Month: May 2013

Jony Ive on Philosophy and Authenticity of Design

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One of the things that’s interesting about design [is that] there’s a danger, particularly in this industry, to focus on product attributes that are easy to talk about. You go back 10 years, and people wanted to talk about product attributes that you could measure with a number. So they would talk about hard drive size, because it was incontrovertible that 10 was a bigger number than 5, and maybe in the case of hard drives that’s a good thing. Or you could talk about price because there’s a number there.

But there are a lot of product attributes that don’t have those sorts of measures. Product attributes that are more emotive and less tangible. But they’re really important. There’s a lot of stuff that’s really important that you can’t distill down to a number. And I think one of the things with design is that when you look at an object you make many many decisions about it, not consciously, and I think one of the jobs of a designer is that you’re very sensitive to trying to understand what goes on between seeing something and filling out your perception of it. You know we all can look at the same object, but we will all perceive it in a very unique way. It means something different to each of us. Part of the job of a designer is to try to understand what happens between physically seeing something and interpreting it.

I think that sort of striving for simplicity is not a style. It’s an approach and a philosophy. I think it’s about authenticity and being honest. Not just taking something crappy and styling the outside in an arbitrary disconnected way.

–Jony Ive, via this blog post titled “Jony Ive is Not a Graphic Designer” (per this PR document, Ive is in charge of Human Interface at Apple).

Salman Rushdie on Worldwide Censorship

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In an interview published at The Atlantic, Salman Rushdie shares his thoughts on censorship (particularly in China):

Q: Why do governments fear literature? Wouldn’t, say, the Chinese Communist Party be better off letting its writers write fiction without harassment?

Rushdie: I’ve always thought of it this way: Politicians and creative writers both try and shape visions of society, they both try and offer to their readers or to the public a view of the world, or a vision of the world, and these visions of the world are at odds with authoritarian regimes. Those regimes attempt to shut down the limits of the possible while fiction tries to push out the limits of the possible. So in effect their visions are in opposition to each other.

Rushdie thinks censorship has gotten worse in the last twenty years:

Q: Nearly a quarter century has passed since you were forced into hiding by the Ayatollah’s fatwa. In the ensuing years, how would you assess the worldwide climate for censorship? Have things generally gotten better, or worse?

Rushdie: I’d say that, in general, they’ve gotten worse. But one of the things our report highlights is that people have more tools to resist censorship using new media. For instance, in China,  while there’s increased repression in the form of arbitrary arrests, artists held incommunicado and put under house arrest, and increasing hostility towards literature and free expression, there is at the same time a growing willingness of Chinese citizens to find ways to express themselves. In spite of all the repression, there’s been a  growth of independent, non-state publishers to print things that wouldn’t be approved by state houses, and people have shown the willingness to post things online even if they’re not to the liking of the state.

Full interview here.

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(via Andrew Sullivan)

A Brief History of the Mass-Market Paperback

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Smithsonian Magazine has a short post on the origin of the paperback book in the United States:

Robert Fair de Graff realized he could change the way people read by making books radically smaller. Back then, it was surprisingly hard for ordinary Americans to get good novels and nonfiction. The country only had about 500 bookstores, all clustered in the biggest 12 cities, and hardcovers cost $2.50 (about $40 in today’s currency).

De Graff revolutionized that market when he got backing from Simon & Schuster to launch Pocket Books in May 1939. A petite 4 by 6 inches and priced at a mere 25 cents, the Pocket Book changed everything about who could read and where.

Per Wikipedia, the first ten numbered Pocket Book titles were:

  1. Lost Horizon by James Hilton
  2. Wake Up and Live by Dorothea Brande
  3. Five Great Tragedies by William Shakespeare
  4. Topper by Thorne Smith
  5. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
  6. Enough Rope by Dorothy Parker
  7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
  8. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
  9. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
  10. Bambi by Felix Salten

An important note: the Pocket Books were the first paperback books in the U.S.  But it was Albatross Books, a German publishing house based in Hamburg. that produced the first modern mass market paperback books.

Albatross was founded in 1932 by John Holroyd-Reece, Max Wegner and Kurt Enoch. The name was chosen because “Albatross’ is the same word in many European languages. Based on the example of Tauchnitz, a Leipzig publishing firm that had been producing inexpensive and paperbound English-language reprints for a continental market, Albatross set about to streamline and modernize the paperback format.

