A class at San Jose State has succeeded in raising the pay for 70,000 workers by 25%. But Silicon Valley’s biggest issue last week was making the photos on Facebook’s Newsfeed 50% bigger. That’s a significant disparity between an impressively progressive bunch of college studen…
The world I want to live in is a world powered by change. It is a world driven by design thinking, disruption, and metadata. It is a world unencumbered by the inequalities of our time. It is a world that challenges and shapes us as we challenge and shape it. It is a world of grea…
Last December, eleven students from Cooper Union entered the eighth floor of the school’s Foundation Building, where they remained for the next seven days. The students barricaded themselves in to protest the possibility that Cooper Union, the 154 year-old tuition-free institutio…
I’m a tiny Asian girl—five feet tall at 20 years old with the face of a baby. My friends say I have the Napoleon complex: I have to act larger than I am to make up for my size. I’m the loudest when we’re out in public. I’m more vulgar than any adult who knows me would probably su…
We do it in democracy, computing, warfare, commerce, academia, networking, and even art: the separation of concerns (SoC). To separate concerns is to allocate responsibility not by workload or capacity, but by control flow, intent, and function. Like sex, morality, or the law, …
It was a design so cool, it belonged on a T-shirt. At an old paper I worked at, I created a cover which was so epic that it looked like something a Threadless designer handed to a newspaper instead of a gaggle of hipsters. But when my editor, understandably impressed by the des…
It was a Friday, and things were not going so well. I was feeling sad, as we all do sometimes. In an attempt to salvage the evening, I agreed to meet a friend at a ping-pong hall on East 23rd Street, a venue I had not previously heard of but whose owner was rumored to be Susan Sa…
Until I started watching Girls, I had no idea how much I had internalized the victim-blaming, “she was asking for it” rape culture that dictates that if women wear skimpy outfits in dangerous neighborhoods, they are inviting harassment. I don’t know if it’s because my parents r…
I’m fortunate enough to be the CEO of a company—Fabrica—with an incredible space. It’s drop-dead gorgeous, it really is. And that’s the problem. It’s a 17th century villa in the north Italian countryside near Treviso, surrounded by vineyards, farms and light industrial buildings…
I stood in the shower and prepared myself for my regular ritual, angling my body to face the sunlight in slight parallel, illuminating the silhouette of my pubescent figure against the plastic wall. I lightly pressed my index finger into the middle of my burgeoning breasts, forci…
The spring stampedes (yes, stampedes plural) in Austin have begun: Students fleeing for spring break and visitors invading for South by Southwest. Local businesses and groups have already inaugurated the annual confab, opening today, with pre-festival pub crawls as well as single…
In July of 2003, I found myself in the Central Highlands of Costa Rica, sequestered away with five other writers and artists in a small colony situated on a hill above the small town of Colon. I arrived in Costa Rica with little more than an idea for a novel, the first impres…
There are three harmless-sounding words that are slowly but surely clawing their way towards internet omnipresence. Like the Harlem Shake, the more they appear the more likely people are to repeat them, so that they’re now the suffix to what must be half the Twitter bios in exist…
One of my earliest memories is of pissing myself because of a movie. The specifics are vague. I’m sitting in the third floor of my childhood home in Belmont, Massachusetts, a former farmhouse that existed well before the doctors, lawyers, and professors of Boston expanded beyond…
“There really is a place in the world for a personalized newspaper,” Mark Zuckerberg said at the unveiling of the new Facebook newsfeed. It’s true that if you gave everyone on earth a publication exactly tailored to them, newspapers wouldn’t be in so much trouble. And in many wa…
The road to the largest city in the United Arab Emirates is an eight-lane highway, paved through rolling sand dunes. An intricate wrought iron fence begins where the pavement stops, separating the road from land owned by the royal family. The camels grazing on these royal scrubla…
This post from Alexis Madrigal over at the Atlantic exists because of a particular micro-furor, but we got lucky, because Alexis built up a head of steam, broke out of furor-space, and produced something much larger and more useful: a panoramic view of internet media economics fr…
Google Glass isn’t available yet. Even so, the technopanic it’s inspiring is rising to full swivet. But I say there’s no need to panic. We’ll figure it out, just as we have with many technologies—from camera to cameraphone—that came before. The greatest compilation of worries to…
When you lose the great love of your life: your best friend. I was once my own private storm. Lone black wave on the beach curling in on itself, folding all the darkness within until it became too much to bear, and then I crested and collapsed onto the shore, devastating everyon…
How did we turn water into cola? And what does that say about us? Once we knelt by a stream to scoop water with bare hands. Now we pull a tab on an aluminum can and drink ingredients we cannot name from places we may not know mixed in ways we do not understand. Coca-Cola is a …
On the first draft of our wedding program, at the end of the procession titles, it said: Gabriella Rosen Bride, and fifth cousin of the bride Ultimately, I jettisoned the post-comma clause because it interfered with our parents’ increasingly solemn vision of that day. Close f…
It feels like every few months, Facebook makes some changes, and some group or another rises up and declares it is a massive Facebook attack against them. Sometimes it’s developers complaining that the open graph giveth and taketh away, sometimes it’s that Facebook is hiding post…
I was seven or eight years old when it first came to my attention that I was chubby. In the classic manner of certain elderly folks who decide that they’ve lived too long to bother with politeness any more, my grandmother looked me up and down, pursed her lips, and said, “Oh, dea…
My husband and I received a wedding invitation in the mail this week; a gorgeous letterpressed invite wrapped in intricate gold paper complete with a proper RSVP pre-stamped to mail back to the hosts. These traditional invitations are reminders of an era when parties and events w…
You may have noticed higher food prices, global debt, food shortages, inequality, vast unemployment and climate change—how it’s all interconnected. Francis Fukuyama’s final form of civilization and government, right? This morning I read an article published yesterday in The Guar…