Brit Bennett: I Don't Know What to Do With Good White People (Jezebel)
Over the past two weeks, I have fluctuated between anger and grief. I feel surrounded by Black death. What a privilege, to concern yourself with seeming good while the rest of us want to seem worthy of life.
The Arcade: Episode 42, Featuring Ta-Nehisi Coates
On writing, being wrong, and understanding that maybe, just maybe, you’re not crazy–that what you think is happening, is happening. Hazlitt contributor Anupa Mistry speaks with Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic’s famed national correspondent and author of The Beautiful Struggle.
Mike Monteiro: These 8 Tricks to Selecting a Design Partner Will Amaze You
Selecting a design partner is a pain in the ass. Designers can be difficult. And the process is a mystery. And let’s face it, designers do a crappy job of explaining it. But for those who have to do it, getting it right can mean the difference between their organization doing well and going under. I want to help you do it well.
What happened on Saturday, August 14, 2014 was not a single display of police violence, it is the reaction to a place's history with racism. Ferguson is making us think about what is evident. What is evident is not special at all. It is what makes up every reality in the United States of America. Yes, the status quo is so racist that People of Color are simply demanding to be relevant.
Albert Burneko: The American Justice System Is Not Broken (The Concourse)
The American justice system is not broken. This is what the American justice system does. This is what America does.
America employs the enforcers of its power to beat, kill, and terrorize, deploys its judiciary to say that that's OK, and has done this more times than anyone can hope to count. This is not a flaw in the design; this is the design.
Max Read: Why Should Anyone "Respect" the Law? (Gawker)
And you cannot ask a people brutalized and oppressed, told their lives are worthless and their deaths are their own fault, to respect the institutions and people that uphold those systems of terror and violence.
Eric Harvey: Taylor SwiftTaylor Swift’s Spotify Decision Means Nothing for Smaller Artists (Wondering Sound)
Taylor Swift is one of the rarefied 0.01 percent of modern musicians whose charisma and talent, combined with an exorbitant promotional machine, can sell a million copies of an album in a week. She assumes this holds for all musicians in the same way that a wealthy politician tells lower middle-class citizens that they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve the American Dream, too.
I can’t use macrodelivery because this is a landmarked building and the coöp board (a terrible institution of ancient and decrepit millennials utterly committed to the folkways of their protoUAV lives) refuses to apply for the dronepad easement.
Molly Beauchemin: Safe from Harm: Drugs and Festival Culture (Pitchfork)
I called Missi Wooldridge, the Executive Director of a nonprofit drug testing and harm reduction agency called Dance Safe, because I was curious about the surge in ecstasy-related deaths at music festivals in the last few months despite a social history of drug use that predates the 1960s.
Jamieson Cox: Perfume Genius: The Agony and Ecstasy of Being a Gay Man (MySpace)
Mike Hadreas’ latest album, ‘Too Bright,’ isn’t just an angry gay record—it’s a complex web of emotions of what it means to be queer. And it’s one that needs to be heard.
Perch helps you to provide better solutions to your clients by providing elegant and simple content management. Design and build your sites the way you like best, then Perch steps in adding the CMS, forms, blog or events calendar functionality that you need.
Steve Buttry: Clay Shirky’s ‘tweet rant’ helps me glimpse beyond Twitter
Clay Shirky on Ello, ~Club, and Meatspace.
These services aren't a new way of creating FB-like value. They're a new way of being valuable in a world that already has Facebook.
Paul Ford: The Group That Rules the Web (New Yorker)
The Web started out as a way to publish and share documents. It is now an operating system: a big, digital sensory apparatus that can tell you about your phone’s battery life, record and transmit your voice, manage your e-mail and your chats, and give you games to play. It can do this all at once, and with far less grand of a design than you might assume.
Leigh Alexander: 'Gamers' don't have to be your audience. 'Gamers' are over.
A new generation of fans and creators is finally aiming to instate a healthy cultural vocabulary, a language of community that was missing in the days of “gamer pride” and special interest groups led by a product-guide approach to conversation with a single presumed demographic.
These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers -- they are not my audience. They don’t have to be yours. There is no ‘side’ to be on, there is no ‘debate’ to be had.
There is what’s past and there is what’s now. There is the role you choose to play in what’s ahead.
I’d always hoped we were more virtuous than the mainstream, but it turns out we just didn’t have enough power to cause much harm. Our ingrained sense of victimization has become a perverse justification for bullying. That’s why I’m calling time on nerd culture. It’s done wonderful things, but these days it’s like a crawling horror of a legacy codebase so riddled with problems the only rational decision is to deprecate it and build something better.
The internet and the digital world are not pathologies, the cultures that develop there are not symptoms to be gazed at, to titillate us and make us feel both in the know, bravely in touch with the challenging truth, and superior to the freaks.
I recently stumbled upon the face hidden in the spectrogram of the Aphex Twin track called "Equation". Intrigued, I decided to try my hand at recreating the effect here on the web.
Meredith Graves: Sun Kil Moon Yells at Cloud: "War On Drugs: Suck My Cock" and the Language of Male Violence (Pitchfork)
It is imperative, when we see men exhibiting this manipulative behavior, for us to identify it and name it as abuse. This can be scary: some incidents, such as this one, are so public and obvious that it's easy to start an open dialog about why it's terrible. But when I sit with my friends and hear their stories about times they've been manipulated, intimidated, coerced or outright abused by older men in the music industry, I wonder how anyone ever feels brave enough to come forward.
Maurits Martijn: Here’s Why Wifi Is a Public Health Hazard (Matter)
We took a hacker to a café and, in 20 minutes, he knew where everyone else was born, what schools they attended, and the last five things they googled.