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Related: How the paperback novel changed popular literature (also from Smithsonian Magazine)

The Bureaucracy of the Food Truck Business

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Adam Davidson reports the state of the food truck business (in New York City) for The New York Times:

The food-truck business, I realized, is a classic case of bureaucratic inertia. The city has a right to weigh the interests of food-market owners (who don’t want food trucks blocking their windows) and diners (who deserve to know that their street meat is edible, and harmless). But many of the rules governing location were written decades ago. In the ’80s, the city capped the number of carts and trucks at 3,000 (plus 1,000 more from April to October). Technically, a permit for a food cart or truck is not transferable, but Andrew Rigie, executive director of the N.Y.C. Hospitality Alliance, said that vendors regularly pay permit holders something like $15,000 to $20,000 to lease their certificates for two years. Legally, the permit holder becomes a junior partner in the new business.

If your fines in one day are more than what you make in a week, how can you possibly stay in business?

One woman, an Ecuadorean immigrant who sells kebabs in Bushwick, Brooklyn, handed Basinski the six tickets that she and her husband received on a single afternoon. The total came to $2,850, which, she said, was much more than what she makes in a good week. She had a street-vendor’s license, she said, but didn’t understand that she also needed a separate permit for her cart.

Perhaps NYC should take a page out of the Portland food truck scene.

Should Barack Obama Legalize Marijuana?

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Writing in The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg profiles the history of marijuana and Barack Obama, and why the President should move to legalize marijuana:

For a start, he could arrange for the Justice Department to end the absurd classification of marijuana as a supremely dangerous Schedule I drug, like heroin. And he shouldn’t just knock it down to Schedule II, cheek by jowl with cocaine. Better to demote it to Schedule IV, where it would have Xanax and Ambien for company, or clear down to Schedule V, reserved for cough medicine. Better still, take it off the “schedule” altogether. If alcohol isn’t on there, marijuana shouldn’t be, either.

Second, he could make it clear—to the public, to the Justice Department, to the D.E.A.—that his policy is to avoid making life unnecessarily difficult for the eighteen states (plus D.C.) that allow marijuana use for medical purposes, for the two states that have made its recreational use permissible under state law (including Colorado; see Ryan Lizza’s piece on John Hickenlooper, the governor, in this week’s issue), for the dozen or so states and hundreds of localities that have decriminalized possession of small amounts, and, overall, for peaceful, otherwise inoffending marijuana smokers. To date, the Obama Administration’s signals in these areas have been confusing and its actions only slightly better (some would say slightly worse) than its predecessors’.

Third, but by no means last, he could change the name of the Office of National Drug Control Policy—a.k.a. the White House “drug czar”—to the Office of National Harm Reduction Drug Policy, and tell it to come up with something halfway as reasonable as the report of the Nixon-appointed Shafer commission, which, in 1972, when Obama was in sixth grade, recommended making marijuana legal.

…

Obama is a busy man. He doesn’t have time to read, let alone encode, everything that appears over his robo-signature. But he really ought to feel a smidgen of shame that the government he heads treats people who do exactly what he used to do, and now casually jokes about, as criminals.

I’m so distant from this conversation that I had no idea what “buzzfeed” was before reading the article.

TIME’s 50 Best Websites of 2013

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TIME just announced the 50 best websites of 2013. It’s a good list overall, especially the news/information section:

However, my two new favorite sites I discovered this year are Distance to Mars (open it in your non-mobile browser for best effect) and Coffitivity (playing ambient noise as though you’re in a coffee shop to help you concentrate).

Is The Avenues School the Best Education Money Can Buy?

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A fun profile in New York Times Magazine of Avenues: The World School in Chelsea, a for-profit (to the tune of $43,000/year) school in New York City. What happens when each set of parents is entitled to an opinion on how the school should be run? Chaos:

In September, Avenues opened with 740 students, from pre-K to ninth grade. And with those students came 740 sets of parents, many of them determined to design the perfect 21st-century school in their own high-earning, creative-class image. They were entrepreneurs and tech millionaires, talent agents and fashion designers, Katie Holmes, hedge-fund managers and artists who refuse to live above 23rd Street. And they wanted to be heard. The school subsequently formed a parents’ association, but it had no rules. So there was a debate about who got to go to the meetings and who got to vote. Bylaws had to be created, which, in Avenues’ case, meant collecting the rules and regulations of 30 other private schools so as to determine the best way to even make bylaws. “There was nothing in place,” says Jacquie Hemmerdinger, head of the standards and values committee on the Avenues Parents Association, “and they empowered 700 parents.”

A committee was created to manage events, like galas and book fairs and bake sales, even though, as a for-profit school, Avenues couldn’t hold any events that raised money. (Did Avenues even want book fairs, some wondered? That was debated, too.) A task force was formed to investigate the safety of the neighborhood after at least one mother fretted that her child had seen the upper outlines of a homeless man’s backside en route to a playground. The complaint became known as the butt-crack e-mail. Other debates waged over the classrooms (were there enough books?); pickup (it was mayhem); identification cards (the photos were too high-resolution); and the school uniforms (was anyone enforcing the policy?). “I think we underestimated the degree of their energy and creativity,” says Gardner P. Dunnan, the former Dalton headmaster and Avenues’ academic dean and head of the Upper School. “They would take over if they could. They are New York parents.”

