotton candy and forget about some of the world around us. As we sat on a bench, my friend became reflective and she observed that she missed the magic of her childhood, when going to carnivals like this one she was attended by a sense of wonder and excitement – where now the mechanics of the rides were exposed in her mind and the banal tragedy of the workers of the rides was plain on their faces.

I told her that the magic wasn’t gone. Think, I said, of the odds of you and I being together and finding this fair. The stress of work had been weighing us down in the way it can do to young people, and just when we needed it the most, this carnival presented itself to us, around the corner from the condo we were sharing with its owner. None of this had to be intentional, it probably was unplanned, the best explanation we had for it was sheer serendipity. That is the magic that remains as we age and see some of the workings of the world people before have made for us exposed. Despite the odds, circumstances had convened and here we were, two people, sitting, sharing the last bits of fluffy goodness, part of the world and apart from it. What other magic could one want?

Buzzfeed

2010-06-11T00:00:00-04:00

Making Hay

2010-04-04T00:00:00-04:00

It is difficult to make an argument against the creative power and urge of people, which is a really good thing. In his Ted Talk on music and passion, Ben Zander begins:

Probably a lot of you know the story of the two salesmen who went down to Africa in the 1900s. They were sent down to find if there was any opportunity for selling shoes. And they wrote telegrams back to Manchester. And one of them wrote: “Situation hopeless. Stop. They don’t wear shoes.” And the other one wrote: “Glorious opportunity. They don’t have any shoes yet.”

Now, there’s a similar situation in the classical music world, because there are some people who think that classical music is dying. And there are some of us who think you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Zander stands alongside those who look at any given situation and prefer to see the possibilities. There is an ever-present difficulty when facing any change, because with change comes an uncertainty about the outcome of the future. At any given point looking to the future, one can imagine either something very bleak or something filled with promise.

I’m of the opinion that there is an innate quality of mankind that drives toward improvement, so I prefer to look ahead to opportunity rather than dystopia. I hear what you are saying already: there is a danger to imagining only good things for the future, because this could cause a blindness in decision-making that opens the door to having all the good intentions in the world but still on average making the world a worse place. Surely, anyone who is serious about partaking in the human project needs to be careful about supporting changes whose outcomes are unknown.

A simple answer to this is that we have mountains of empirical evidence showing that the risks involved in taking chances are well worth it, and that the story of human progress is the story of the people who embrace change and move forward. But this is a sort of grandiose way to think about things, and misses the point on the individual and day-to-day scale. It is fallacious to imagine that we have much control over what will happen to us tomorrow, and a little absurd to imagine even more control than that. Things happen to me every day that surprise me, as I’m sure they happen to you as well. We may sometimes be in a better mood to recognize and respond to those things, but the surprises are there if we are open to them.

I would say that it is fairly easy and a little lazy to argue that some change in the way things are is going to lead to the demise of some sort of human potential. Thinking that a change in technology is going to limit our ability to realize our creative selves implies a fragility that I don’t think most people making such arguments take into account.

On the eve of the release of the iPad, Cory Doctorow wrote:

The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

This sounds like a pretty limiting take on kids’ potential. And a pretty limiting take on the adults those kids grow up to be. On a human scale, is the difference between growing up with an Apple II and a shiny new iPad the kind of difference that really makes a difference? If we have learned anything about humanity over the course of, well, recorded history, isn’t it that we’re a pretty resilient bunch?

And yet leading into this conclusion, Doctorow claims:

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple’s model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of “that’s too complicated for my mom” (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn’t too complicated for their poor old mothers).

Doctorow’s argument sounds a lot like “Here, finally, is something that’s going to stop kids from wondering about the world.”

John Gruber has a nice piece in response, “The Kids Are All Right,” in which he points out an email he received from 13-year-old Sam Kaplan who has a chalkboard app already for sale in the iPad App Store. In Gruber’s words, “Somehow I don’t think young Mr. Kaplan sees the iPad as hurting his sense of wonder or entrepreneurism.”

This is, in a way, how it always goes, and Gruber’s conclusion in his piece is on point:

Something important and valuable is indeed being lost as Apple shifts to this model of computing. But it’s a trade-off, because something new that is important and valuable has been gained.

All change is of that nature. Some attempts at change don’t catch on, and so don’t make a difference. Those that do inherently bring loss and gain. I don’t fault Cory Doctorow for standing on the side of concern – but looking ahead, pessimism is no more warranted than optimism. That being the case, I’d prefer to choose optimism. At least enough so as to try to promote a good outcome. To my mind, Doctorow’s opinion is based in the same kind of belittling view of people that he seems to be deriding.

