All an “Uncharted” movie had to accomplish — all that it possibly could accomplish — was to capture the glint and derring-do that helped the series port the spirit of Indiana Jones into the modern world. And while it’s true that the best moments of Ruben Fleischer’s thoroughly mediocre (if not unpleasant) adaptation manage to achieve that goal for three or four entire seconds at a time, this generic multiplex adventure falls so far short of its source material because it fails in the areas where history says it should have been able to exceed it. The areas where movies have traditionally had the upper hand over video games: Characters. Personality. Humor. Humanity! You know, the things that films get for free, and video games have to create through witchcraft. The same things that someone up the ladder decided to leave behind when they took a solid-gold brand like “Uncharted” and turned it into an IMAX-sized chunk of cubic zirconia, resulting in a movie that isn’t just less playable than the game on which it’s based, but less watchable too.

This is all build-up to my proposal for what Musk — or any other bidder for Twitter, for that matter — ought to do with a newly private Twitter. First, Twitter’s current fully integrated model is a financial failure. Second, Twitter’s social graph is extremely valuable. Third, Twitter’s cultural impact is very large, and very controversial. Given this, Musk (who I will use as a stand-in for any future CEO of Twitter) should start by splitting Twitter into two companies. One company would be the core Twitter service, including the social graph. The other company would be all of the Twitter apps and the advertising business.

TwitterServiceCo would open up its API to any other company that might be interested in building their own client experience; each company would: Pay for the right to get access to the Twitter service and social graph. Monetize in whatever way they see fit (i.e. they could pursue a subscription model). Implement their own moderation policy. This last point would cut a whole host of Gordian Knots:

A truly open TwitterServiceCo has the potential to be a new protocol for the Internet — the notifications and identity protocol; unlike every other protocol, though, this one would be owned by a private company. That would be insanely valuable, but it is a value that will never be realized as long as Twitter is a public company led by a weak CEO and ineffective board driving an integrated business predicated on a business model that doesn’t work. Twitter’s Reluctance

Advertisers don’t really want to know who you are - they want to show diaper ads to people who have babies, not to show them to people who don’t, and to have some sense of which ads drove half a million sales and which ads drove a million sales.

In practice, ‘showing car ads to people who read about cars’ led the adtech industry to build vast piles of semi-random personal data, aggregated, disaggregated, traded, passed around and sometimes just lost, partly because it could and partly because that appeared to be the only way to do it. After half a decade of backlash, there are now a bunch of projects trying to get to the same underlying advertiser aims - to show ads that are relevant, and get some measure of ad effectiveness - while keeping the private data private.

Apple has pursued a very clear theory that analysis and tracking is private if it happens on your device and is not private if leaves your device or happens in the cloud. Hence, it’s built a complex system of tracking and analysis on your iPhone, but is adamant that this is private because the data stays on the device. People have seemed to accept this (so far - or perhaps the just haven’t noticed it), but acting on the same theory Apple also created a CSAM scanning system that it thought was entirely private - ‘it only happens your device!’ - that created a huge privacy backlash, because a bunch of other people think that if your phone is scanning your photos, that isn’t ‘private’ at all. So is ‘on device’ private or not? What’s the rule? What if Apple tried the same model for ‘private’ ads in Safari? How will the public take FLoC? I don’t think we know.

On / off device is one test, but another and much broader is first party / third party: the idea it’s OK for a website to track what you do on that website but not OK for adtech companies to track you across many different websites. This is the core of the cookie question

At this point one answer is to cut across all these questions and say that what really matters is whether you disclose whatever you’re doing and get consent. Steve Jobs liked this argument. But in practice, as we've discovered, ‘get consent’ means endless cookie pop-ups full of endless incomprehensible questions that no normal consumer should be expected to understand, and that just train people to click ‘stop bothering me’. Meanwhile, Apple’s on-device tracking doesn't ask for permission, and opts you in by default, because, of course, Apple thinks that if it's on the device it's private. Perhaps ‘consent’ is not a complete solution after all.

