Blog archive

I’ve written extensively over the years for various blogs and websites, some my own, and some professionally. I’ve spent some time migrating old blog posts, articles, and ebooks from other sites into this new home. This library is still incomplete, but growing as I identify old content I’d like to restore, and I’ve noted any cases where content has been modified since its original publication date.

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2026

A man uses a new MacBook Pro with touch display outdoors.
Superabundance of platforms
Exactly 10 years ago to the week, I wrote a post about how Microsoft and Google getting into hardware was transforming the technology landscape. I bemoaned the state…
Steve Jobs takes the MacBook Air out of a manila envelope at Macworld 2008.
What does “Air” in Apple product names even mean?
I’m fascinated by the words Apple chooses for its product names. This company is ruthlessly selective with the products it builds, and for decades has effectively defined the…

2025

An overhead view of Barack Obama’s state of the union address, with both houses of Congress gathered.
Representative democracy is worth fighting for, even if we’ve never had one
Since I’ve been alive, our government has felt static and immovable. The same parties, platforms, and personalities have dominated the national stage for decades and resisted younger voices…

2024

Craig Federighi at WWDC 2024 beside Apple Vision Pro, a MacBook, an iPad and an iPhone, each showing the new Passwords app.
Erase your digital footprint
As more companies report data breaches, my personal credit card numbers are compromised, and especially as I become more familiar with cybersecurity, I’ve become increasingly preoccupied with where…
A black-and-white photograph of the Pioneer plaque affixed to the underside of the space probe.
Pioneer plaque
The Pioneer 10 and 11 probes launched by NASA in 1972 and 1973 were the first manmade objects with sufficient escape velocity to exit the solar system. While…
Image of Connor Mason wearing an Apple Vision Pro headset in an Apple Store, talking with his hands.
First impressions of Apple Vision Pro
There’s tech in this thing that doesn’t seem like it should be possible. The extended reality features are the biggest thing for me—app windows casting shadows onto nearby…

2023

2019

An image of a laptop in the dark, half closed, with the backlight from the screen illuminating its keyboard and the surrounding surface.
What if Apple replaced all its Mac apps with Catalyst?
Of course they shouldn’t do it. But what if they did? What features would they leave behind, or bring to iOS? Where does it make sense for them…
Visual effects from the Ender's Game film showing the zero-gravity battle room.
Ender’s Game and Twitter harassment
In the 1985 novel Ender’s Game, one of my favorite young adult sci-fi books, the “Nets” are the equivalent of the Internet, where characters can instantly communicate with…

2017

2016

A photograph of someone using a Microsoft Surface device with a stylus in tablet orientation.
Pixel and Surface are turning the electronics industry on its head
Even with the Cubs winning the World Series and national politics inspiring breathless headlines, perhaps one of the strangest things about 2016 has been the transformation of some…
An image of an iPhone 6s resting on a wooden table, running the Apple Music app in iOS 10. The home screen of Apple Music shows the new, bolder headers that are central to the new iOS 10 design aesthetic.
Apple’s new design style in iOS 10 is a statement on accessibility
When iOS 7 was first previewed to the public at WWDC 2013, it seemed Apple was obsessed with extending its devices’ thinness to its software. Fonts were ultralight,…

2015

Apple Music on a MacBook in iTunes, and on an iPad, Apple Watch and iPhone.
Apple Music’s design is broken
Apple’s new streaming service launched to massive hype this summer, bringing a new Beats Music–infused flavor to Apple’s iTunes-centric media ecosystem. Apple Music transforms how Apple approaches media…
Screenshot of typeface documentation for the San Francisco display font, showing sizes and alignment guides.
What’s in a font? Working with San Francisco
Because the Apple Watch display is so small, and because there are so few items that can be economically displayed within Watch apps, the elements that designers have…

2014

Illustration of “material” components of progressively larger sizes.
Material Design wipes the slate clean
When Android took the scene on the T-Mobile G1 in 2008, its aesthetic resembled the Google of a bygone era. Software buttons were covered in a gloss and…
Image of a Nexus 6 device sitting on a table next to a pen, a notepad, and a bowl with kiwi, figs, and almonds.
More Android than Android
Android’s new poster child
An image of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg presenting at a conference, with a large visualization of the Facebook social graph behind him.
Facebook forever
Until as recently as last year, Mark Zuckerberg thought of Facebook as a web company. Now, he says, mobile is the company’s “big focus” moving forward. In this…
Illustration of Material Design components across a laptop, tablet, and phone form factor in neon green and purple colors.
Material design for consumer apps
In recent years, Google has put an increased emphasis on the design and consistency of its products’ web and mobile interfaces. At this year’s I/O developer conference, the…

