Ideas

“The word ‘computer’ only really slid over to mean ‘a machine’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, once we started building mechanical and then electronic devices to do that work instead [of people]. We did not name the machines after some abstract idea. We named them after the humans they were replacing.”

The post We named them after the humans they were replacing. appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

We must stop thinking of failure as an end of something, and learn to see it as a natural part of progress. The first incarnation of a new idea may die, but the best ideas will find new lives. Behind every successful launch, there are 100 interesting failures. 

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If you’re finding today a bit stressful for some reason, grab a respite by sinking into any of these web design inspiration websites.

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by Basak Kus* It has now been almost two decades since the 2007-10 financial crisis shattered the exuberance that surrounded American capitalism in the 1990s. The immediate issues the crisis posed—negative growth rates, rising unemployment, and falling stock prices—were addressed long ago. Crises like the Great Recession, however, are more than temporary setbacks; they necessitate […]

by Yingyao Wang* The technocratic project, which once captured political imagination with its potential to manage society and the economy could be managed with rationality and scientific knowledge, seems in decisive decline. Democracy has reasserted its dominant value, and recent populist attacks on expertise have sounded a death knell for technocraticism. If anything, the technocrats […]

Clair Wills has long been among the most supple and illuminating explorers of the intertwined cultural histories of Ireland and Britain. She works in the intersections between social experience and literary representation, giving as much weight to supposedly ordinary lives as to momentous political events and artistic movements. That Neutral Island: A History of Ireland During […]

The post Making Sense of the Missing  appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

A business world with deeply misguided priorities—exemplified by horror stories from the worlds of tech, gaming, and entertainment—accounts for much worker unhappiness and customer frustration.

The post Our Lady of Perpetual Profit appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.

Fortunately, on that day, I allowed a strong, simple idea to penetrate my big, beautiful wall of assumptions.

The post “Where the people are” appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.

Quick, before everyone else thinks of it. Set the word “SUCCESSION” in Engravers Gothic and export it to a transparent PNG. Download photos of confederate general Mitch McConnell and Republican Johns Thune (R-S.D.), Cornyn (R-Texas), and Barrasso (R-Wyo.). Grab and burn Nicholas Britell’s main title theme from Succession. Import all files into Final Cut Pro […]

The post Just add water. appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.

“Led” is the past tense of “lead.” L.E.D. Not L.E.A.D. Example: “Fran, who leads the group, led the meeting.” When professional publications get the small stuff wrong, it makes us less trusting about the big stuff. Trust in media is already at an all-time low. Don’t alienate liberal arts majors and obsessive compulsives. We may […]

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