If you can only analyse behaviour within one site but not across many sites, or make it much harder to do that, companies that have a big site where people spend lots of time have better targeting information and make more money from advertising. If you can only track behaviour across lots of different sites if you do it ‘privately’ on the device or in the browser, then the companies that control the device or the browser have much more control over that advertising

it is very difficult to figure out what specific effect ATT has because there are so many factors involved

If ATT were so significantly kneecapping revenue, I would think we would see a pronounced skew against North America compared to elsewhere. But that is not the case. Revenue in North America is only slightly off compared to the company total, and it is increasing how much it earns per North American user compared to the rest of the world.

iOS is far more popular in the U.S. and Canada than it is in Europe, but Meta incurred a greater revenue decline — in absolute terms and, especially, in percentage terms — in Europe. Meta was still posting year-over-year gains in both those regions until this most recent quarter, even though ATT rolled out over a year ago.

there are those who believe highly-targeted advertisements are a fair trade-off because they offer businesses a more accurate means of finding their customers, and the behavioural data collected from all of us is valuable only in the aggregate. That is, as I understand it, the view of analysts like Seufert, Benedict Evans, and Ben Thompson. Frequent readers will not be surprised to know I disagree with this premise. Regardless of how many user agreements we sign and privacy policies we read, we cannot know the full extent of the data economy. Personal information about us is being collected, shared, combined, and repackaged. It may only be profitable in aggregate, but it is useful with finer granularity, so it is unsurprising that it is indefinitely warehoused in detail.

Seufert asked, rhetorically, “what happens when ads aren’t personalized?”, answering “digital ads resemble TV ads: jarring distractions from core content experience. Non-personalized is another way of saying irrelevant, or at best, randomly relevant.”

does it make sense to build the internet’s economy on the backs of a few hundred brokers none of us have heard of, trading and merging our personal information in the hope of generating a slightly better click-through rate?

Then there is the much bigger question of whether people should even be able to opt into such widespread tracking. We simply cannot be informed consumers in every aspect of our lives, and we cannot foresee how this information will be used and abused in the full extent of time. It sounds boring, but what is so wrong with requiring data minimization at every turn, permitting only the most relevant personal data to be collected, and restricting the ability for this information to be shared or combined?

Does ATT really “[deprive] consumers of widespread ad relevancy and advertisers and publishers of commercial opportunity”? Even if it does — which I doubt — has that commercial opportunity really existed with meaningful consumer awareness and choice? Or is this entire market illegitimate, artificially inflated by our inability to avoid becoming its subjects?

Conflicts like these are one of many reasons why privacy rights should be established by regulators, not individual companies. Privacy must not be a luxury good, or something you opt into, and it should not be a radical position to say so. We all value different degrees of privacy, but it should not be possible for businesses to be built on whether we have rights at all. The digital economy should not be built on such rickety and obviously flawed foundations.

“I’ve been on the internet for the last 10 years and I don’t know if I like what I like or what an algorithm wants me to like,” Peter wrote. She’d come to see social networks’ algorithmic recommendations as a kind of psychic intrusion, surreptitiously reshaping what she’s shown online and, thus, her understanding of her own inclinations and tastes.

Besieged by automated recommendations, we are left to guess exactly how they are influencing us, feeling in some moments misperceived or misled and in other moments clocked with eerie precision.

For the layman to build their own Folk Interfaces, jigs to wield the media they care about, we must offer simple primitives. A designer in Blender thinks in terms of lighting, camera movements, and materials. An editor in Premiere, in sequences, transitions, titles, and colors. Critically, this is different from automating existing patterns, e.g. making it easy to create a website, simulate the visuals of film photography, or 3D-scan one's room. Instead, it's about building a playground in which those novel computational artifacts can be tinkered with and composed, via a grammar native to their own domain, to produce the fruits of the users' own vision. The goal of the computational tool-maker then is not to teach the layman about recursion, abstraction, or composition, but to provide meaningful primitives (i.e. a system) with which the user can do real work. End-user programming is a red herring: We need to focus on materiality, what some disparage as mere "side effects." The goal is to enable others to feel the agency and power that comes when the world ceases to be immutable.

I hope this mode can paint the picture of software, not as a teleological instrument careening towards automation and ease, but as a medium for intimacy with the matter of our time (images, audio, video), yielding a sense of agency with what, to most, feels like an indelible substrate.

