The Curse of Cow Clicker

In this month's Wired Magazine

Jason Tanz wrote a fantastic feature for the January 2012 issue of Wired about me and Cow Clicker. The feature includes, to use Levi‘s words, a centerfold of me, on a fence, in a pasture, with a cow (see below). The print issue is on newsstands now, with a web and iPad version coming soon. Look out for those, as… read more

The Imperative

A strange review of Alphonso Lingis's 1998 book

Jean Georges is one of four Michelin Three Star restaurants in New York city. It’s very French, so French that you’re just as likely to hear the language spoken as English. That and the environment in the main dining room—a single, enormous, plush chamber on the ground floor of the Trump International Hotel—make the place feel monarchal and exotic. The… read more

Write a Platform Studies Book

...and secure your fame and fortune forever*

Nick Montfort and I were thinking about the Platform Studies series today, as we are wont to do. There are two books in the series that are nearing completion now, which we are delighted about, but there are many more to be written. We were talking about some platforms that we thought were large and low-hanging fruit for any interested… read more

Getting Real

On the Digital Humanities

Each year, the organizers of the Day of Digital Humanities ask participants the question, “How do you define the digital humanities?” Recently I browsed the many responses scholars have offered over the years. They vary widely, from simple (“Humanities by digital means”) to definitive (“The application of information, computing, and communication technologies to humanities questions, problems, or data”) to vague… read more

Flash is not a Right

What Gripes about Apple tell us about Computational Literacy

I’ve been watching reactions to Apple’s controversial decision to prohibit the publication of iPhone applications created in environments other than Apple’s own. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g.,… read more

The Sanitary Handheld

Public Rhetoric and the iPad

I swore I wasn’t going to write anything about Apple’s newly announced iPad, but I suppose it’s unavoidable. Instead of its benefits or flaws, however, what’s interested me the most about the gadget is the public reaction to its name. It seems that back in 2007, MadTV wrote a spoof of Apple’s raging devicitude, in the form of a parodic… read more