August 2010
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Awe and the Machine →
Today we are less likely to feel awe in the presence of our machines than we are to experience what historian Jacques Barzun called “machine-made helplessness.”
Visiting the Paris Exhibition in 1900, the American writer Henry Adams saw something so remarkable he compared its influence to that of the Virgin Mary. It was a hall filled with machines - early power generators known as...
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July 2010
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Exactly what happens when a person leaps off the... →
In 1996, I jumped off a 350-foot-high bridge over a river gorge. I wanted to experience what it would be like to leap, head first, from a lethal height and hurtle toward my death. The death part itself I had no interest in experiencing — in fact, a fairly strong interest in not experiencing — so I had a bungee cord wrapped around my ankles. After the initial terror and...
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“With love, there’s value in scarcity. That’s why it feels like such a jackpot.”
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Americans don't know how to die →
Almost all these patients had known, for some time, that they had a terminal condition. Yet they-along with their families and doctors-were unprepared for the final stage. “We are having more conversation now about what patients want for the end of their life, by far, than they have had in all their lives to this point,” my friend said. “The problem is that’s way too...
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Top 10: Tips For Making A Sex Tape - By Tommy... →
I was just talking about wanting to see The Room!
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In Which Antisocial Behavior Is Redefined For... →
The Taxonomy of the Nerd
by BENJAMIN HALE
I have been using this to entertain people at parties for years, and I’ve finally decided to write it down. I have to credit my good friend Sam Cooper as the co-creator of this graph. (Check out his band, Horse Feathers.) The very first Nerd Graph was rendered on a napkin at Abo’s Pizza in Boulder, Colorado sometime around the turn of the...
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“I THINK YOU WANT TO LEARN ABOUT ART BECAUSE YOU HAD AN EXPERIENCE OF SOME SORT—...”
– Interview with Dave Hickey in The Believer.
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The Sins of St. Paul, by Michael Bierut →
Paul Rand stands without peer at the pinnacle of graphic design’s Olympus, the North Star that guides professional practice even more than eight years after his death. (Indeed the first entry here at Design Observer was on Rand’s personal library.) An important new book, Paul Rand: Modernist Design, edited by Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo as part of the University of Maryland’s Issues in...
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a bright wall in a dark room: Lars and the Real... →
AN ISLAND NEVER CRIES
by Chad P.
“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.” - Thomas Wolfe
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“It suddenly got weird and I bolted. It was the normal flight pattern of the...”
