November 2015

All right, @propublica, let’s do this thing.

Apparently this is the time of year I make some changes. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

“As horrific as [mass shootings] are, by most counts they represent less than 1 percent of all gun homicides.” propublica.org/article/how-th…

“As hardware has grown more powerful and screens more capable, book-reading software has largely stagnated.” aeon.co/magazine/techn…

“This story [has] a long way to go before the government’s narrative can be accepted as true, or rejected as false.” nytimes.com/2015/10/18/mag…

For you compassion-challenged folks, here are three refugees’ stories of living under Islamic State rule in Syria. nytimes.com/2015/11/22/wor…

This is far and away the most informative article on ISIS I’ve seen. Absolutely essential reading. theatlantic.com/features/archi… via @instapaper

Up for a good cry? Here’s the story of a young woman finding her way out of the hateful Westboro Baptist Church. newyorker.com/magazine/2015/…

Continuing today’s reading on teens being horrible, here’s a fascinating analysis of the spread of school shootings. newyorker.com/magazine/2015/…

A riveting crime procedural about how nihilistic trolls exploit our over-militarized and under-technologized police. nytimes.com/2015/11/29/mag…

So. Any two-factor authentication models out there that aren’t a user experience nightmare?

Can we just skip to the part where Killer Mike is president?

Incredible enthusiasm and inspiration bubbling for things other than my task at hand, which is the very last thing I want to do right now.

Not trying to get all NIMBY on you, but I’m really looking forward to the day I can walk five feet in Brooklyn without hearing a jackhammer.

I feel bad for the many US conservatives who are even remotely reasonable people. At the federal level, there is no one to represent them.

One area of empathy where I need to improve is being happy for people who make decisions for themselves that I wouldn’t make for myself.

Since I use ⌥⇧⌘S, I had no idea Photoshop’s “Save for Web” was deprecated. (And I totally forgot about ImageReady!) zeldman.com/2015/11/17/sav…

I always get annoyed at super thick business cards, like, “Do you need it to stop a bullet?” But I dunno, these days, maybe you do.

Was @Rdio’s survival tied to my freelance career? Its beta began when I left @Harmonix, and now its sale is announced as I join @propublica.

Over a few years, I wrote about 3,500 words’ worth of short music reviews on @Rdio. But I knew this day would come. v5.robweychert.com/writing/rdio-r…

I don’t like any of the alternatives to @Rdio. I don’t want it to go away.

A nice, ongoing roundup of little things that too easily fall by the wayside when designing and developing websites. twitter.com/coryetzkorn/st…

It feels good to budget some Twitter time in advance for a day when you know you’ll need to respond to nice things said by nice people.

I’m very pleased to announce I’ll be joining the @propublica design team at the end of this month! propublica.org/atpropublica/i…

At its best, Ghost in the Shell is a striking exercise in worldbuilding. If they were extended, I could probably watch an hour or two of its atmospheric montages of daily life in Hong Kong’s near future, whose sights and sounds are at once dreamlike and palpable. But as an exercise in storytelling, it’s disappointing that a film with such strong visuals and interesting ideas relies almost entirely on dialogue for its expository and thematic… See more →

“…plenty of people… believe that racism is another simple binary and that they dwell on the better side of it.” newyorker.com/magazine/2015/…

Birthday girl, birthday book.