A Writing Device

2010-02-04T00:00:00-05:00

Let’s be honest. In the short time that I’ve been a user of Apple’s products, I have always been enthusiastic and excited about impending announcements. I was one of the few people who saw those fake videos of the iWalk and got all excited that a successor to the Newton was imminent. In fact, my excitement about portable computing in particular runs deep and further back than my use of Macs. There was a period in the 90s when I was avidly reading everything I could about what was going on in the worlds of Windows CE and the Palm Pilot. My family can probably recount for you how annoying I was about it. I would talk about small portable computers over lunch and dinner. When we went out, I would want to stop by CompUSA or Best Buy or Office Max, just to play around on devices like the LG Phenom, the HP Jornada 820, or the Psion Series 5mx and Revo.

These devices were not meant for a kid like me. (Or probably any kid.) The potent general idea from my point of view at the time was that these were devices which offered a subset of the functionality of a full-blown desktop, but simplified to the point where they were actually possible to use. This was not long after I had switched from browsing inside AOL to connecting over dialup through AOL, minimizing it, and browsing with either Netscape or IE. I was learning a valuable lesson about feature creep: extra features often come at the cost of usability. The Palm OS, Windows CE, and Symbian OS all boiled down to the same main choices about what users needed and what they could do without. “Productivity” apps like email and calendar were in, other things like games were out. Not a lot of fun for a 14-year-old.

But I wasn’t really all that interested in games. What I cared about was writing. When my parents bought me an iMac in 1998, the first best thing that I noticed about it was how much easier I found it to write on. To be honest, I couldn’t tell you why very specifically. I was too young and writing is an odd experience that is hard to understand any way you do it. I can still remember what the experience felt like, however. It was as though the computer had really just melted away, and all I was left with was the keyboard and a canvas, uninhibited and unencumbered. It was great, and some of my fondest memories of writing took place in front of that lime green iMac.

When I went to the stores to try out the Phenom or the Jornada or the Psion, I was trying out what it would feel like to write on the thing. I cared about the keyboard, I cared about navigating the file system, I cared about how my words looked on the screen… hoping that the confluence of the OS, keyboard, and screen would create something that felt right to me. I didn’t need a calendar, contacts, or even email really. I certainly didn’t need PowerPoint or Excel, although I was fascinated that they were able to get something similar to those things working on such small devices. I wanted something that I could take with me to start writing whenever the mood would strike.

Every time new products came out, or were speculated upon, that might fit what I wanted – a portable writing device – I was excited. I was excited when laptops with full keyboards got smaller and lighter. I was excited when the Visor was doing well and when the Handspring team rejoined Palm. I was excited about the Psion Series 7 and about the creation of subnotebooks. I was excited about the idea of “thin clients,” computers with more limited built-in power that off-loaded most of the work to a remote server over an internet connection. (That one sounds familiar, doesn’t it?) Anything that was making computers smaller and lighter, and anything that was making the activity of typing more portable, I watched with baited breath. When Apple introduced Inkwell to Mac OS X, I thought that surely a foray into the tablet format was in the works, with the intention of giving users a pen-based interface and pen-based text entry.

Now that the iPad is here, I’m not sure quite what to make of it from this perspective. I think that it’s because I am still falling in love with my iPod Touch. My iPod is now my portable writing device. I wrote the first draft of my last post in Simplenote while flying from San Francisco to Los Angeles. In fact, I read the essay I was responding to on the same flight in Instapaper. After getting used to the auto-correction, writing on my iPod feels right to me in the way that I have been looking for. And it is portable beyond what I thought possible for a digital writing tool. I can carry it in my pocket with me everywhere at all times. I never thought that typing with two thumbs on a screen with no tactile feedback on a device that sits comfortably in the palm could feel like writing. But it does. A need that I’ve had unfulfilled for ten years has been met. I will of course be excited to try out the iPad in the Apple Store when they find their way there, running it through my usual motions, trying to determine whether I can really see myself writing on such a thing, weighing the feel of using it against its portability. For now, I couldn’t be happier with my iPod.

Modern Friendship

2010-01-04T00:00:00-05:00

In “Faux Friendship”, William Deresiewicz argues that friendship – once noble, private, intimate, and deeply meaningful – has become watered down and scattered to the point of falseness:

Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling – from something people share to something each of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves, rearranging the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls.

I agree with almost nothing in this essay. This is odd on the surface considering I probably share Deresiewicz’s viewpoint on many things. I have long been critical of Facebook and the way that many people use it. I’m critical of the way many use Twitter, but prefer its system because for now it is still basically possible for me to use Twitter in a way that suits me. However, I believe short one-off broadcast communication need not inhibit other more substantial, directed, and intimate forms.