2013

2012

I’m afraid your god is dead, Dave
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Nietzschean posthumanity
Still from the film Citizen Kane.
Citizen canon
An analysis of Citizen Kane and literary tradition
Gender and its discontents
Sex, gender, and politics in Le Guin & Haldeman

2011

The widening gyre
Yeats’s The Second Coming and cyclical Christian mythos
Nothing to be done
“After Waiting for Godot,” George Szanto quotes Darko Suvin in his essay on Beckett’s most famous play, “writing dramas like Eliot or Williams, Camus or latter Ionesco is…
Nothing is more real than late modernism
An analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, modernism, and postmodernism
The impact of factory farming
A raucous crowd waves American flags and celebrates the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011.
On rejoicing in death
Not to belittle the symbolic magnitude of Osama bin Laden’s assassination, both for American morale domestically as well as foreign perception and relations, but something irked me about…
A scene of urban life in the 1800s.
All that is solid melts into air
The desire of Western societies to begin organizing themselves more efficiently gave rise to curious clusterings of peoples and structures that became centers of commerce, culture, and government.…
Boxers and bullfighters
The Lost Generation, a term coined by author Gertrude Stein to refer to the loose community of expatriate writers and artists living in France after the First World…
Atreyu tries to rescue his horse from the mud in a scene from the film *The Neverending Story*.
Atreyu with a thousand faces
Until relatively recently, literary history has trended towards the fantastic. These were fairy stories, dealing with supernatural beings, forces of nature, and the oft-hapless humans who interact with…
The water’s clear and innocent: Radiohead’s King of Limbs
Radiohead devotees are an interesting bunch. Since—along with millions of other fanatics the world over—my fandom of the Oxford experimental band borders on religious devotion, I was obviously…
A still from the 2013 live-action adaptation of *The Great Gatsby*, where Daisy Buchanan, played by Carey Mulligan, looks to the camera as she dances with her husband.
Beautiful little fools
A feminist critical analysis of The Great Gatsby
Photo of Steve Jobs holding up the first-generation iPad.
Tablet wars: how iPad is lapping the industry
How Apple won the everyman
Bootleggers and gold-diggers
A Marxist critical analysis of The Great Gatsby

2010

James and the giant, looming specter of nuclear annihilation
Cold War paranoia in Roald Dahlʼs children’s novel
Fluorescent snapper!
The function of animals in The Life Aquatic
Looking past our differences, specifically exoskeletons
One of the essential elements of our science-fiction-and-fantasy-obsessed culture is the understanding of what constitutes a monster. Most of these popular stories involve a monstrous entity in some…

2009

Cropped image of the album cover for Hail to the Thief by Radiohead.
“Let me hear both sides”: Radiohead and political discourse
In recent years, political platforms endorsed by rock musicians been elevated to a prominent position in popular culture and in the psyches of mainstream Americans. Artists with uncompromising…
Screenshot of a Twitter exchange between Major Tom and Ground Control, recreating the lyrics of "Space Oddity" by David Bowie.
Space Oddity in 140 characters
David Bowie’s Major Tom and Ground Control, retold as a Twitter timeline in 2009.
On Mutilation by Jim Sherry
Among the more uncommon experiences is the realization that one of your close friends is destined for greatness. Thus was the singular thought running through my mind after…
His noodly appendage
When the Kansas School Board in 2005 decided to teach the theory of intelligent design alongside established theories of evolution, there was an uproar among more level-minded citizens…

2008

Aerial photography Lake Cote, Costa Rica showing an unidentified object from September 1971.
Unidentified flying objects
Like I said when I started this blog, I’d give my opinions on “anything and everything,” including things like flying saucers. While I don’t take them (or their…
Review of MobileMe
Apple has all but completed the transition from their previous .Mac services to their new replacement, called MobileMe. Loosely defined, MobileMe is a collection of web applications and a…
Meryl Streep and Robert Redford lounge in the grass in the 1985 film adaptation of Out of Africa.
Fact or feminism
Feminist ideals in Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa

2007

Before the launch of the iPhone, I made an advertisement in my driveway using sidewalk chalk.
First impressions of iPhone
The iPhone was announced at the Macworld Developers’ Conference in January 2007. When it was first announced, it created a media frenzy. The next great gadget from Apple…