do dot that thing dot org

Now Making: Editorially

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 16:07:48 -0500

I was raised to be an editor, but I always wanted to be a writer. My father is a lawyer, and his red pen and proofreaders’ marks were a constant, sometimes painful, reminder that the first draft of whatever story I was writing was never final. I’d sit with him and defend my choices, then concede that his changes might improve my writing (Even today, he insists that his changes were always for the better.) So I knew what an editor was before I knew anything about publishing, and I learned to respect their work and how important it is for the writing process.

Words have prospered in this most recent burst of new technology companies. Publishing and distribution have already been completely rebuilt, and writers have far better tools today than the electric typewriter, but good writing—beyond the typing—is collaborative, and the editorial process hasn’t scaled with this flood of new writing.

There is simply no good analogue today for my dad’s red pen and our ensuing discussions, no beautiful common space for writing and editing, no sensible way of watching a document evolve and nurturing it to maturity. So today, we’re announcing Editorially—a tool that gives writers and editors the collaborative space to simply write better.

I consider myself seriously lucky to be working on a problem that has nagged at me since I was a kid and reinvigorated my love of writing. More than that, I have hit the holy grail of teams. With me in the quiet trenches since the middle of last year are four amazing folks: Mandy Brown and Jason Santa Maria of A Book Apart, both of whom I’ve watched respectfully for a very long time; Ethan Marcotte, who gave life to Responsive Web Design and taught me to take GIFs seriously; and Rob Brackett, who knows all about meaningful work from his time at Code For America. These are people who care deeply about words and writing, and this thing we’re building together, I promise you, is amazing.

U.S. Voters' Rights: tl;dr

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 19:15:00 -0500

Okay, so, U.S. people: You have the right to vote. The rules around those rights might sound complicated, but here’s the short version (and a number to call, 866-OUR-VOTE, if it gets confusing):

1. If you know you are registered to vote in your district and have ID if required in your state, you should insist on your right to a regular ballot. Provisional ballots are rejected more often than regular ballots—know your rights to a regular ballot and assert them as needed.

2. If your vote is challenged, or you are not listed and you know you should be, insist on your right to an affidavit or provisional ballot.

3. If you encounter any resistance at the polls, or believe your right to vote a regular ballot is being violated, call 1-866-OUR-VOTE. I’ve worked with Election Protection in the past—they are hard-working, smart, and non-partisan.

Your best bet is to know your specific rights before you walk in the door of your polling station. Check out http://www.866ourvote.org/state to learn about ID requirements and more about your rights as a voter.

Share as needed, vote tomorrow, and stay informed.

Update 9/6: Ensuring that you’ve filed your ballot if your vote is challenged is important, but if you believe you have been intimidated or see others intimidated based on race, color, national origin, or religion, contact the Department of Justice. Election Protection should help you do that, but you can and should follow up with a call to DOJ.

A plaque at the US Government Printing Office cast with a...

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 17:59:00 -0400

A plaque at the US Government Printing Office cast with a broadside by Beatrice Warde, titled “This is a Printing Office”.

THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE

Crossroads of civilization

Refuge of all the arts against the ravages of time

Armory of fearless truth against whispering rumor

Incessant trumpet of trade

From this place words may fly abroad

Not to perish on waves of sound

Not to vary with the writer’s hand

But fixed in time

Having been verified by proof

Friend, you stand on sacred ground.

This is a printing office.

From the Polaroid of the Day archive of photographer Jamie...

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 14:29:45 -0400

From the Polaroid of the Day archive of photographer Jamie Livingston (1956-1997), a fellow Bard graduate. Every year or so, I get totally lost in these pictures, trying to zoom in on particular days I can remember. This one, for the record, is November 14, 1992.

Jump

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 14:04:22 -0400

In April of 2007, my friend Raul approached me about a side project. It was about the art world, he said, and if it worked, it would be fun. He introduced me to Jen Bekman, and they agreed that building this thing was both possible and exciting. Five months later, we launched 20x200.