I care about people more than I care about positions or beliefs, which I tend to consider a subservient class of psychological phenomena. That is to say: I think people wear beliefs like clothes; they wear what they have grown to consider sensible or attractive; they wear what they feel flatters them; they wear what keeps them dry and warm in inclement winter. They believe their opinions, tastes, philosophies are who they are, but they are mistaken. (Aging is largely learning what one is not, it seems to me).

Criticism must serve some function to justify the pain it causes: it must, say, avert a disastrous course of action being deliberated by a group, or help thwart the rise of a barbarous politician. But this rarely occurs. Most criticism, even of the most erudite sort, is, as we all know, wasted breath: preached to one’s own choir, comically or indignantly cruel to those one doesn’t respect, unlikely to change the behavior of anyone not already in agreement.On the other hand! There persists the idea that culture arises out of the scrum of colliding perspectives, and that it is therefore a moral duty to remonstrate against stupidity, performative emoting, deceitful art, destructively banal fiction, and so on. If one doesn’t speak up, one cannot lament the triumph of moral and imaginative vacuity.

One must believe, of course, that there are abstractions worth protecting, and therefore abstractions worth hurting others for, in order to criticize; and the endless repetitiveness of cultural history seems to devalue such abstractions as surely as bad art and cliche devalue words.

Material-based software can also have gentler learning curves, because the user only needs to learn a small set of rules about how different metaphors in the software interact with each other rather than learning deep hierarchies of menus and terminologies. In the best case, users can continue to discover new capabilities and workflows long after the initial release of the software.

Take nonlinear video editing software, like Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro, for example. Though they have their fair share of menu complexity, it’s pretty intuitive for anyone to understand the basic building blocks of video and audio clips sitting on a layered timeline. Here, the video and audio clips are composed of a software material that have their own laws of physics: they can grow and shrink to take up more or less time on the timeline. They can be moved around and layered in front of or behind other clips, but they can’t occupy the same space on the same “track” of the timeline. The timeline that runs left-to-right is a kind of “world” in which the materials of audio and video exist.

The game is that every time we create a new technology, we’re creating new possibilities, new choices that didn’t exist before. Those choices themselves—even the choice to do harm—are a good, they’re a plus.

We want an economy that’s growing in the second sense: unlimited betterment, unlimited increase in wisdom, and complexity, and choices. I don’t see any limit there. We don’t want an economy that’s just getting fatter and fatter, and bigger and bigger, in terms of its size. Can we imagine such a system? That’s hard, but I don’t think it’s impossible.

Social networking is much more than just a dominant discourse. We need to go beyond text and images and include its software, interfaces, and networks that depend on a technical infrastructure consisting of offices and their consultants and cleaners, cables and data centers, working in close concert with the movements and habits of the connected billions. Academic internet studies circles have shifted their attention from utopian promises, impulses, and critiques to “mapping” the network’s impact. From digital humanities to data science we see a shift in network-oriented inquiry from Whether and Why, What and Who, to (merely) How. From a sociality of causes to a sociality of net effects. A new generation of humanistic researchers is lured into the “big data” trap, and kept busy capturing user behavior whilst producing seductive eye candy for an image-hungry audience (and vice versa).

We need to politicize the New Electricity, the privately owned utilities of our century, before they disappear into the background.

What remains particularly unexplained is the apparent paradox between the hyper-individualized subject and the herd mentality of the social.

Before we enter the social media sphere, everyone first fills out a profile and choses a username and password in order to create an account. Minutes later, you’re part of the game and you start sharing, creating, playing, as if it has always been like that. The profile is the a priori part and the profiling and targeted advertising cannot operate without it. The platforms present themselves as self-evident. They just are—facilitating our feature-rich lives. Everyone that counts is there. It is through the gate of the profile that we become its subject.

We pull in updates, 24/7, in a real-time global economy of interdependencies, having been taught to read news feeds as interpersonal indicators of the planetary condition

Treating social media as ideology means observing how it binds together media, culture, and identity into an ever-growing cultural performance (and related “cultural studies”) of gender, lifestyle, fashion, brands, celebrity, and news from radio, television, magazines, and the web—all of this imbricated with the entrepreneurial values of venture capital and start-up culture, with their underside of declining livelihoods and growing inequality.