(Has it ever? Just because literature hasn’t always shown it doesn’t mean that people haven’t been making small talk for as long as they have been talking. Did Goethe and Schiller in their great friendship have to stop holding small conversations with acquaintances and more casual friends in order to reserve their resources for their own more intense conversations? Did they never fill in space and time with small familiar talk with each other?)

Technology can’t be the root problem in the degradation of communication and friendship – at best it can enable people to communicate and relate to one another in less meaningful ways more frequently. Thankfully this isn’t an argument that Deresiewicz makes, although it is lingering in the background.

Changes in communication technology have enabled something else as well though. Far more communications – written, verbal, video; live, delayed; broadcast, directed – are made in either a public or recorded way now than potentially ever in human history. (That we communicate more on the whole is unfounded, even if potentially true. If it is, I think the increase has more to do with population density than changing technology.) The public pieces of communique cause an interesting dilemma: as a consequence of having these publicly available bits of expression/communication, the more casual forms of relationships and the communication styles that go along with them are so readily available as to almost feel forced upon the world as a tide.

Of course this mass of quips and check-ins and preening and exhibition doesn’t represent or display the qualities of deeply connected friendship. (How could it?) Because Facebook uses a definition of “friend” that you disagree with (rightly so) does not mean that Facebook has redefined the word. In pockets of our culture where the word “friend” has been watered-down substantially already, new words fill in to describe the relationships, still strong and powerful, that one paying attention only to the tidal wave can easily overlook. “Bromance” is not the most potent of these; I have heard the phrase “hetero life-mates” bandied about more in recent years – almost the perfect descriptor of loving non-sexual relationships Deresiewicz seems to long for.

Perhaps in Deresiewicz’s disconnected circle he has come to the conclusion that no one has the sort of friendship had by Achilles and Patroclus. Yet he claims to feel a sense of oddness in reading Facebook updates – that the point of many is to advertise the having of friends. My own experience has been that against a sea of these types of communication and relations, I hold the relationships that are important and close to me all the more dear. I would not be surprised at all if others’ experience is quite similar. The behavior of teenagers is not a good indicator. Most long for fame and celebrity and are drawn to the appeal of making their private lives public for reasons that have to do with our culture and media but not, I think, with some changing nature of friendship.

If people in general are having a harder time establishing close friendships, I think that is an unfortunate development. I don’t know that there is a good way to measure this, and I’m not sure just asking a bunch of people would be a good approach. However, if that shift is taking place, I do not think it is because people treat friendships differently. I have never known anyone to take the term “BFF” at face value. Everyone knows that these language devices are a lark. They are made to sound cute so as to remove the pretension and gravitas connected to what Deresiewicz calls “classical friendship”. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t want, seek out, or understand the meaning and work required for close bonds of friendship.

Thoughts on “Avatar”

2010-01-02T00:00:00-05:00

I haven’t seen Avatar yet, but I’m considering it still. What bothers me about this is that I don’t know why I want to go see it.

First of all, I don’t really like James Cameron’s movies. In fact, when I was looking over his list of films recently, I discovered that my favorite of his movies is True Lies — which I enjoy almost entirely because of Jamie Lee Curtis’s transformation from clumsy awkward business-woman fantasizing over an exciting life (however false) into a surprisingly sexy “spy” convinced that her pretend role is part of a real assignment, even though it is actually constructed by her husband whose normal life with her has always been a lie. When Arnold’s eyes drop his tape recorder in astonishment, I’m right there with him every time.

The simplistic reality of a husband suddenly stunned at seeing his wife in a newly attractive light cuts through all of the layers of pretense, falsehood and deceit into a palpably real story of two people who love each other.

If I’m going to give Cameron credit, it’s for being able to reliably create exactly this type of moment. In Terminator 2, which has an equally if not more complicated story-line, Sarah Connor and gang track down the engineer who is building the technology that will become Skynet. We meet him first at his home with his family, and he agrees to plot to destroy the technology which he has been building by harnessing advanced technology from the future, based on his as-yet-incomplete work, left behind by the first Terminator film. All of these layers of metaphysical conundrum slip away as we see a man with a family back home, mortally wounded, holding onto his life long enough to detonate a bomb that will obliterate himself and the legacy he wishes not to unleash upon the world his children will grow up in.

I have heard many good things about Avatar. Alex loved the story and the story-telling. Cori finds the movie growing on her as she thinks back to it and thought everything was gorgeous (although she hated the use of Papyrus or whatever derivative for the subtitles).

