You know, with complaints about how email pulls context out of conversations, I’m delighted to report that the Netflix insta-support manages to convey perky perky perky…And for what it’s worth, I suppose I’m beginning to internalize some good user experience language! Netflix Customer Service You are now chatting with: Catherine Netflix Catherine: Hey there! Thanks […]
Let’s start with Jay Smooth’s discussion about how to tell people they sound racist. His point is that when you tell someone they are a racist person you will inevitably be drawn into a conversation about their motivations, intentions, past actions. People will ‘vouch’ for them, and you will lose what you want to say. […]
I’m usually delighted to see what Jason Kottke finds around the web, but for what it’s worth, exploding actresses is not funny. What it is, is horrible. Masquerading as funny. It’s not social commentary, or cute, or whatever. It’s just horribly misogynist.
You should spend some time reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ reports from Europe (a harrowing pre-departure, and a first report). His writing is excellent. I felt a lot like him, in race- and class-specific ways, when I went to Paris as a student in college. But I didn’t have a way to express myself with eloquence about […]
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold – William Carlos Williams
We have a running joke in our household about movies with arbitrarily and implausibly choreographed dance scenes. It’s from the 1999 classic She’s All That, when Usher DJ’s the prom: ‘Right about now we’re gonna do that dance I taught you! And I know you’ve been practicing!’ This crops up everywhere, once you start looking […]
A while back (could be years, actually), there was a compelling post on how blogs were supposed to be varied, but end up showing same things. There was a good metaphor using peaks and valleys, how blogs end up looking peak to peak, but still so much ends up being hidden. Does anyone recall anything […]
We are crippled in so many ways today by the desire to avoid fashion mistakes, to elude ridicule – a desire that leads at one extreme to the smiling elisions of political candidates and on the other to the awful tyranny of cool – that this willingness to be foolish is hard for us to […]
There is a glowing review of Per Se in the New York Times today, declaring it the best restaurant in New York City. I went there, and I agree: the food was incredible, the service impeccable, the experience indelible. The challenge, I think, is that food at that kind of restaurant, particularly if you are […]
I may as well continue to post Mad Men stuff. Here’s a behind the scenes look at Mad Men, where you can see how surreal it looks when Apple products are sent into the Wayback machine. Also, Peter Campbell is a total cutey.