Software, or perhaps more precisely operating systems, offer us an imaginary relationship to our hardware: they do not represent transistors but rather desktops and recycling bins. Software produces users. Without operating system (OS) there would be no access to hardware; without OS no actions, no practices, and thus no user. Each OS, through its advertisements, interpellates a “user”: calls it and offers it a name or image with which to identify. We could say that social media performs the same function, and is even more powerful.

In the age of social media we seem to confess less what we think. It’s considered too risky, too private. We share what we do, and see, in a staged manner. Yes, we share judgments and opinions, but no thoughts. Our Self is too busy for that, always on the move, flexible, open, sporty, sexy, and always ready to connect and express.

Platforms are not stages; they bring together and synthesize (multimedia) data, yes, but what is lacking here is the (curatorial) element of human labor. That’s why there is no media in social media. The platforms operate because of their software, automated procedures, algorithms, and filters, not because of their large staff of editors and designers. Their lack of employees is what makes current debates in terms of racism, anti-Semitism, and jihadism so timely, as social media platforms are currently forced by politicians to employ editors who will have to do the all-too-human monitoring work (filtering out ancient ideologies that refuse to disappear).

Imagine a person who is very lazy at work, yet whose customers are (along with everyone else concerned) quite satisfied. It could be a slow-talking rural shop proprietor from an old movie, or some kind of Taoist fisherman – perhaps a bit of a buffoon, but definitely deeply content. In order to be this way, he must be reasonably organized: stock must be ordered, and tackle squared away, in order to afford worry-free, deep-breathing laziness. Consider this imaginary person as a kind of ideal or archetype. Now consider that the universe might have this personality.

Miller is the CEO of a new startup called The Browser Company, and he wants to change the way people think about browsers altogether. He sees browsers as operating systems, and likes to wonder aloud what "iOS for the web" might look like. What if your browser could build you a personalized news feed because it knows the sites you go to? What if every web app felt like a native app, and the browser itself was just the app launcher? What if you could drag a file from one tab to another, and it just worked? What if the web browser was a shareable, synced, multiplayer experience?

Miller became convinced that the next big platform was right in front of his face: the open web. The underlying infrastructure worked, the apps were great, there were no tech giants in the way imposing rules and extracting huge commissions. The only thing missing was a tool to bring it all together in a user-friendly way, and make the web more than the sum of its parts.

Browser's team instead spent its time thinking about how to solve things like tab overload, that all-too-familiar feeling of not being able to find anything in a sea of tiny icons at the top of the screen.That's something Nate Parrott, a designer on the team, had been thinking about for a long time. "Before I met Josh," he said, "I had this fascination with browsers, because it's the window through which you experience so much of the web, and yet it feels like no one is working on web browsers." Outside of his day job at Snap, he was also building a web browser with some new interaction ideas. "A big one for me was that I wanted to get rid of the distinction between open and closed tabs," he said. "I wanted to encourage tab-hoarding behavior, where you can open as many tabs as you want and organize them so you're not constantly overwhelmed seeing them all at the same time."

One of Arc's most immediately noticeable features is that it combines bookmarks and tabs. Clicking an icon in the sidebar opens the app, just like on iOS or Android. When users navigate somewhere else, they don't have to close the tab; it just waits in the background until it's needed again, and Arc manages its background performance so it doesn't use too much memory. Instead of opening Gmail in a tab, users just … open Gmail.

Everyone at The Browser Company swears there's no Master Plan, or much of a roadmap. What they have is a lot of ideas, a base on which they can develop really quickly, and a deep affinity for prototypes. "You can't just think really hard and design the best web browser," Parrott said. "You have to feel it and put it in front of people and get them to react to it."

The Browser Company could become an R&D shop, full of interesting ideas but unable to build a browser that anyone actually uses. The company does have plenty of runway: It recently raised more than $13 million in funding from investors including Jeff Weiner, Eric Yuan, Patrick Collison, Fidji Simo and a number of other people with long experience building for the internet, that values The Browser Company at $100 million. Still, Agrawal said, "We're paranoid that we could end up in this world of just having a Bell Labs kind of situation, where you have a lot of interesting stuff, but it's not monetizable, it's not sticky, any of that." That's why they're religious about talking to users all the time, getting feedback on everything, making sure that the stuff they're building is genuinely useful. And when it's not, they pivot fast.