I remain skeptical. I can’t say I’ve ever liked the whole of a Cameron film, for one thing, as much as I may hold a few moments of his stories very close. But there’s a more important problem I don’t know what to do with: motion capture.

Until earlier today, I hadn’t actually seen a trailer for Avatar in full. My impression has been that I don’t like the quality of the CG, and I am a long-standing skeptic of the use of 3D for anything but IMAX documentaries about outer space narrated by Tom Hanks or Sigourney Weaver. Part of this is my tendency to prefer minimalism. There is probably a lot of hoo-ha out there about the virtues of minimalism, but the only reason I think anyone subscribes to any point of view about creative work is because they believe it will positively affect the outcome of their own creative efforts. I like minimalism simply because I like constraints.

More importantly, I just don’t see how it’s possible to really do anything creative without constraints. I’ve often heard (and sometimes espoused) that design is about solving problems. I pretty much think the same thing about all forms of creativity, whether they be expressive or not. With design, it is easy to see its problem solving nature by thinking of an example. Take a newspaper. There’s an interesting design problem. We need something that is easy to scan for headlines, easy to read when settled on a story, easy to hold while reading and easy to carry around during the day, but also easy to print millions of copies of every day. Now there are some constraints! Oh, and by the way, we need to use typesettings throughout that reflect the history of newsprint journalism in this particular country while remaining easier to read at very small sizes despite variations in inking due to the high speed of our press.

Sometimes, we are working without enough of these kinds of constraints, so it is useful to impose some. That, perhaps taken a bit to an extreme, is my view of minimalism: making the problem more solvable by pairing down the tools with which you can solve it.

I may have to eat these words if I see the movie, but I’m inclined to think that Avatar is going to be yet another example of a big-budget movie suffering from a lack of constraints placed on the director. (I’m looking at you, George Lucas and Tim Burton.) I can only imagine how this might have gone:

James Cameron: I’d like to do a movie.
Studio: Finally! Why can’t you make more hits more of the time? We love you even though you’re crazy.
Cameron: Oh and I want to film it so that everything will be presented in 3D.
Studio: Sounds expensive, but people are eating that shit up these days. Disney’s been doing it for a while with some good results. You’re the boss.
Cameron: I think that a lot of the characters are going to be humanoid, but alien. Without going into too much detail, can I get an enormous budget to use motion capture on some actors’ faces and digitally turn them into, well, blue kitties?
Studio: I think you lost me, but let’s just go for it.
Cameron: So you’re saying that I can just come up with whatever the fuck I want and no matter how much it costs you’ll foot the bill and promote the thing like crazy with my name on it and we’ll all get stinking rich and get one thumb up from Roger Ebert?
Studio: Silver platter, buddy — unless you prefer gold.

Maybe Cameron’s team pulls it off — I honestly don’t know because I haven’t seen the movie. However, the odds are certainly stacked against him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie make good use of 3D or motion capture. Alex, however, has likened Cameron to Steve Jobs (“a phone, an iPod, and a breakthrough internet communication device; a phone… are you getting the picture?”) and I would be a fool to take Alex’s opinion lightly.

Most importantly, I haven’t wanted to see the movie because I’m afraid that I want to see the movie just so I don’t sound like an asshole when I criticize it without having seen it. Sounds like a pretty dumb reason to see or not see a movie. So now that I’ve gotten the asshole uninformed criticism out of the way, I’m free to make my own choice about whether I want to see the movie.

Maybe there will be one of those magical Cameron moments that cuts through all the confusion about who is on whose side, and the metaphysical questions bound to come up when a man’s mind inhabits a body that is a genetic mixture of himself and an alien species which behind the scenes is being done by animating the results of an electronic capture of an actor’s movements. Maybe this moment will be Cameron’s own statement about the craft of movie-making and the age-old ways of story-telling and fiction’s relationship to the truths of daily life. Or maybe it will just all be an overblown sci-fi fantasy wet dream.

I guess it could be both.

Pom Wonderful

2009-12-21T00:00:00-05:00

Gabriel Aronson

2009-12-01T00:00:00-05:00

David Pogue on Cleaning Up the Clutter Online

2009-11-06T00:00:00-05:00

I believe I agree with the sentiment here regarding ads, especially on pages that are intended for reading.

As for Readability, I wish that it were an unnecessary tool. It is a much more difficult project to try to educate writers and designers and readers about typographic treatment on the web. It is more work for the standards makers and browser builders to devise, agree on, and implement ways for type to be treated far more intelligently on the web. But it’s worth it, because even though there are rules and guidelines to making texts more readable, writing will never be one-design-fits-all.

