Ideas

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.

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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 […]

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“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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Ever since an infantile fascist billionaire (hereafter, the IFB) decided to turn Twitter over to the racially hostile anti-science set, folks who previously used that network daily to discuss and amplify topics they cared about have either given up on the very premise of a shared digital commons, continued to post to Twitter while holding […]

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“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points. […] Perhaps we shall […]

Examining last week’s Verge-vs-Sullivan “Google ruined the web” debate, author Elizabeth Tai writes: I don’t know any class of user more abused by SEO and Google search than the writer. Whether they’re working for their bread [and] butter or are just writing for fun, writers have to write the way Google wants them to just […]

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Genealogy is fun, but it has never been an entirely innocent pastime. The establishment (or fabrication) of pedigrees has been essential to the policing of social and racial hierarchies. The Nazis, however, made it a murderous obsession. A banal family record could be a license for advancement or a death warrant. According to the historian […]

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“Ideas in which economists have reposed the greatest confidence have been proved wrong and therewith, not surprisingly, the responding policy. And this has happened under circumstances which admit of no really plausible explanation, rationalization, or alibi—things in which we economists are more than minimally accomplished. There was, to be sure, more than a suspicion of […]

by Ben Clift* Political economy has long taken a keen interest in the politics of economic ideas, but considerably less attention has been paid to the politics of economic method. Method gets neglected as the technical realm within which, it is assumed economic ideas, once established, are implemented in straightforward fashion. In fact, economic method […]