Gatekeepers could see themselves not only as talent hunters for their own organization, but also as managers of society’s collective supply of ambition. We could demand that they consider it a responsibility to waste as little of their applicants’ ambition as possible. That they strive to redirect and allocate that ambition wherever it is most needed.

In practice, there isn’t any single solution. Rejection is a facet of life, and everybody needs to figure out their own strategies to cope with it. The most I can offer is that it’s better when you’re aware of how it works. It isn’t enough to know, on an abstract level, that rejection is typically random and impersonal — but it helps.

If you’d looked at Skype in 2004 and argued that it would own ‘voice’ on ‘computers’, that would not have been the right mental model. I think this is where we’ll go with video - there will continue to be hard engineering, but video itself will be a commodity and the question will be how you wrap it. There will be video in everything, just as there is voice in everything, and there will be a great deal of proliferation into industry verticals on one hand and into unbundling pieces of the tech stack on the other. On one hand video in healthcare, education or insurance is about the workflow, the data model and the route to market, and lots more interesting companies will be created, and on the other hand Slack is deploying video on top of Amazon’s building blocks, and lots of interesting companies will be created here as well. There’s lots of bundling and unbundling coming, as always. Everything will be ‘video’ and then it will disappear inside.

the calendar is often the aggregation layer - you don’t need to know what service the next call uses, just when it is. Skype needed both an account and an app, so had a network effect (and lost even so). WhatsApp uses the telephone numbering system as an address and so piggybacked on your phone’s contact list - effectively, it used the PSTN as the social graph rather than having to build its own. But a group video call is a URL and a calendar invitation - it has no graph of its own.

one of the ways that this all feels very 1.0 is the rather artificial distinction between calls that are based on a ‘room’, where the addressing system is a URL and anyone can join without an account, and calls that are based on ‘people’, where everyone joining needs their own address, whether it’s a phone number, an account or something else. Hence Google has both Meet (URLs) and Duo (people) - Apple’s FaceTime is only people (no URLs).

When Snap launched, there were already infinite ways to share images, but Snap asked a bunch of weird questions that no-one had really asked before. Why do you have to press the camera button - why doesn’t the app open in the camera? Why are you saving your messages - isn’t that like saving all your phone calls? Fundamentally, Snap asked ‘why, exactly, are you sending a picture? What is the underlying social purpose?’ You’re not really sending someone a sheet of pixels - you’re communicating.

That’s the question Zoom and all its competitors haven’t really asked. Zoom has done a good job of asking why it was hard to get into a call, but it hasn’t asked why you’re in the call in the first place. Why, exactly, are you sending someone a video stream and watching another one? Why am I looking at a grid of little thumbnails of faces? Is that the purpose of this moment? What is the ‘mute’ button for - background noise, or so I can talk to someone else, or is it so I can turn it off to raise my hand? What social purpose is ‘mute’ actually serving? What is screen-sharing for? What other questions could one ask? And so if Zoom is the Dropbox or Skype of video, we are waiting for the Snap, Clubhouse and Yo.

Torres, who is thirty-three, is more attuned to the visual world than most comedians. His imagination is a comic synesthesia, assigning anthropomorphic traits to colors, objects, and design flaws.

There once was a chandelier at the Metropolitan Opera who thought that the audience was applauding just for him. The chandelier fell in love with one of the janitors, a man named Rocco, and wanted only Rocco to change his bulbs. Rocco returned the chandelier’s love, but when his boss found out about the affair he was fired. Late one night, Rocco broke into the Met and stole the chandelier. They settled into Rocco’s apartment, blissful in their union, the chandelier’s light blazing through the window onto the street below.This peculiar romance is not from a magical-realist novel or a quarantine fever dream. It’s an idea for a digital short that Julio Torres pitched again and again at “Saturday Night Live,” where he worked as a writer from 2016 to 2019.