So, David Pogue, I know you’re listening. Take on this cause! If people are responding to you so well on Twitter, point them in the direction of something by Mandy Brown. The best way to tackle the readability of the web isn’t by trying to automatically reformat it (although it’s a good stop-gap). No! We need to raise awareness to push the community of people who write for and publish online to take the extra care to make words readable.

Thank you for your help. :)

The Roar

2009-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

John Kricfalusi’s Review of Meatballs

2009-09-21T00:00:00-04:00

For context, John Kricfalusi created The Ren & Stimpy Show. Here’s his take on the new movie based on Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs:

I had a tough time sitting in my seat through Meatballs, because what was happening and who it was happening to was not remotely interesting. It’s hard to pace a story around characters with no personality.

But as a cartoonist and designer, there was enough visual interest and unique action throughout the movie that intellectually I found things to stimulate me.

It was an optimistic portent of what could be. It’s basically an undirected film – but one that allowed many of the artists to take nothing scenes and add some kind of cleverness, design and action to the formulaic events being told by the story.

This in itself is so far ahead of an overdirected film (overdirected by executives typically, not by directors that actually have a point of view or style) that stops creativity from happening every step of the way, just so that more stock plot points, filler and bad puns can happen.

I think this kind of thing is enjoyable to read not just because of how harsh it is, but because it touches on something that is really true about the current state of, in my opinion, not just animated films, but most major films. I often find myself settling for the little things in a movie that make it good, rather than expecting something more, maybe in order to seem less like a cynic and an asshole.

But the truth is, there’s a lot of terrible stuff out there, and the industry that has grown around making movies has moved it from an art form into a calculating box office science. I can only remain optimistic by holding onto my belief that the creative juices going into films have stagnated due to lack of competition. Lower production and distribution costs, one hopes, will eat away at the joint monopoly whose long project has been the reduction of creative work to “content.”

Time will tell. Quality endures, but only if it can first find life.

(via Khoi Vinh)

The Guts of a New Machine

2009-09-11T00:00:00-04:00

Came across this again while digging through the DF archives. Rob Walker profiles the then-two-year-old iPod for the Times:

A handful of familiar cliches have made the rounds to explain this — it’s about ease of use, it’s about Apple’s great sense of design. But what does that really mean? “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s C.E.O. “People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

(Emphasis mine.)

This idea has, I think, taken root since then, and a respect for the relationship between usability, readability, and visual character on the web in particular has really grown. And yet, some companies seem to continue to try to “copy Apple” in all the wrong ways, drawing the wrong inferences, and learning the wrong lessons.

Think about what you’re making, respect the user and the reader, and make informed decisions along the way to the best of your ability. Setting everything minimally against a white background is not the great lesson of Apple’s success. The takeaway is to place an emphasis on the user in the design process and not to underestimate the value of quality.

Kernest

2009-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

Kernest is one of the first good options for using embedded fonts in a website. Unlike projects like Cufón or sIFR, Kernest takes advantage of @font-face embedding, which is now supported by Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

One of the problems with @font-face at the moment is that Safari and Firefox support font formats like OpenType and TrueType, while Internet Explorer only supports Embedded OpenType. The usual workaround is to supply a different format depending on the requesting browser. This is exactly what Kernest takes care of for you.

Not only will it serve the right file type depending on the browser, it will only serve the font files when the request comes from a domain name tied to that particular font. Many of the current selection of fonts are free, but in order to make them available to your domain, you must activate them. Based on my brief use, this is a very simple process, requiring only a user account, and adding new domains is completely effortless.

After activating a font for your domain, you simply link to a stylesheet specific to your domain on their server. It is worth noting that there is no javascript involved, and this is as it should be.

I’ve been trying Kernest out for a few days now, and have found the experience very pleasant all around. I don’t know much about what TypeKit’s model will be like, whether they will have some fonts available free of charge, or if there will still be a charge for the service. If not, Kernest looks like it could be a great free alternative for projects without a budget for fonts.

And in the meantime, I highly recommend giving it a try. There are already several serviceable fonts on the site. I’m currently using Droid Serif from Ascender Corp.

Update: I’ve since switched to Heuristica.

Update 10 Dec 09: In case it isn’t obvious, I’m using neither Droid Serif nor Heuristica anymore.

Exclusive! Sarah Palin Interview

2008-10-02T00:00:00-04:00

Sadie Lou’s own Rebecca Rubenstein lands an exclusive debate-day interview with Sarah Palin.

