The Reading List, January – June 2012

The bulging backlog in Instapaper tells me it’s been a while since i’ve done one of these. Herein, a collection of articles and posts that i particularly enjoyed reading over the past six months, in no particular order:

• 3D Printing, Teleporters and Wishes: Anil Dash lays out a possible future for 3D printing, touching on the metaphors we might come to adopt around the technology.
• The Queens of Montague Street: Nancy Rommelmann reminiscing about her teenage years in Brooklyn Heights in the 70s. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be available online for free any longer, but can be purchased as a Kindle Single.
• All the Single Ladies: The decline of males, consequent lack of marriageable men and the end of traditional marriage as society’s highest partnership ideal.
• Why William Gibson Distrusts Aging Futurists’ Nostalgia: William Gibson talks about his (then new) book Distrust That Particular Flavor, a collection of non-fiction essays and writings collected over a period of more than twenty years.
• Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us: Despite the sensationalist title, an interesting look at the limitations of reductionism.
• Made Better in Japan: Japan is creating the highest quality in originally foreign wares – American Denim, French cuisine, Italian Espresso.
• How I Helped Destroy Star Wars Galaxies: “The game that I loved so much, I helped to destroy.”
• How to Say I Love You 100 different ways. Paul Ford is great.
• Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto: A detailed and measured look at Android 4.0’s new system font Roboto by Glenn Fleishman.
• The Incident Report. Or, The Time I Broke It: Yeah, i’m not going to try and summarize this one.
• The Grammar of Happiness: An Interview with Daniel Everett: An interview with the preeminent, yet controversial expert on the Pirahã language.
• Teller Reveals His Secrets: “[A] few principles magicians employ when they want to alter your perceptions.”
• Where’s _why? Annie Lowrey tracks down Ruby hacker legend _why the lucky stiff, who very suddenly (and supposedly voluntarily) disappeared almost two years ago.
• Make Your Thing: 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success: Jesse Thorn shares his secrets for success.
• Exclusive: a behind-the-scenes look at Facebook release engineering: Did you know that the entire Facebook application is (or at least was) compiled into a 1.5GB single binary executable? Neither did i.
• Yahoo! Patent Thoughts: Russell Beattie shares his thoughts on Yahoo weaponizing its patent portfolio. For an additional perspective, Andy Baio shared his own sentiments in this piece for Wired.
• Tyler Brûlé: the man who sold the world: “What about Scandinavia? After all, Monocle is forever claiming Copenhagen or Helsinki is the best place in the world to live. Brûlé looks aghast, revealing the conflict between aesthete and businessman. “The Scandis are a bit too socialist.” He swings his hand around the office. “Everything in this room is from Scandinavia, but the maternity leave would kill us.” So Copenhagen may be the best place to live in Brûlé’s world, but it is no place to run a business.”
• The frequent fliers who flew too much: I had no idea that something like unlimited first-class life-time travel tickets ever existed. Seems like a real bargain at its initial $250.000 price.
• How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet: What a waste of potential.
• SF, big ideas, ideology: what is to be done? “[T]oday you don’t need to read SF to get a sense of wonder high: you can just browse “New Scientist”. We’re living in the frickin’ 21st century. […] Seriously: to the extent that mainstream literary fiction is about the perfect microscopic anatomization of everyday mundane life, a true and accurate mainstream literary novel today ought to read like a masterpiece of cyberpunk dystopian SF.”
• Popular Writers: A Stephen King interview. By Neil Gaiman.
• Why Elites Fail: ““Who says meritocracy says oligarchy.” See also Institutions and Privilege: “Meritocracy is a paradoxical thing, best pursued obliquely.”
• Game of Thrones and the Good Ruler complex: “As well as being mightily entertaining, Game of Thrones is racist rape-culture Disneyland with Dragons.” That sums it up pretty well.
• Such a Long Journey – An Interview with Kevin Kelly