In Torres’s HBO special, “My Favorite Shapes,” which was released in 2019, Torres sits on a dreamlike pastel set, and, as small items come out on a conveyor belt, he narrates their inner thoughts. A pink rectangle with a chipped corner is “having a really bad day.” An oval is prone to gazing at its reflection, “wishing he were a circle.” The conceit sounds twee, but Torres’s delivery has the matter-of-factness of a child describing the secret lives of his toys

Tita told me, in Spanish. The family shares an aesthetic language, influenced by the Memphis design movement of the eighties, which favors bold colors and cutout shapes;

He refuses to use credit cards (“I just don’t like games”) and, for a time, shut down his bank account. “At that point, I had, like, forty dollars,” he said.

Finally, he spied a brocade with a blue-and-green watercolor pattern. He pulled the bolt from the shelf and felt the cloth between his fingers. “A floral that’s not a floral!” he said. “It does exist.”

Tita loved science fiction and Brazilian telenovelas, which often feature fantastical story lines. Torres half-remembered one about a man in a dungeon whose lover is reincarnated as the moon.

Unhappy with Mattel’s premade Dream Houses, he enlisted his mother to make customized homes out of cardboard. “I wanted circular windows and for the doors to open a certain way, so she made them per my specifications, setting me on this lifelong journey of being, like, ‘If it doesn’t exist, I have to create it,’ ” he said. (At “Saturday Night Live,” he channelled his Barbie obsession into a recurring sketch in which interns at Mattel write captions for Barbie’s Instagram account.) His parents encouraged his nontraditional interests. “It gave him the power to be different against the world,” his sister said.

When Torres was eleven, his grandfather died, leaving crippling debts, which his father inherited. His mother’s store went out of business, and the family had to move to a farmhouse where Tita had been brought up, on the outskirts of the city. Torres was prone to allergies and developed a respiratory condition. He hated the outdoors. And he no longer had his mother’s seamstresses at his beck and call.

He and his sister won scholarships to attend a private high school in San Salvador, where their rich classmates were picked up by servants. “I got picked up by my dad, whose car was older than I am,” he said. “Oh, my God, the noise the car made, pulling up to this castle.”

His second time applying to the New School, he got a significant scholarship, and in 2009 he moved to Manhattan, with enough money to live there for two years. “They wanted a translation of my transcripts, because they were in Spanish, so I translated them myself and I embellished a bunch of courses,” he said. “And then I sheepishly put it in front of the admissions officer, and she was, like, ‘Oh, my God, why didn’t you say you took all these courses when you applied?’ And she takes out her calculator and says, ‘You’re a junior, not a freshman.’ And I’m, like, ‘Ooh, I guess I am.’ ”

he found a job as an art archivist for the estate of the late painter John Heliker. He worked in a windowless vault in Newark, cataloguing Heliker’s papers. “I glamorized the optics of that job,” he said. “Solitude has never really been a problem for me. I liked how weird and difficult it was.”

Working at the coat check one day, he recalled, “I overheard this elderly rich woman tell this other elderly rich woman, ‘Oh, remind me to send you that article on how good standing is for you.’ That was the moment where I realized that New Yorker cartoons were based on a reality.”

Torres was a peculiar presence in the comedy scene, which is riddled with dudes in flannel shirts complaining about their girlfriends. He usually read non sequiturs from a notebook, with a flat affect. “He would always say ‘Hi’ before he started,” Einbinder said. “And then, at the end, he would always say, ‘So unless anyone has any questions . . .’ ”

In order to apply to stay in the country as a comedian, he had to pay more than five thousand dollars in legal and filing fees. His new friends in the comedy world, including Chris Gethard, Jo Firestone, and Newman, made a YouTube video called “Legalize Julio,” and the money was raised in an hour. His new visa classified him as an “alien of extraordinary ability.”

“I’ve seen so many corporations—HBO included—talk about how now it’s time to ‘elevate Black voices,’ and that got me thinking about the Hollywood fairy tale that representation equals change,” he said. “For a while, I have felt like a pawn in this hollow representation game. Because what the hell does Disney’s ‘Coco’ do for Mexican children? Bob Iger gets richer. That’s the climax. And then I’m researching the C.E.O.s of these media conglomerates, and they’re predictably the mushiest white faces you can think of. You see who is reaping the benefits of all the ‘woke’ content that me and my peers produce, and it’s just these kings. These monarchs.” He let out a cynical laugh. “I don’t know what the answer is.”