…

And then there was the food committee. After the PowerPoint presentation concluded in the black-box theater, the questions started flying: Why so much bread? What was the policy on genetically modified organisms? Why no sushi?

My question: what does it mean for the identification cards to be too high resolution? New Yorkers!

Read the entire story here.

Ted Heller: Self-Publishing is Not Fun

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If you’re thinking about publishing your own novel, consider the cautionary story by Ted Heller. This is the author of Pocket Kings, which has a 4.5 star rating on Amazon and was favorably reviewed in The New York Review of Books. But Mr. Heller decided what would happen if he tried to self-publish his new book, West of Babylon. In two words: no luck.

I can tell you that self-publishing is not fun.

As I write these words, I am now in my seventh week of attempting to spread the word about “West of Babylon.” I have sent emails to many newspapers, from the Boston Globe down to the Miami Herald across to the San Francisco … well, to just about everywhere. I’ve sent emails to newspapers and magazines in England, too, and to websites and book blogs. In each email I send, I announce that “West of Babylon” will be available online only as of early May 2013. I attach the cover image and stellar reviews of my three novels. I do everything I possibly can in about four or five paragraphs to inspire interest in whomever the email is sent to.

Sometimes I get replies. Overwhelmingly I do not.

When I hit the send button, I assume that nothing will come of it. (The lyrics from a Rogue Wave song come to me: “But it don’t matter/Because no one comes out to see us.”) Sometimes I cannot even get the correct email address or find out whom to send the book to — who at the Cleveland Plain Dealer edits the book section now? The Los Angles Times said I could email them the book and that was a truly great day for me, despite the 10 other newspapers that day that didn’t want the book.

Continuing:

After a few weeks of this 9-to-5 masochism, you lose your sense of shame. I’m no longer so hesitant about sending emails because, I figure, nobody is going to read the damn thing anyway. The worst thing they can do is turn you down or ignore you, and by now I am used to that. I sent an email to the book section editor of a newspaper I thought would find “West of Babylon” to its liking and, through an intermediary, was able to discover that the editor had never gotten the email. I have to assume that this is just one of the reasons for the great silence: I’m sending queries to people and my email is probably going straight into spam folders, right along with the ads for Viagra and Cialis. I have no idea what’s worse: writing books that don’t ever get published, or writing books that get published but don’t ever get read, or writing emails that don’t ever get read to people about books that don’t ever get published and won’t ever get read.

So discouraging. I get the purpose of having a real-life agent and going with the traditional publishing route. I also get why people would want to self-publish. It’s a delicate balance. But if Mr. Heller’s story is any indication, even if you’ve had great success in the past, it is no guarantee for future success.

I am sticking with my non-revenue generating blogging for now.

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(update: reflected that Mr. Heller still has an agent, but when self-publishing, most of us won’t have that access/luxury)

Iron Man 3 in China

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An interesting bit on the importance of China for the Hollywood industry, via some Iron Man 3 and Robert Downey Jr. trivia:

And it’s not just records: Marvel and its Chinese partner, DMG, are setting new standards for foreign movies looking to earn government clearance in China. To curry favor, the company added four minutes of footage just for the mainland, including throwaway parts for Chinese A-list actors Fan Bingbing and Wang Xueqi, and a ham-handed milk drink product placement.

Also new is the aggressive outreach to Chinese audiences by Iron Man himself, Robert Downey Jr. Not only did he visit China for the first time in his life to talk up the film, but Downey also set up a personal account on Sina Weibo…

I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I want to. I enjoyed Iron Man 2.

The Onion Makes Fun of an Atlanta Social Media Rock Star

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This is the first The Onion post I’ve ever linked to, and damn, if it isn’t a great one. Titled “Social Media Rock Star Makes $28,000 Per Year,” it’s chock-full of awesome one-liners and non sequiturs:

Sources confirmed that Wasserman, who is paid $13 per hour and is not eligible for overtime, appears regularly on the FavStar daily leaderboard and is frequently featured in “Must Follow” lists from the Huffington Post, CNN, andTIME. Influential Twitter users such as musician Questlove, actress Olivia Wilde, Mashable founder Pete Cashmore, and NBA star Blake Griffin also follow Wasserman’s tweets, which the high-profile social media icon reportedly writes on the iPhone his parents bought him and still keep on their family plan.

Moreover, experts say the swift ascent of the 28-year-old entry-level employee into the upper echelons of internet superstardom is showing no signs of slowing down.

I wonder why they chose to pick on an Atlanta suburbanite. Anyway, you have to click through the article to watch the video. HILARIOUS.

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(Oddly, the Twitter account in the article is one that belongs to Erika of Chicago).