The Reading List, Second Half of 2011 Edition

I won’t explain why this took so long, but let’s just say i’m in the process of catching up with lots of stuff i wanted to post here but never came around to.
First step: Catching up on The Reading List, a (supposedly) monthly collection of articles i particularly enjoyed reading that month. Except this time around, it’s stuff i particularly enjoyed reading in the second half of 2011:

• Spacesuit: An Interview with Nicholas De Monchaux. On the history of the spacesuit, by Geoff Manaugh. One of the best pieces of tech writing in 2011. Not to be missed.
• Getting Bin Laden – What happened that night in Abbottabad: A thrilling account of the mission to kill Osama Bin Laden.
• The History of Dialogue: Other People’s Papers. Fascinating dialogue between a university lecturer and a ghostwriter who’s written over 100 papers for pay.
• Looking for Someone – Sex, love, and loneliness on the Internet: The New Yorker examines the state (and state-of-the-art) of online dating.
• Dead is just dead: Sean Bonner recounts his suicide attempt as a twelve years old.
• Cities in Fact and Fiction: Scientific American interviews William Gibson.
• If Your Website’s Full of Assholes, It’s Your Fault: Anil Dash on the responsibility of website operators to maintain a civilized ground for discussion and community.
• Big Brother isn’t watching you: Russell Brand on the London riots in August 2011. Shame on me, i had almost forgotten about those by now.
• The Possibilian – What a brush with death taught David Eagleman about the mysteries of time and the brain: David Eagleman researches our perception of time.
• Health Now: A Provocation. A critical look at the common obsession with health as an end in itself.
• The Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Paul Ford shares the story of conceiving their child through in-vitro fertilization. He’s a terrific writer.
• The Insidious Evils of ‘Like’ Culture: Seems almost unbelievable today that Facebook introduced its like-buttons only in 2009.
• The Year of Wonders: Alex Shakar shares the story of how his first novel, The Savage Girl, bombed despite critical accolade. Maybe i’m a little slow, but i didn’t see that end coming…
• Rebuild: Regarding Clones. Northway Games discusses the seemingly growing problem of game clones, with many interesting examples.
• The Psychology of Nakedness: How a little nakedness changes our perception of other people.

The June Reading List

It’s time for another reading list, so here’s some stuff i particularly enjoyed reading in June:

• Amanda Hocking, Storyseller: The New York Times profiles self-publishing, best-selling author Amanda Hocking.
• Windows 8 for software developers: the Longhorn dream reborn? Ars Technica takes a look at what Windows 8 has in store for developers and the fate of Microsoft technologies such as .NET and Silverlight.
• A form of augmented reality: Another interesting response to that Kevin Slavin talk.
• In a new world of informational abundance, content curation is a new kind of authorship: Maria Popova on the growing role and importance of curation. Snip: “While “old media” fought against the scarcity of information, new media are fighting the overabundance of information.“
• AOL Hell: An AOL Content Slave Speaks Out. What it’s like to write for an AOL weblog. Makes me almost feel bad about reading Engadget.
• The Earth Is Full: This one drew criticism on Twitter when it made the rounds some time ago, but i kinda like these fatalistic doomsday scenarios to drive your thoughts out of your comfort zone. Snip: “How many people […] lie on their death bed and say, ‘I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value’.“
• Ass, and You Shall Receive: Underground Lap-Dance Club Exposed! Yes, apparently such things exist. The New York Observer investigates dutifully.
• Meet Amazon.com’s first employee: Shel Kaphan. GeekWire interviews Amazon’s first employee.
• How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code: How Project Euler succeeds at teaching programming.
• Poking at Cow Clicker: Edge magazine profiles Ian Bogost’s Facebook game Cow Clicker.
• I Was There When Acid House Hit London and This Is How It Felt: Slightly before my time, which makes it all the more interesting.
• Bad Job Market: Why the Media Is Always Wrong About the Value of a College Degree
• Google Chrome – Why I Hate It And Continue To Use It: I’ve never managed to use Chrome for more than a few hours before switching back to Safari as my default browser.
• Genevieve Bell, Intel anthropologist – 10 visions of the future: Pocket Lint (who knew they’re still around) interviews Genevieve Bell. Some great soundbites in there.
• Cranking: Fantastic essay by Merlin Mann.
• On the Floor Laughing: Traders Are Having a New Kind of Fun: Articles like this one illustrate how fancy buzzwords like gamification change the media coverage and our perception of the world around us. Suddenly everything around us is a bloody game. Interesting article nonetheless – i wouldn’t have thought that a trader’s workspace costs $200k per year in upkeep.
• My Month With the Nexus S: Chris Clark reviews the Nexus S. Snip: “If the Nexus S were my first smartphone, having used only candybar feature phones before it, I’d probably love it.” That’s what many iPhone users say after trying Android…