Torres was hired at “Saturday Night Live” in 2016, as the show was feeling pressure to diversify. He had applied for a writing job and been rejected, but then was asked to audition as a cast member. “Instead of showing a wide array of characters that I could play, I just stood there and did my standup, with glitter on my face,” he recalled. He was brought on initially as a guest writer. Torres managed to float above the show’s nerve-racking backstage culture. “It’s the tradition to wear a suit on Saturdays,” Jeremy Beiler told me. “On Julio’s first Saturday show, he showed up in a sparkly silver jacket. I was just, like, ‘Oh, that’s another way to do it.’ ”

Torres is clear-eyed about his success. “I’m certainly not bringing in the big bucks for HBO,” he told me. “It feels like ‘Game of Thrones’ is a rich student, and I’m the scholarship kid.”

One by one, he summoned an all-star roster of guest performers. First up was the comedian Nick Kroll, who was lounging in front of a roaring fireplace. Torres gave lessons in “hand acting,” instructing him to act out scenarios using only his hands, such as dropping a knife after committing a murder: “But you didn’t plan for the murder—it sort of just happened.” Kroll tried it, using a pen. “One thing I found missing from your knife-dropping was regret,” Torres said, then tilted his own camera toward his hands and acted the scene with quivering fingers.

Fred Armisen played a similar game with letters of the alphabet. “I have very strong feelings about Q,” Torres proclaimed. “To me, Q is misplaced in the alphabet. Q should be all the way in the back with the avant-garde X-Y-Z.” He imagined Q performing early in the evening at a rock club, between the more mainstream letters P and R. “Q is doing noise music, and people are, like, Whoa.”

A Little Life was rightly called a love story; what critics missed was that its author is one of the lovers. This is Yanagihara’s principle: If true misery exists, then so might true love. That simple idea, childlike in its brutality, informs all her fiction. Indeed, the author appears unable, or unwilling, to conceive love outside of life support

Luxury is simply the backdrop for Jude’s extraordinary suffering, neither cause nor effect; if anything, the latter lends poignancy to the former. This was Yanagihara’s first discovery, the one that cracked open the cobbled streets of Soho and let something terrible slither out — the idea that misery bestows a kind of dignity that wealth and leisure, no matter how sharply rendered on the page, simply cannot.

“There’s a point,” Yanagihara once said of Jude, at which “it becomes too late to help some people.” These are difficult words to read for those of us who have passed through suicidal ideation and emerged, if not happy to be alive, then relieved not to be dead. It is indeed a tourist’s imagination that would glance out from its hotel window onto the squalor below and conclude that death is the opposite of paradise, as if the locals did not live their little lives on the expansive middle ground between the two.

even Yanagihara’s novels are not death camps; they are hospice centers. A Little Life, like life itself, goes on and on. Hundreds of pages into the novel, Jude openly wonders why he is still alive, the beloved of a lonely god. For that is the meaning of suffering: to make love possible. Charles loves David; David loves Edward; David loves Charles; Charlie loves Edward; Jude loves Willem; Hanya loves Jude; misery loves company.

Almost all startups are fragile initially. And that's one of the biggest things inexperienced founders and investors (and reporters and know-it-alls on forums) get wrong about them. They unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones. They're like someone looking at a newborn baby and concluding "there's no way this tiny creature could ever accomplish anything." It's harmless if reporters and know-it-alls dismiss your startup. They always get things wrong. It's even ok if investors dismiss your startup; they'll change their minds when they see growth. The big danger is that you'll dismiss your startup yourself. I've seen it happen. I often have to encourage founders who don't see the full potential of what they're building. Even Bill Gates made that mistake. He returned to Harvard for the fall semester after starting Microsoft. He didn't stay long, but he wouldn't have returned at all if he'd realized Microsoft was going to be even a fraction of the size it turned out to be. [4] The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this company taking over the world?" but "how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?" And the right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time. Microsoft can't have seemed very impressive when it was just a couple guys in Albuquerque writing Basic interpreters for a market of a few thousand hobbyists (as they were then called), but in retrospect that was the optimal path to dominating microcomputer software. And I know Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia didn't feel like they were en route to the big time as they were taking "professional" photos of their first hosts' apartments. They were just trying to survive. But in retrospect that too was the optimal path to dominating a big market.