Rebecca Rubenstein: As a Sarah Lawrence student, I tend to be very confrontational and opinionated, so I’m just going to put it out there —

Sarah Palin: Oh sure.

RR: Mrs. Palin…or do you mind if I call you Sarah? I’m kind of used to calling authority figures by their first names.

SP: Oh, you know, as a hockey mom, as you know I am one, all the kids on the team call me Sarah. But, really, I have to say that since being given this wonderful opportunity to be the vice-presidential candidate for John [McCain], who I feel is the most qualified presidential candidate to date, what with his maverick, should be having me be called Mrs. Palin. After all, I have been married for 20 years now to my childhood sweetheart Todd.

RR: Okay… [Confused look.] To get to my first question, right off the bat I’d like to ask you about your so-called foreign policy “experience.” I know that you had some difficulty answering when Katie Couric addressed the topic in her interview, but since you will inevitably be discussing this at length in tonight’s VP debate, perhaps you’ve had some time to rethink the question.

SP: It’s funny you should ask that particular question in such a way, because I ultimately take a strong stance against rethinking. We are in such a state of Iraq that we can’t afford to blink, much less think more than once. Rethinking, if you think about it, is clearly a sign of weakness. But to answer your original question, I think foreigners are really given a short stick in this country, but it is nothing compared to the sticks in their countries.

RR: I see… [A look of slight alarm.] Could you specify your experience with foreign policy, though?

SP: Um.

RR: For instance, I am experienced at going to the gym…because I walk to the gym, and I interact with the equipment in the gym. Do you understand the question now?

SP: Oh I think the gymnasium is one of the favorite places of myself to spend time in the day.

RR: I’m sorry?

SP: Oh gym equipment and me go way back, you know that I was Miss Congeniality in the Miss Alaska pageant, of which I am still very proud, and I have been going to the gym every day since to try to keep myself in figure.

RR: Maybe I should ask another question. Your eldest daughter, Bristol, has received a lot of media attention during this campaign due to her pregnancy. As someone who has been so outspoken about teaching abstinence and family values, how does this affect you?

SP: I have to say I think all of the attention has been rather offensive. There is nothing more American than a man marrying a woman.

RR: But Bristol isn’t married yet…

SP: I’m sorry, our wedding invitations have all already gone out.

RR: What?

SP: Well, I’m sorry to say this during an interview, but it would be very difficult to invite you, this has been a very popular wedding after all.

RR: [Sigh.] Nevermind. Third question: how do you feel about Tina Fey’s portrayal of you on Saturday Night Live?

SP: First of all, let me just say that I usually don’t stay up that late to watch shows, but my son was nice enough to show me some parts from the You-Tubes. Honestly, I don’t understand why everyone in the liberal media could think that she looks so much like me. I know that part of taking on such a public face with the public means being open to humor and mocking, but as you know, John and I have tried very hard to differentiate our campaign from the celebrity-driven campaign of Barack Obama, which was further supported by the work of Paris Hilton, you know. And I think that if anyone deserves humor and mocking, it is clearly Barack Obama and not John and me.

RR: Let’s be candid for a second. What do you really think of Barack Obama?

SP: To be frank, it still amazes me that Barack Obama had the audacity to go on a vacation to Europe while we were heading toward such an economic crisis that this country has never seen before, of which John McCain instead of going on vacation has done everything in his power including suspend his own campaign not lollygagging around with the French and the Germans while we’re at war with the terrorists and everyone at home is suffering from the demands of a weakening economy.

RR: Yeah… [Checks watch.] Well, fancy that, we’re almost out of time.

SP: Oh dear.

RR: Last question: if John McCain were to die during his term, and you were to become President of the United States, what is the first thing you would do while in office?

SP: God forbid such an event should ever occur, I think the first thing I would do would be to – well, I’ve heard that the President receives free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream – and I think the first thing for me to do would be to order myself some Chunky Monkey, because ice cream always makes me feel better when I know I’ve got tough times ahead.

RR: Uh huh… [A look of immeasurable disdain.] Well, thank you for your time.

SP: No, thank you, and God bless America.

Making Complicated Machines

2007-12-26T00:00:00-05:00

Computers offer a fascinating window into the play between the simple and the complex. The alphabet of computer language is as simple as they come, with two figures: 1 and 0, known as bits, which typically correspond to high and low voltage electronic pulses. From such a simple base, however, complex functionality can be achieved. On the other hand, seemingly simple behavior can require a substantially complex arrangement of ones and zeros. It also requires well-designed complex machinery to sculpt the flow of bits into something useful.