The May Reading List

Here’s the stuff i particularly enjoyed reading over the last month:

• Is Sugar Toxic? – NYTimes.com: In case you didn’t know, too much sugar is really bad for your health.
• The Sharing Economy: Fast Company on how the internet opens up new possibilities for sharing resources.
• Exit interview: Jaiku’s Jyri Engeström: Some great insight into what happens to your startup once you flip the company.
• John Maeda Mulls RISD’s Backlash Against His Cyber-Style Leadership
• The Updated Book off Jobs: Great profile of Steve Jobs by Time magazine from 1983. See also: Playboy interview with Steve Jobs from 1984.
• Nuclear waste: Keep out – for 100,000 years: How can you design a site to keep people out for the next 100,000 years?
• Innovation by Death: A Theory: Scott Berkun theorizes that the old guard needs to (literally) die out before change can happen.
• What We Can Learn from The Daily
• Sony, it’s time to act like Sony again: Paul Miller misses the old Sony and wishes for a comeback.
• The last post: Derek K. Miller passed away May 3, 2011. This is his last post.
• My Column on Columns: Khoi Vinh thinks you shouldn’t layout text in columns on screens. I tend to agree. See also: Scroll or Card?
• Pedestrian: Paul Mison on not driving in London and San Francisco.
• How to Get a Real Education: How Scott Adams learnt to run a business in college.
• Liveable v lovable: The Financial Times thinks that most livable city rankings lack validity, probably because US cities aren’t doing so well in these rankings.
• How Google controls Android: digging deep into the Skyhook filings: Nilay Patel digs deep into the Skyhook Wireless court filings against Google. I wonder what happened to the don’t be evil mantra?
• The Class That Built Apps, and Fortunes: The New York Times reports about a Stanford class that built Facebook apps with great success.
• Persuasive Games: Exploitationware: Ian Bogost would like to reframe gamification as exploitationware. Best of luck to him.
• What Books Will Become: Kevin Kelly ponders the future of books. I found his observation that the definition of a book is shifting from physical container to something defined by its structure and content highly astute.
• The “book” is dead: More thoughts on the future of books by Mark Pilgrim.
• The Really Smart Phone: The WSJ explains what you can learn about people from their phones. Undoubtedly triggered by the iPhone location kerfuffle, this article goes deeper than focusing on this single incident.
• A Sit-Down With Joichi Ito, The Drop-Out VC Leading MIT’s Media Lab by Co.Design
• And I Should Know: Roseanne Barr reflects on her experiences in the TV business.
• Keys to the cloud castle: Glenn Fleishman discusses privacy and security aspects in cloud storage in layman’s terms.
• Disposable Worlds And Imagining Brink 2
• One Experiment, Four Theories: Nice essay about Portal and Portal 2.
• Makers and Takers: Matt Gemmell on the value of ideas and execution.

