If you write about your expertise from a place of contempt, maybe you’re not so smart after all.
One of the pleasures I enjoy as an editor at The Atlantic is bringing the work of scientists and scholars to our pages. From the Object Lessons series on the ordinary lives of everyday things, to the Metropolis Now project on technology and urbanism, to our regular coverage of science, technology, and health, I have had the privilege of editing… read more
A luxury bicycle computer forecasts a welcome future of humble, embedded systems.
The joy I used to feel when using computers has turned largely to anguish. These machines once provided a unique and compelling way to do things, from writing to shopping to communication to entertainment. But today, devices and services strive to replace every activity with computer use itself. Now I think about escaping the computer as much as using it.… read more
The example title that opens my book Persuasive Games
In 2007—ten years ago!—I published Persuasive Games, a book about how computer software, and especially games, make arguments. In it, I advanced a theory of “procedural rhetoric,” or argumentation through process and model instead of oration, writing, image, and the other media formats typically associated with rhetoric. The book opens with an anecdote about my session with remarkable game. Remarkable in part because it offered such a… read more
The company’s new “spaceship” headquarters shows how its beauty has always been skin deep.
Apple has great design is the biggest myth in technology today. The latest victim of this ideology comes in the form a remarkable report on the late Steve Jobs’s final project, still in production: a new, $5 billion Cupertino headquarters for Apple Inc. Writing for Reuters, Julia Love outlines the campus’s “astonishing attention to detail.” Vents and pipes remain obscured… read more
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
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
What the billionaire’s financing of lawsuits against the gossip rag says about Internet culture
What could be stranger than a former professional wrestler winning an eight-figure jury award in a lawsuit against an online gossip site that distributed his sex tape? If the lawsuit also had been secretly funded by a technology billionaire. It sounds like something out of a pulpy television script, but, nope, apparently it’s the sort of thing that really happens… read more
Talking about social-network service changes as mysterious changes to algorithms turns software companies into false idols.
Last week Facebook “tweaked its algorithm” again. The latest update promises to show users links that people spend more time reading, which might be a good thing for media outlets like this one. Another update, this one purely hypothetical, concerns the company’s hypothetical ability to affect the outcome of elections by altering its news feed—to prevent a President Trump, for… read more
What an Amazon prank can teach us about delight in the Internet age
Yesterday was a strange day full of surprises. The fencing contractor I’d spoken to last week about a site visit for an estimate didn’t show up. Later, when I tried to attend a local community meeting in my neighborhood, I discovered that the indicated room was totally empty at the appointed time—apparently the meeting had been moved without my knowledge.… read more
Campus-carry laws add unnecessary worry to communities already overwhelmed by unease.
ATLANTA, Ga.—A while back, a student at Georgia Tech, where I teach, showed me a series of anonymized “threats” that students in a notoriously difficult class of mine had posted in an online discussion forum. I’d just returned grades, and nobody was happy. “Does he have kids?” one asked. “I’m going to steal them and blackmail him,” answered another.” “Had… read more