Of the nearly 600 souls on board the crippled steamship, five were priests. Over the noise of ripping wind and sailors shouting, the holy men offered spiritual counsel to any passenger who would listen. They assured anxious women and children… Read More ›
Articles
Are You An Echo?
In 1966, while leafing through an obscure book, a 19-year-old Japanese aspiring poet by the name of Setsuo Yazaki discovered a poem that stopped him up short with its staggering generosity of empathy and existential truth conferred with great simplicity:… Read More ›
Why I think I need a Psion-style device, but won’t be buying the Gemini PDA
The world has moved on a lot since Psion exited the mobile market, an exit that for most people is either a distant memory or of no consequence whatsoever. For those of us, however, who were introduced to the world… Read More ›
The CEO Paying Everyone $70,000 Salaries Has Something to Hide
It seemed too good to be true. On April 13, with reporters from the New York Times and NBC News hovering nearby, Dan Price, the young chief executive officer of Gravity Payments, a Seattle-based credit card processing company, told his… Read More ›
Smartphones as we know them will be dead in five years
Right now, we use the phones to send messages, make calls, browse the web and watch things. That’s still going to be the case but the real innovation in the future is going to come from software and a large… Read More ›
When organisations don’t bother validating email signups
I received 3 emails overnight saying that I had signed up for offers, deals, newsletters and various other crap that I did not need or want. At first I thought it was just normal spam, but then I looked a… Read More ›
Why Nothing Works Anymore
“No… it’s a magic potty,” my daughter used to lament, age 3 or so, before refusing to use a public restroom stall with an automatic-flush toilet. As a small person, she was accustomed to the infrared sensor detecting erratic motion… Read More ›
Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things
I’m in my early-40s. I’ve often wondered if we would end up better at accepting the pace of change of technology than previous generations, like rapid change was just part of the landscape we grew up with, or if we… Read More ›
Technology takes time, for humans
A few days after writing an article lambasting the Apple Watch and asking what exactly it does, I have been wearing it every day. I don’t know how it happened and what changed, but it would appear that just… Read More ›
You’re Fired!
In early February, Vincent Viola, the nominee for Army Secretary, withdrew because of insurmountable conflicts of interest. The Wall Street billionaire was making an effort to untangle himself from his many business ties, but, as the New York Times put… Read More ›
