“It is eminently doable to buy or lease a Xerox or similar machine that prints perfect bound books and use it to do short runs and galley printings. One of these machines could print books for a lot of SPD clients, I expect. I kinda wish I had tried harder to raise the funds for…
Month: March 2024
“How airlines fly away from accountability” – Boondoggle
“In 1978, Congress passed and then-President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Airline Deregulation Act, which was part of a deregulatory zeal that grabbed national lawmakers in the 70s and 80s, and led to the deregulation of vast swathes of the economy, from trucking to railroads to telecoms to, perhaps most famously, banking and finance….
“What makes Dragon’s Dogma 2 a fiery breath of fresh air” – Keza MacDonald (Pushing Buttons, Guardian)
“Some players have reacted with dismay to this game’s inflexibility, but I respect Dragon’s Dogma 2’s willingness to ruin your day from time to time. It doesn’t bend to your will; you have to work around its rules – even when, at the beginning, you don’t necessarily know what they are. At first you might…
“On Productivity” – Counter Craft
“Publishers believe—and to be fair I see no reason to think they’re wrong—that having a few years between books is useful for everyone involved. It gives the publishers more time to launch books properly, gives readers time to catch up and build excitement, and those both help the author actually sell copies” https://countercraft.substack.com/p/on-productivity
“Killing The Messenger: My Final Days Working at a Disaster” – Jordan Hoffman (Intelligencer)
“But I soon recognized that time-consuming reporting or rich critical essays were less valued by upper management than quick hits. I’ll never forget the day I was told, breathlessly, by the then-head of the entertainment channel that Toni Collette was trending. (Trending, I say, trending! Do you hear me? Toni Collette is trending!!! I believe…
“Trump Haters Turned Trump Voters” – Olivia Nuzzi (Intelligencer)
“When I returned to the state in September, she invited me over, and for several hours at her kitchen counter, where she showed me the semiautomatic rifle she keeps in a drawer, she explained how a former precinct captain for Teddy Kennedy’s 1980 presidential campaign became the kind of woman who bulldozed through a crowd…
“Haunted House on the Thames” – Jörg Schindler (Das Spiegel)
“In its better moments, the House of Lords is a kind of council of elders, where the polished word and cogent argument have a home in a place where politics is more than an exercise of slavish obedience in the interest of climbing the career political ladder. It is a bulwark against populism, which is…
“The Rotten State” – Will Dunn (New Statesman)
“Senior civil servants are “who you dream of, if you’re a vendor”; they may be exceptionally bright people with Oxbridge firsts who have completed their training at the Major Projects Leadership Academy, but in practice they have never worked in the industry with which they are negotiating. More fundamentally, civil servants do not understand that…
“Make better documents” – Anil Dash
“Similar to the importance of sequencing and order, you almost always want to start by clearly and simply stating your conclusion, or declaring your request or question. Very often, people feel a lot of anxiety about the need to preface their big dramatic point with lots of build-up. But you almost never want to be…