Former prosecutor Bobby Constantino got himself arrested so he could examine the justice system in the States from the inside.
On April 29, 2012, I put on a suit and tie and took the No. 3 subway line to the Junius Avenue stop in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville. At the time, the blocks around this stop were a well-known battleground in the stop-and-frisk wars: Police had stopped 14,000 residents 52,000 times in four years. I figured this frequency would increase my chances of getting to see the system in action, but I faced a significant hurdle: Though I’ve spent years living and working in neighborhoods like Brownsville, as a white professional, the police have never eyed me suspiciously or stopped me for routine questioning. I would have to do something creative to get their attention.
Some very interesting insights from Hacker News users on how a sudden influx of money affects one’s life. Three years old thread, but still worth a read. The most voted answer is also one my favorites:
I’ve been meaning to write about this one day. There are some things that change. For example, you learn to distinguish problems that can be solved with money from those that can’t. You can buy your way out of a lot of schleps.
Life doesn’t get an order of magnitude more enjoyable, because you still can’t buy your way out of the most serious types of problems, but a lot of annoyances are removed. The best part is what I thought would be the best part: not having to worry about money. Before Viaweb I’d been living pretty hand to mouth, doing occasional consulting. It felt like treading water, in the sense that while it wasn’t hard, I knew in the back of my mind that I’d drown if I stopped. Getting rich felt like reaching the shore.
One thing you learn when you get rich, though, is how few of your problems were caused by not being rich. When you can do whatever you want, you get a variant of the terror induced by the proverbial blank page. There are a lot of people who think the thing stopping them from writing that great novel they plan to write is the fact that their job takes up all their time. In fact what’s stopping 99% of them is that writing novels is hard. When the job goes away, they see how hard.
This is a really good interview. Here’s a snippet, when Andrew Gold of the New York Times asks Joel if songwriting is hard for him:
Yeah, I relate to Beethoven. I write backward — I write the music first and then I write the words. Most people write the words first and then they write the music. Keith Richards was explaining his method of songwriting. He calls it “vowel movement.” They come up with a riff, and it’s like sounds, and whatever sound . . . like “start me up” — “up” works because it has a consonant at the end of it, but if you go “take me home,” it wouldn’t have worked. I kind of subscribe to that. It has to sound right sometimes even more than being a poetic lyric. It’s a struggle to fit words onto music, and I want it to be really, really good, so I take a long time. I love having written, but I hate writing.
I wonder how would backward prose-writing work, and whether I’d fare better doing it the Beethoven way. Surely no experimentation can hurt with the current output rate.
Marco Arment on the early days of Tumblr, David Karp’s product-driven thinking, and his piece of the pie:
As for me, while I wasn’t a “founder” financially, David was generous with my employee stock options back in the day. I won’t make yacht-and-helicopter money from the acquisition, and I won’t be switching to dedicated day and night iPhones. But as long as I manage investments properly and don’t spend recklessly, Tumblr has given my family a strong safety net and given me the freedom to work on whatever I want. And that’s exactly what I plan to do.
Even 0.5% of $1.1 billion makes a “strong safety net” seem like a bit of an understatement. In any case, this is turning out to be a great year for Marco1, and every bit of it is deserved.
A few days ago I sent a link of this blog to a friend of mine whose opinions and stance on journalistic issues I value highly. Let’s call this friend Lance.
I told Lance I wanted to start writing here under my full name (which is now the case) and that I was wondering what he thought about it.
Working as a news anchorman, my perceived neutrality is critical. I am very minded about what I write here and how, but I still felt the need for another set of experienced, unbiased eyes to go over it. Just to be sure.
Three days went by, and then this reply appears in my inbox:
“A pretty revealing blog you got there. I urge you to think through this a bit more, you’ll definitely have some explaining to do once your name is signed on it”
Now, Lance is quite an experienced journalist, so as much as I was assured there were no misdoings on my part, I stopped for a moment and started wondering what might he have read that made him say this.
I couldn’t find anything too sensational or even remotely personal. And it drove me crazy inside.
What am I missing?
Luckily, we had a meeting scheduled for later that week. I resisted the urge to e-mail him until then.
Towards the end of our talk on Friday, I asked Lance about his “revealing” comment, hinting that I’m not sure what made him think that of this blog’s content.
A designer’s false-consensus bias
What he said next would provide us both with a relieving fit of laughter, but more importantly, it carried a few important lessons for me as the writer and producer (designer) of this blog.