In Computer Organization and Design, David Patterson and John Hennessy describe in detail the design of a particular type of machine and its instruction set called MIPS (originally for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages). MIPS is one way to create the balance needed to make a good computer. The questions at hand in designing such a system include: what functionality need be built directly into the machine itself? how will instructions be represented? how will data be represented? how will the reduced set of operations be sufficient to accomplish a wide variety of more complicated operations? how will these operations be carried out quickly and efficiently?

The authors outline four design principles that guided the solutions to these problems in MIPS. The first of these, “simplicity favors regularity,” indicates that a reliably consistent design affords simpler solutions. For example, MIPS-32 uses a consistent ‘word size’ of 32 bits, meaning instructions and pieces of data are represented by a string of 32 ones and zeros. Having a regular word size allows for some simplicity in the hardware, for example: 32 wires, one for each bit, can be used to communicate both instructions and data – in fact, the same group of 32 wires can be used for either purpose and for any instruction or piece of data. The second principle is “smaller is faster.” Whatever the medium, the representation of bits has to travel through the computer. Shorter travel distances allow for faster computation, plain and simple. The third principle, “make the common case fast,” sometimes requires compromise. “Smaller is faster” asks for a small set of instructions and corresponding hardware, “make the common case fast” asks for instructions and hardware for as many frequently-used operations as possible. Hardware built to parse and quickly compute a larger instruction set take up more space, which can in turn slow down the overall function of the computer. These two principles must be balanced for maximum computing power and speed, which leads to the fourth guiding principle: “good design demands good compromises.”

These four principles all inform the design of MIPS. Thirty-two memory registers are kept close to the processor for temporary storage of 32-bit words currently in play. Access to these words is fast because of their proximity. Likewise, only six bits are required to indicate each, leaving room in 32-bit instructions for a wider variety of common instructions involving values in registers. The size of the architecture is kept small by reusing parts with basic functionality for multiple tasks. Compromises are made to reduce size while accommodating common cases: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are built into the instruction set and the hardware. To take a square root, the operation must be broken down into more basic parts.

In The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder follows Data General, a successful computer company, through the late 1970s as a team within the company worked feverishly to build a state-of-the-art microcomputer. This new computer, the Eagle, needed an architecture built from scratch with lofty restrictions and goals in mind. At the time, Data General’s bread and butter was a 16-bit microcomputer called the Eclipse. The Eagle would be a 32-bit machine roughly based on the Eclipse. It also set out to be backwards-compatible with the Eclipse: software written for the Eclipse needed to work on the Eagle.

There were also realities in place which added further restrictions to the design of the Eagle. Development of the Eagle was set on a very short timeline: one year. Why? The team working on the Eagle in Massachusetts was subject to competition with another Data General group in North Carolina, also working on a new 32-bit flagship microcomputer. The North Carolina group had a head start and was favored by the company. In fact, the Eagle team operated low key within the company, and included mostly junior engineers fresh out of school. Data General, meanwhile, was playing catchup with rival DEC, which had already brought a 32-bit machine, the VAX, to market.

The need for backwards-compatibility with a 16-bit instruction set, combined with the limitations on time and resources added to the compromises required to design and build the Eagle, and get it out the door.

The size of the instruction set was already a compromise. Doubling the word size would cause an increase in the size of the parts of the computer, working against the “smaller is faster” principle. The increased word size also vastly increased the number of instructions and data that could be represented with a single word, accommodating more common cases. Sixteen bits offer a vocabulary of about 66,000 words. Thirty-two bits represent 4 billion. In this case, the overwhelming vocabulary gain of the increased word size outweighed the speed hit of the size increase. The jump from 16 to 32 bits also offered another gain. According to Kidder, Eagle’s architect Steve Wallach reasoned that the increase led to “the enlargement of the Eclipse’s logical-address space from 65,000 to 4.3 billion storage compartments.” The number of spaces in memory that could be addressed increased 65,000-fold.

In building the Eagle, the second principle, “smaller is faster,” carried less weight. The goal was to fit the Eagle’s processor onto seven boards, where other companies were making machines using a single board. According to Kidder:

A multiple-board CPU performs simultaneously many operations that a single-chip CPU can do only sequentially… A time was probably coming when components would operate so quickly that the distance that signals had to travel would intimately affect the speed of most commercial computers. Then miniaturization and speed would become more nearly synonymous. But that day had not yet arrived.