The Reading List, Easter Edition

Because it’s easter holidays, meaning that publishing is slower while people have more time to read, here’s another reading list with some of the things i’ve enjoyed reading over the last few weeks that i haven’t posted here so far:

• Unsolving the City: An Interview with China Miéville: Geoff Manaugh interviews my favorite author, China Miéville. Fantastic interview.
• Leaving in a Huff: Eric D. Snider looks back at the last days as a writer for AOL before being laid off. Related: AOL is doing layoffs the wrong way.
• Trouble @Twitter: Twitter is getting a lot of negative press these days. This is one of the more reasoned pieces.
• Working (Part-Time) in the 21st Century: The NYT on the growing popularity and social acceptance of part-time work in the Netherlands.
• Motion and The Clay of Interaction Design: The importance of motion, specifically physically motion, in interaction design, discussed on the example of Twitter for iPhone and iPad.
• User-Led Does Not Equal User-Centered: A while back a terribly misguided critique of user centered design (that i won’t even bother linking to) made some waves. Lawrence Kitson wrote this sound rebuttal.
• Mediated Cityscapes 01: Four Statements About Urban Computing: Greg J. Smith presents four statements about urban computing, illustrated and substantiated by examples of current research and case studies. The second part in this series is also already available and well worth a read.
• Product design at GitHub: Everyone at GitHub is a product designer.
• Progressive Refinement: Guy English describes progressive refinement as a UI design pattern. Reminded me of progressive image loading techniques from back before everyone had broadband.
• Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality: Tim Berners-Lee argues for the importance of continued open standards and net neutrality to foster further development of the web. Written in layman’s terms and thus ideal to pass on to less techy friends and acquaintances.
• Against Chrome: A Manifesto: An argument against UI chrome (not Google’s browser).
• A book review of Jesse Schell’s THE ART OF GAME DESIGN: Bruce Sterling reviews Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design.
• Gamification: Ditching reality for a game isn’t as fun as it sounds: Good critique of Jane McGonigal’s latest book, or rather its basic premise.
• Lost in Translation – Does Language Influence Culture? “If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world.”
• What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology.
• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule: Why meetings are so detrimental to a maker’s schedule.

The March Reading List

In case you need something to read on a lazy Sunday morning, here’s some of the stuff i particularly enjoyed reading over the last month:

• Two Bejars: Beware of the Googlegänger: Daniel Bejar the artist impersonates Daniel Bejar the musician. Art or identity theft?
• Why I’m Crossing NFC Off My List: I tend to agree here. The problem with NFC isn’t that it’s useless, but rather that it’s facing infrastructural problems that won’t (and can’t) be solved by designers or developers. Also, the abstractions on top of the technology are in my opinion too low-level to start building on as an application developer.
• Steven Jobs Playboy Interview: Outstanding interview from 1985.
• My Month With the Nexus S: Chris Clark reviews the Nexus S.
• Finding Baby Sciences and New Moons: Matt Webb on proto-sciences as opposed to “royal science”. Interesting food for thought.
• The Other Kind of iPad Magazines: Khoi Vinh on social magazines such as Flipboard. Still a lot of untapped potential in there.
• Lessons From Chernobyl for Japan
• Instapaper’s Arment: Seek Money From Customers, Not VCs
• Revealing the Man Behind @MayorEmanuel: The Twitter account that elevated tweeting to the level of literature. Bummed that i missed this when it happened in real time…
• Passing a Worst-Case Scenario Test: A lot of reporting here in Europe in the Fukushima aftermath seemed far removed from reality where risks and consequences are concerned. Looking at the loss of human life, nuclear still seems vastly preferable to coal and oil.
• You Are Solving The Wrong Problem: Aza Raskin on iterative problem solving.
• The Day the Movies Died: Would you believe that a movie like Inception is considered a risk these days in Hollywood?
• Inside Hollywood’s Greatest Vanity Project: I remember wanting to see Middle Men after watching the trailer, but then it kinda disappeared. Apparently no one watched the movie.
• Architecture Fiction: Premonitions of the Here and Now: Fantastic overview of and introduction to the field of architecture fiction.
• Tightening Up Building 3: Tim Maly on what architecture can learn from video game level design.
• A Rule of Thumb: Pricing Should Be Simple: John Gruber on pricing, in response to the somewhat misguided NYT paywall.
• What the NYT Pay Wall Really Costs: Khoi Vinh on the real cost of the NYT paywall.
• Opinions on REST: Nice overview of some problems with pure REST APIs.
• An Archive for Interaction Design: Khoi Vinh on the challenges of archiving experiences for posterity. I’ve been thinking along similar lines a few years back, with regards to online roleplaying games, but i’m convinced by now that interesting experiences (i.e. anything worth preserving) cannot be archived at all.
• Things about Blogging: Good, old-fashioned meta-blogging by Tim Bray. These things are rare these days.
• Upgrading the World: The WSJ reviews McGonigal’s recent book “Reality is Broken”. I don’t think i’ve come across a single review that didn’t take fault with the basic premise of the book.
• Reality A and Reality B: Fascinating essay by Haruki Murakami in the NYT.
• The Positive Balance of Technology: Kevin Kelly presents his thesis that there’s an overall positive tendency in technology from his book The Technium.

