A review of Dan Ackerman’s The Tetris Effect
In an official photo from April 6, 1993, Hillary Clinton smirks slightly while playing a Nintendo Game Boy aboard a flight back to Washington, DC. The record doesn’t note what game she was playing, but surely it was Tetris, the cartridge that shipped with the popular Nintendo handheld upon release in 1989. When the photo was released last year, Clinton was already… read more
40,000 years of visual media in one surprising White House photograph
This remarkable photograph of President Obama wearing VR goggles in the West Wing looks like the very image of futurism. But new technologies will become old and familiar, just as all those before them have become invisible to contemporary eyes. But there they are, preserved in the amber of history, just waiting for the VR headset to join them.… read more
How a broken Twitter adaption of James Joyce’s novel reveals the secret of Bloomsday
Today is Bloomsday, a folk holiday adopted to celebrate the life and work of the Irish writer James Joyce, in particular his 1922 novel Ulysses. The name derives from the book’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, one of the Dubliners the book follows through the day of June 16, 1904. First celebrated mere years after the novel’s publication, Bloomsday festivities have been… read more
The Freewrite, a “smart typewriter,” wants to liberate writers from their computers.
These days, I write with my fingertips. We all do. And so, anything that changes that sensation stands out. Today, instead of chiclet keys on an Apple laptop, I am clacking at the white, mechanical keys of the Freewrite, a “smart typewriter” made by Astrohaus. It’s the latest and most extreme entry in the distraction-free writing wars. The idea: by… read more
The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games
This book is available in print, ebook, and audiobook formats. Buy on Amazon How filling life with play—whether soccer or lawn mowing, counting sheep or tossing Angry Birds—forges a new path for creativity and joy in our impatient age. Life is no game. It’s demanding, boring, and rarely fun. But what if we’ve got games wrong? Playing anything—whether an instrument,… read more
It’s not any harder to imagine a Federal Reserve Chair Kim Kardashian now than it was two decades ago to imagine a President Donald Trump.
Two high-profile examples of disorienting job changes, both involving Google, recently graced the news. First, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, will head the new Defense Innovation Advisory Board at the Pentagon. And second, Chris Poole, the founder of 4chan, the anonymous messageboard known for Internet diversions such as lolcats and Rickrolling—as well as its… read more
A “Devember” for coding is the latest and most ridiculous of commemorative months.
In his 1996 book Infinite Jest, the late American writer David Foster Wallace imagined a near future in which corporations could sponsor the calendar. Instead of counting up from the birth of Christ, the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.) develops a “revenue enhancing subsidized time.” Year of the Whopper. Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland. Year of the… read more
A Review of Michael W. Clune's Gamelife
I am on an airplane reading Michael W. Clune’s Gamelife, a memoir about growing up playing computer games in the 1980s. I’ve just finished eating the smoked salmon and kiwi on the “fruit plate” I was offered by the flight attendant but had initially declined. Just like I had declined to review Gamelife for this publication, initially. For reasons, too. Michael… read more
Our telephone habits have changed, but so have the infrastructure and design of the handset.
One of the ironies of modern life is that everyone is glued to their phones, but nobody uses them as phones anymore. Not by choice, anyway. Phone calls—you know, where you put the thing up to your ear and speak to someone in real time—are becoming relics of a bygone era, the “phone” part of a smartphone turning vestigial as… read more
Smart devices turn every industry into the computer industry, and dupe consumers into thinking their lives are better for it in the process.
Atlanta turns yellow for two weeks in April. Streets, driveways, terraces, cars—everything cakes with pollen. It’s the trees that cause the worst of it. Pine, oak, sweet gum, sycamore, mulberry, hackberry, birch, willow. Prolific itching, sneezing, and car-washing ensue. Grilling season officially begins when the pollen subsides. This year’s was particularly grievous, and perhaps that’s why I was so eager… read more