“Well, I just urged you to rethink it. I didn’t say you shouldn’t write. If I were an anchorman though, I wouldn’t write about sensitive stuff just like that. And how come I never knew you had a brother?”
I don’t have a brother.
Oh, wait.
That was the moment I realized how things went down: Lance was referring to a post published here on May 10th, 2013 under the title ‘My brother, my mother, and a call girl’. It’s a great piece I found on The Hairpin and decided to link to.
Lance, though, had thought it was written by me.
The thing is, even after we opened the web browser on his office computer, Lance still found it hard to differentiate between things that I’ve written and things that I was only referring to/quoting.
This was because I had previously decided to eschew the link-post format in favor of design uniformity. I counted on visitors — web-savvy and non-web-savvy alike — to make them apart from my own-written material. Also, quotes were only slightly different in color than the rest of text, with a border to their left — quite a common practice for quotation styling on the web.
The reflex response to this is “maybe he just doesn’t get this web stuff”(, which may or may not be true), but the underlying question was: “even if Lance isn’t my (or the) average blog reader, how much clearer can this website’s design be?”
The deeper I dug into this question, the closer I came to the realization that I had fallen a victim to something called the “false-consensus bias”. The first paragraph from Wikipedia reads:
In psychology, the false-consensus effect or false-consensus bias is a cognitive bias whereby a person tends to overestimate how much other people agree with him or her. There is a tendency for people to assume that their own opinions, beliefs, preferences, values and habits are ‘normal’ and that others also think the same way that they do. This cognitive bias tends to lead to the perception of a consensus that does not exist, a ‘false consensus’. This false consensus is significant because it increases self-esteem. The need to be “normal” and fit in with other people is underlined by a desire to conform and be liked by others in a social environment.
While not exceptionally harmful in other crafts, I saw clearly how counter-productive this bias was for me as a designer: non-textual, visual choices clearly affected the perception and context of textual output and altered the final experience for some readers.
Assuming that the final result is clear enough for everyone if it was clear enough for me was, of course, a rookie-designer’s conception.
The moment I got out of Lance’s room, I started thinking about the next redesign for zipped (now The Typist). This time it would have to be much more than just aesthetics. During the last few days, I found myself thinking about how to make the this blog’s design more efficient: semantically, chromatically, and structurally.
The result, hopefully, is clear enough so I don’t have to explain it to you. Nor to Lance.
The only way to know though is to ask more and more readers what their thoughts are (contact), which probably means that this isn’t the latest design iteration on here.
As rumored, Barbara Walters announced today she will retire from journalism in the summer of 2014. Kevin Fallon of The Daily Beast calls the fifteen-minute segment in which Walters addressed the viewers “as classy as ever”, while Alex Pareene of Salon bids the first news anchorwoman in America a very different farewell:
When she’s not interviewing famous people, Walters is partying and vacationing with and occasionally dating them. Former relationships (dutifully recounted in her boldfaced-name-heavy memoir) include Sen. Edward Brooke, former Bear Stearns head Alan Greenberg, and Alan Greenspan, who I guess has a type. She’s buddies with war criminal and society fixture Henry Kissinger. She’s old friends with make-believe TV tycoon Donald Trump. She testified at the Brooke Astor trial, because Astor was, of course, a close friend.
Writing for The New Yorker, Paul Bloom starkly highlights the sore evils of Empathy and argues it “has some unfortunate features—it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We’re often at our best when we’re smart enough not to rely on it.”
Genís Carreras makes it easier to explain complicated philosophies by using short à la-Twitter definitions and beautifully-simplistic yet telling designs. 48 of Carreras’ postcards are available for exploration on his website (in twoparts), and the entire collection can be ordered on Kickstarter.
Eudaimonism: A system of ethics that evaluates actions in terms of their capacity to produce happiness.
9to5Mac collected some video speculations of how Apple’s upcoming “flattened” iOS7 might look like. Dare I predict that Jony Ive is gonna take things even further down the flat road?
In 2001, researcher Frédéric Brochet invited 54 wine experts to give their opinions on what were ostensibly two glasses of different wine: one red, and one white. In actuality, the two wines were identical, with one exception: the “red” wine had been dyed with food coloring.
The experts described the “red” wine in language typically reserved for characterizing reds. They called it “jammy,” for example, and noted the flavors imparted by its “crushed red fruit.” Not one of the 54 experts surveyed noticed that it was, in fact a white wine.
Finally a link I can send to those friends who claim wine tasting isn’t nonsense.