The February Reading List

A couple of things i enjoyed reading last month that i haven’t linked to before:

• Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks: Fascinating commentary on WikiLeaks by Slavoj Zizek in the London Review of Books.
• What is at stake in animate design? About the differences between responsiveness and interactivity.
• What Technology Values: Alex Payne on the inherent values and biases of technology.
• Master of Play: The New Yorker profiles brilliant Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing that the author obviously isn’t a gamer himself…
• 25 Years of Digital Vandalism: William Gibson on the history of digital vandalism.
• The disposable academic: The Economist on the sorry state of postgraduate education.
• Suitably dressed: The Economist explores the history of the lounge suit in celebration of its (probably) 150th anniversary.
• The internet of hype: The Economist takes a critical look at the internet of things. (Yes, that’s a lot of Economist this month…)
• The End of Men: Seemed a little one-sided, but an interesting read. Made me wonder about short-term goals vs. long-term effects in gender equality policies. I was quite surprised when i noticed at the end that the author is a woman…
• If you didn’t blog it, it didn’t happen: If you think back a few years, it’s funny how weblogs are considered a bastion of good long-form writing these days.
• The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2: Eurogamer retells the story of the hacker who stole the Half-Life 2 source code that eventually leaked on the internet.
• Virtual Pop Star Inspires Terrorism: Karley Sciortino was threatened over a perfectly sensible and pretty interesting article about virtual pop icon Hatsune Miku for Clash magazine (also to be found at this link). Crazy people are crazy.
• Science Proves You’re Stupid: Recently i’ve become increasingly aware that my memories are often not very accurate, so this article felt timely. Includes examples of many more cognitive biases.
• Ruin, Space, and Shadow: An Interview with Mike Minola: Geoff Manaugh interviews Hellboy creator Mike Minola.
• My Father’s Final Gift: Aza Raskin remembers his father’s, Jef Raskin’s, final gift.
• How One Man With An Idea And $1000 Made The Global iOS Hit Trainyard: You gotta love these self-made millionaire App Store success stories.
• Bargain Junkies Are Beating Retailers at Their Own Game: I’m pretty sure coupons work very differently here in Austria, or maybe i’m missing something…
• How did WordPress win? Movable Type product manager Byrne Reese shares his opinions on why WordPress won the blogging platform wars.
• The Best Questions For A First Date: I’m glad the OK Cupid guys continue with their statistical analysis of online dating behavior after their recent acquisition by match.com. “Do you like the taste of beer?” is now probably the most asked question on first dates.

Short Reading List: Cyberwar Edition

• Egypt has turned off the internet. While western media seems most concerned that people can’t access their Facebook or Twitter streams, i’m left wondering what this can do to a country’s economy. Read some interesting technical analysis here.
• Tunisia tried to hack all its citizen’s Facebook accounts. Here’s how they did it. I’m pretty sure the recent announcement of Facebook-over-https is no coincidence.
• The New York Times reports how Israel helped the US in testing the Stuxnet worm. Between WikiLeaks and Stuxnet it’s kinda hard to believe that i’m not living inside a cyberpunk novel.