There’s nothing I love more than a small business with a mission, and we have a great one: “Art for Everyone”. That sounds both happy and easy, but it’s not, because collecting art can feel intimidating, extravagant, and confusing—but it’s not. Our job is to stand with people at that cliff, give them a really good harness, and (very gently) get them to jump. You teach people to feel confident as they grow; to push back at voices (real or imagined) that question their decisions and tastes; to live with a work of art instead of looking at it—not five seconds, five decades. Five years.

Today is my last day at 20x200. I’ve worked at a few young/small/startup businesses, and I can say I’ve both given and received more here than at any job I’ve ever held. It’s been thrilling, overwhelming, intense, and gratifying; five years later, I’m a different person. I’ve learned a ton, worked with some amazing folks, helped some artists make a living (in many cases, by buying their work myself—much of which I’m taking home today), christened thousands of new art collectors, and had an amazing ride. I had no idea what 20x200 would become, but Raul really pinned it over dinner that night—it has been so much fun.

The culture of startups is overflowing with mythical personae of pirates and ninjas, but I’m not a pirate—I’m an evangelist and a plumber. I love building things that help people grow—preferably in ways I need to grow. Building 20x200 with this team has taught me more than I’d ever thought I needed to know about how products and companies work, and I’m grateful to Jen and the extended 20x200 crew for teaching me; I hope to make them proud as I move on to build a new company—and a new product—that suits this particular evangelist plumber.

What I’ve tried to teach collectors and coworkers here, I’ve ended up learning myself: confidence, taste, persistence, how to stand at the edge of a cliff and check your harness. I can’t wait—I’m thrilled—to jump.

June 8th, 2002, was a Saturday

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 13:53:00 -0400

Ten years ago today, at ten-thirty p.m., I was taking a nap on the couch in my living room. I had planned to meet friends from work that night, but I was exhausted and ready to call it off. At eleven, I sat up and decided to go out anyway, which is good, because that is how I met Laurea.

The universe of ways I could have crossed paths with Laurea, even when you set aside the infinitesimal luck of her and my even existing, was tiny. She was from California, here on vacation, meeting a casual friend—the girlfriend of one of my coworkers—just for the night. Sometime shortly after eleven o’clock on June 8, 2002, from a block away, I saw her waiting in front of a bar on Ludlow Street; when I closed that distance, she gave me a really hard handshake and said two words: “I’m Laurea.” That was the last moment in my life that I did not know her.

We spent the summer together, decided cautiously when she went back to California to stay together “as long as it felt right”, outlasted a two-and-a-half-year long-distance relationship, built a life in New York with each other, hiked twenty-four miles through the Ventana Wilderness with seven Power Bars and two Cup o’ Noodles, got married (woo!), traveled the world, and became two sides of a personality that I’m really proud of.

In 2008, six years after we met, I started my wedding vows by saying, “When I first fell in love with you, I had this thrill of knowing you existed.” Let’s not even discuss the being-with-each-other, the commitment, the long-distance video chats, the co-ownership of cats, or the wedding rings. It is hard for me to believe that somebody as amazing as my wife ever came to be; it takes my breath away that we met at all, and I pinch myself daily as a reminder.

That thrill I feel at our co-existence (amazing!) has flourished with time, and when I woke up this morning, I looked into Laurea’s eyes, still as big and open and loving and demanding and confident and caring as the ones I fell in love with in the summer of 2002, and said, “Ten years.” I like a wedding anniversary as much as anybody else, but a handshake’s a handshake, and I gotta say: This has been a pretty amazing decade.

"We definitely are trying to reduce allergy-producing trees where we can,” says Leif Fixen, an urban..."

Sat, 19 May 2012 01:08:32 -0400

“We definitely are trying to reduce allergy-producing trees where we can,” says Leif Fixen, an urban forester with the city of Boston.”

- Just wanted everybody to know that’s his real name. Allergic Tree Action

They rushed the lion into townThe doctor shook him up and down...