Compromises between what operations the hardware and software would handle also took place. However, decisions about how to make these compromises were not always geared toward making the Eagle a fast and efficient computer, and more toward ensuring the Eagle would actually be a computer:

One Hardy Boy [working on the hardware], Josh Rosen, looks around and can hardly believe what he sees. For example, Microkids [working on the low-level software] and Hardy Boys are arguing. A Microkid wants the hardware to perform a certain function. A Hardy Boy tells him, “No way – I already did my design for microcode to do that.” They make a deal: “I’ll encode this for you, if you’ll do this other function in hardware.” “All right.”

What a way to design a computer! “There’s no grand design,” thinks Rosen. “People are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands.” Rosen is having some problems with his own piece of the design. He knows he can solve them, if he’s just given the time. But the managers keep saying, “There’s no time.” Okay. Sure. It’s a rush job. But this is ridiculous. No one seems to be in control; nothing’s ever explained. Foul up, however, and the managers come at you from all sides.

This way of working was even encouraged by the project’s manager, Tom West, who kept the following written on his white board: “Not Everything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Well.” The limited time and resources available to the project compromised the overall quality of the design of the Eagle itself. There was, however, another human factor contributing to the inability to produce an ‘ideal’ design. West, a talented engineer himself, feeling the pressures of looming deadlines, decided at one point to try to examine flaws in the design to debug problems himself. After a few weekends of looking at the prototypes, West decided, “We’re way beyond what any one person can do. It’s too complex.” The complexity of the design and workings of the Eagle had become great enough that a complete understanding of all the details, decisions, and compromises involved in its engineering was unattainable.

Design, like engineering, is about problem solving. When setting out to design a computer architecture, several problems are at play. Machines need to be fast and small. They also need to be reliable and easy to fix or debug. Preferably, they adhere to some standards to ease programming by offering a consistent base for development. In the case of the MIPS architecture, one of the major design goals was simplicity. The design of the MIPS architecture, led by John Hennessy, began in 1981 at Stanford University, where the demands of the business world did not impose unreasonable restrictions on time and resources. Aspects of the design could therefore be thought out more carefully than the business-world could afford, lending the design a more complete overall grace and understandability. Data General’s Eagle team, however, had to sacrifice this idealism in favor of making a machine that worked and would be marketable. This was born out in West’s policy, “If you can do a quick-and-dirty job and it works, do it.” The MIPS architecture balanced simplicity and complexity in a wholly different way than the Eagle. The difference lay in the problems that needed solving.

Some Thoughts on Choice and Reason

2007-06-08T00:00:00-04:00

Last week I read Michael Bierut’s On (Design) Bullshit in Design Observer from a couple of years ago. He talks about the need to give reasons for design choices in order to sell your work to clients:

Before I could commit to a design decision, I needed to have an intellectual rationale worked out in my mind. I discovered in short order that most clients seemed grateful for the rationale as well. It put aside arguments about taste; it helped them make the leap of faith that any design decision requires; it made the design understandable to wider audiences.

In my far more limited experience working with design, this is true and apt. Even when ‘the client’ is yourself, rationalizing decisions makes you feel better about your own work in the ways that Beirut describes. Beirut himself admits that these rationales amount to bullshit, and at the end of his essay leaves off with an amusing anecdote:

I remember working years ago with a challenging client who kept rejecting brochure designs for a Francophile real estate development because they “weren’t French enough.” I had no idea what French graphic design was supposed to look like but came up with an approach using Empire, a typeface designed by Milwaukee-born Morris Fuller Benton in 1937, and showed it to my boss, Massimo Vignelli. “That will work,” he said, his eyes narrowing.

At the presentation, Massimo unveiled the new font choice with a flourish. “As you see,” he said, “in this new design, we’re using a typeface called Ahm-peere.”

I was about to correct him when I realized he was using the French pronunciation of Empire.

The client bought it.

In this example, it is clear that the reasons for choosing Empire did not include the fact that it is French, because it is not. However, this was the rationale given to the client, who had some predisposition to thinking that the design somehow needed to be French. The client had a desire that needed fulfilling, and the designers did so with bullshit. This bullshit rationale, however, made the choice of font perfect in the eyes of the client.

It may be hard to see this as a ‘bad’ thing overall, because Beirut ostensibly did not choose the font under those same false pretenses. However, this same process – desire or need followed by false fulfillment – can take place internally. In other words, when we are already looking for a particular reason to like a choice we have to make, we can easily be too quick to provide ourselves with a satisfactory bullshit reason why a certain choice fits what we need or want to accomplish.

In this way, having reasons that we are predisposed to sets us up to make some choices by default, without considering other options. The important question, when reviewing your own work or someone else’s, is not always “Why did you make this choice?” Sometimes it is “What choice did you make here?”

Michael Beirut recently announced the publication of his first book, Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design.