To find jobs more quickly, students tend to showcase the types of work most in demand in our industry, making website and app redesigns the overwhelming majority of case studies being published.

The myopic focus on shorter time-to-job metrics requires schools to standardize their design curricula — a trend which is reflected in the structure of case studies being produced.

The UX bootcamp also benefits from its students’ projects being published on Medium: case studies become content marketing that helps attract new students — and therefore revenue.

How can you differentiate yourself when applying to a position, if case studies from other candidates look exactly the same at first glance?

formulas create the illusion that real projects will always follow those same predetermined steps. In reality, working with both in-house and agency teams is too chaotic to apply a one-size-fits-all methodology

Research budgets are not always available; user journeys are not always necessary.

Many case studies start with an unexplained “user need” that one infers is the student’s personal need (e.g. "an easier way to share music on Spotify"). User research is then utilized in an attempt to prove that other people experience the same problem.

Because students are used to ticking boxes on a standard design process template provided by their school, they forget to explain why they are utilizing a particular method. If everyone’s process is somewhat the same, what is your unique angle to the way you work?

Insights gathered from one step are rarely applied to the next one. As a result, most case studies feel complete, but few feel smart.

Many case studies describe the project process in great detail, only to conclude with a solution which is predictable, unpolished, and/or lacking insight.

There are only so many audiences a single case study can speak to. If the student’s main objective in creating a case study is to get a foot in the industry, it might be a good idea for them to prioritize recruiters and hiring managers when thinking about their public-facing output. Ultimately, recruiters are the ones who screen candidates and hiring managers are the ones who make the final decision.

Because their time is limited, most hiring managers do not go through a designer’s entire portfolio, but instead review a couple of case studies

Since they must review a high volume of case studies as part of the recruiting process, hiring managers rarely read thoroughly, but instead quickly scan students’ work in search of talent

First [I do] just a quick scan. If the work looks interesting then I proceed to a more thorough analysis. This can range from 30 seconds to 15 or 20 minutes, it all depends on the quality and quantity of the work. Weak portfolios get discarded in seconds. Really good portfolios are analyzed in-depth and I usually end up on the candidate’s website or Twitter account. — Head of Design, 13 years of experience

Another common concern raised by the upper-level managers we spoke with was the extreme focus on the part of students on the design process, at the expense of the quality of the output. They reported that this was especially the case with UX and product-focused portfolios.

I jump to the final designs, I want to see the outcome of the case study. Only then, if the final designs are solid I go back and try to understand the designer’s process. You see a lot of people building really deep use-cases, but the execution fails and right now I need designers who can think and deliver, not one or another. — VP of Product Design, 17 years of experience

Your case study structure should reflect the areas that most interest you as well as the ones that will help you reach your personal goals. What type of company do you want to work with, and what kind of story will make the design leadership of that organization excited about the possibility of working with you?

If UI design is one of your strengths, showing personas that are shallow or unresearched can hurt more than they can help.

If you are writing about a real project for a real client, it’s important to explain the constraints and limitations around which you were working. If there were no constraints involved —as in the case of a project completed as part of a UX course— hiring managers will expect the designs to be as as innovative as possible, and will be frustrated if they are not.

Focus on insights rather than process

Reading an insightful case study is much more exciting than reading one that is complete but uninspired.

Would someone feel compelled to retweet a random sentence from your case study?

how you brought those insights to each subsequent step of the process.

The case study should tell a story about how you think and how you design — it's never about the project itself. Ideally, your case study should reflect your personality so strongly that it would feel out of place in any other designer’s portfolio.

What excited you the most about working on this project when you first received the brief?

A case study should focus less on the project it portrays and more on the skills and personality of its designer.

it should provide a platform for you to talk about the things you believe as a designer: your passion (reflected in how much time and attention you invested in the project), your thinking (demonstrated by how you connect the dots throughout your process), and your insights as you learn new things and evolve in your career.