Tue, 08 May 2012 12:09:00 -0400

They rushed the lion into town
The doctor shook him up and down
And when the lion gave a roar
Pierre fell out upon the floor
He rubbed his eyes and scratched his head
And laughed because he wasn’t dead
His mother cried and held him tight
His father asked—Are you all right?
Pierre said—I am feeling fine
Please take me home, it’s half past nine

—Maurice Sendak, Pierre (a Cautionary Tale)

I am going to go home tonight and slowly eat every page of my copy of Where the Wild Things Are. Maurice Sendak is another one of those people, like Jim Henson, whose work for children has contributed significantly to who I am as an adult, and losing him closes the book on a huge part of my childhood.

One of the first books I ever remember reading, or having read to me, is Maurice Sendak’s Pierre. While I don’t think I was ever that child outwardly, reading Pierre (and Where the Wild Things Are) evoked a sense of protest for me as a child that was a great outlet; it showed me that I could survive disagreement—even thrive from it—and emerge somehow as a Greater Person. The imperative expressed in all of Sendak’s books, to do otherwise, is woven into the fabric of my personality and has quietly informed so many of the choices I’ve made in my life.

On a shelf in my office are gently-read copies of Where the Wild Things Are and Pierre, signed by Sendak at a rare appearance in a local bookstore. I stood in line for hours to see him, and when I got to the front, I nearly cried. For a man with a very thorny reputation, he was surprisingly kind as he listened to me yammer about how much I loved his books. Someday, I’ll read them to my kid, and I really hope she eats the signature page—he’d obviously have loved that.

npr:

nprfreshair:

hwentworth:

Internet’s over, people. Maurice Sendak just won.

Fresh Air remembers Maurice Sendak

Higher praise there could not be. —Wright

“Guys, you don’t need to over-think it; it is what...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:07:00 -0400

“Guys, you don’t need to over-think it; it is what it is. People pay me money, I send them a really sharp pencil—that’s about it.”

thenearsightedmonkey:

How to sharpen a pencil.

Suggested by the Seven of Diamonds

Barista Joke for your Friday

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:51:32 -0400

Sara: How many baristas does it take to make an Americano?
Me: Six. And you can't have milk--it's an Americano. That'll be $5.50. Next customer.

Y U NO UNDERSTAND ENO CAT staceynightmare: I made this, because...

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:40:02 -0400

Y U NO UNDERSTAND ENO CAT

staceynightmare:

I made this, because someone had to.

"Rule 1: go on your normal walk routine, to school, the store, the best most traveled routine works..."

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:42:04 -0400

“

Rule 1: go on your normal walk routine, to school, the store, the best most traveled routine works best and the object is to try to notice things you have never noticed before.

Rule 2 Always state before the thing you are noticing with the phrase ” I never noticed…¨ followed by thing you are noticing.

Rule 3. It has to be something that is relativley permanent or something that has been there for awhile and has never been noticed. eg, It can´t be a new piece of trash on the ground, but could be a sticker or graffiti mark. Also, very small things or insignificant marks usually considered not fair game. It is up to the players to decide if it warrants a true ¨I never noticed” score.

Rule 4 When something is ” I never noticed….” and you or any other player present at the time also has never noticed that particular thing, the player or noticer receives 10 points for noticing something unique and never noticed before— usually celebrated and acknowledged with “Wow , I never noticed that! ” or “Man, I wish I noticed that!”

On the other hand if one of the players has also noticed that before either from silent observation and or past games of I never noticed, The fellow player must state “I already noticed that before” and no points are awarded

Rule 5 first person to 100 points wins. If the full 100 points are not attained durring the routine they should be noted and continued until another day.

Please feel free to add and collaborate useful rules.

Saludos

”

- This is my favorite kind of game. Kudos for the rules about phrasing.

Mark (via eliotshepard)

“This is sad! O little book! A day will come in truth when...

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:52:48 -0400

“This is sad! O little book! A day will come in truth when someone over your page will say, ‘The hand that wrote it is no more.’”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

theatlantic:

laphamsquarterly:

“I am very cold”

“The parchment is very hairy.”

“Oh, my hand.”