The January Reading List

January was very busy, so i didn’t get much reading done unfortunately. Here are some of the pieces that stuck out, in no particular order:

• The Cyborg Ethics of Eating: Tim Maly on the morality of changing our environment vs. changing ourselves. Great piece.
• A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation
• What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York
• Alex Payne on Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms. I tend to agree that cross-platform UI design simply doesn’t work.
• What Good is Wall Street? From the tagline: Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless. No surprise there.
• Matt Gemmel reviews the MacBook Air 11″. I haven’t come across a single negative review of the MacBook Air so far.
• Inside the Parliament Square kettle: Laurie Penny reported from the student protests in London last month. Terrifying.
• Reality is Alright: Ian Bogost reviews Jane McGonigal’s new book “Reality is Broken”.
• Jack Monahan argues Against Dilettantism, specifically in game design.
• Asleep and Awake: Tom Armitage ponders the nature of “active” (e.g. iPad) and “passive” (e.g. Kindle) screens.
• I, Reader: Alexander Chee discusses his relationship with ebook readers.
• Few personal year end retrospectives are worth reading (i believe they’re mostly written for oneself anyway), but i rather enjoyed Craig Mod’s: So Long 2010, and Thanks for All the Pageviews.
• Good and Bad Procrastination: Paul Graham on how intelligent and productive people procrastinate – by putting off the small stuff.
• Why Is Eric Schmidt Stepping Down at Google?
• Comic Illustrator Paul Duffield isn’t a big fan of motion comics. Here’s why.
• The Awl presents The Most Emailed ‘New York Times’ Article Ever.

The December Reading List

Happy new year! Herewith, again, a list of things i particularly enjoyed reading in the last month, for your lazy sunday morning perusal:

• The Blast Shack: Great piece by Bruce Sterling about WikiLeaks.
• Twelve Theses on Wikileaks by Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens.
• The Reaction of Governments to Wikileaks Should Scare the Hell Out of You: Sometimes Gizmodo is surprisingly good.
• Letting Go: Terrific piece by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker on the difficulties of dying introduced by modern medicine.
• Cloud Services as Personal Conduits: Russell Beattie raises some interesting and difficult questions about the legality and ethics of reappropriating content.
• Magical: The value of user interface innovation and qualities of natural interfaces discussed through the example of the Word Lens translation app.
• AirPlay: Here to there: Adam Lisagor spells out why AirPlay is so fundamentally different from any other existing video streaming solution. It’s all about touching and moving.
• The Presence of the Past in Fallout 3: What Fallout 3 can teach you about being a historian.
• Everything you think about graphics is stupid: Good rant about the merits of great art direction as opposed to great graphics in video games.
• Primal Rage: a conversation with Carmack, and a look at id’s latest: Ars Technica interviews John Carmack. Offers some interesting insight into why id hasn’t turned to Android development yet.
• What’s Old Is New Again on iPad: Khoi Vinh makes a compelling point that the iPad has not yet reached its full potential as a tool and platform for creation.
• The iPhone is not superfluous, not easily copied, not revolutionary and not a premium product: Great analysis by Horace Dediu.
• Do Androids Dream of Fragmented Sheep? Complaining about Android fragmentation is like flogging a dead horse these days, but still – a decent overview of the lay of the land by Glenn Fleishman at Boing Boing.
• The Men Who Stole the World: Time profiles four pioneers of the peer-to-peer file-sharing revolution.
• Newspapers are dead as mutton – HG Wells, 1943 (No, they’re not): Cory Doctorow argues that a medium doesn’t just fade away, it shrinks to fit the content it serves best.
• Analysing data is the future for journalists, says Tim Berners-Lee: Data-driven journalism would certainly be a step up from most of what passes as journalism these days.
• The Lure of Tomorrow: Why we procrastinate and how to stop. There’s maybe a new year’s resolution in there…
• How to write 1000 words by Scott Berkun.
• What does cognitive science say about privacy and the Net?
• Talking To The Sci-Fi Lord: Regenerations & Ruminations With Michael Moorcock: The Quietus interviews Michael Moorcock.
• Istanbul: City of the Future by Pico Iyer for National Geographic. Istanbul continues to rank high on my must-visit list.