—Notes from medieval monks and scribes in the margins of their work

Our latest issue “Means of Communication” is now online. Take a break from the scriptorium to check it out!

This is awesome.

"It’s just very difficult to end a series,” he said. “For example, ‘Seinfeld,’ they ended it with..."

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:41:09 -0500

““It’s just very difficult to end a series,” he said. “For example, ‘Seinfeld,’ they ended it with them all going to jail. Now that’s the ending we should have had. And they should have had ours, where it blacked out in a diner.””

- David Chase, on final scenes in television drama, in a New York Times article about Matthew Weiner.

Jessica Eaton’s Cubes for Albers and DeWitt is seriously....

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 15:44:31 -0500

Jessica Eaton’s Cubes for Albers and DeWitt is seriously. blowing. me. away. From the press release:

The images are constructed on sheets of 4 x 5 film. The subject is in reality monochromatic. The photographs use a set of cubes and ground options painted white, two tones of grey, and black. Through multiple exposures the colour hues in each image have been made by exposing the film to additive primaries of red, green and blue.

I can’t even with this. It’s amazing. It appears I missed this show by a few months, but you can still check the images and be bamboozled anew.

jessicaeaton:

••• cfaal (mb RGB) 21, 2011

"In the rush to gamify enterprise websites, a number of SaaS companies have sprung up almost..."

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:54:17 -0500

“In the rush to gamify enterprise websites, a number of SaaS companies have sprung up almost overnight, including BadgeFarm, Bunchball, and the self-proclaimed leader in gamification, Badgeville. Their business model is to enhance enterprise websites with “social loyalty” platforms that turn content, commerce, and community branding into a self-directed experience that exploits the psychology of gaming to keep users coming back for hours at a time. These are the same characteristics that get users to spend hours on end in massive multi-player online games like “World of Warcraft.””

- Try to imagine where this kind of stuff leads. Highly-optimized dopamine candies, strewn around every app and website you frequent. “Games” to incentivize your consumption of gossip or the purchase of additional text-message plans for your phone. Death by badge.

For the record, the way this is discussed is exactly the mistake, precisely the error. You rarely see it spelled out in such specific language, but there it is.

Gamification Boosting Enterprise Websites - Social Business

(via slavin)

Greg Leuch: iaminlikewithmybike: A jury in a civil trial just found a driver...

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 11:24:16 -0500

Greg Leuch: iaminlikewithmybike: A jury in a civil trial just found a driver...:

Speaking as somebody who was actually run over by a traffic cop on my commute, I can attest to the general antipathy that the NYPD has for cyclists and their limbs. I was raised to trust in the blanket trustworthiness of cops’ defense of rights and laws, but the NYPD, of late, has begun to betray that trust in incremental and worrisome ways.

iaminlikewithmybike:

A jury in a civil trial just found a driver mostly responsible for the negligent death of a cyclist in 2008. While this sort of thing is sadly common, the alarming part is not only that the NYPD officers responding to the incident originally found no reason to charge…

I have been whistling this song all day. This is not a...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:35:22 -0500

I have been whistling this song all day. This is not a coincidence.

slavin:

every once in a while, an amazing signal arrives through the noise.

discoverynews:

jtotheizzoe:

Apollo 17 astronauts singing on the moon.

This is real.

(via Boing Boing)

Amazing how a photo with so few details—the vast whiteness...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:59:25 -0500

Amazing how a photo with so few details—the vast whiteness of the tray table, the bevel of the glass, a straw, the position of the woman’s wrist in the frame—can so accurately portray how much more pleasant flying used to be. It was like a goddamn country afternoon up there.

slavin:

Eggleston.

"This is how it works,” he said, as he peeled a yellow sticker with the name of a Teen Vogue editor..."

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:15:50 -0500

““This is how it works,” he said, as he peeled a yellow sticker with the name of a Teen Vogue editor from her place in the front row to a seat in the back. “You move people around like this.””

- Oh, dang, anonymous Teen Vogue editor!

[“The Man Who Says No”, New York Times]