Every few months, we see someone in culture who unabashedly talks about not washing well, whether it's a celebrity discussing their griminess, or a random pers...

The latest fad amongst tech CEOs is no longer "founder mode", or taking drugs that they would fire you for taking, or telling everybody to return to...

It’s hard to really take in, after all these years, that most people have no memory of the day. The majority of people in the world were either not born, or no...

I have a lot of thoughts about systems and how they work, and how we can teach systems thinking to others. Maybe one good place we could start is by capturing...

Not too long ago, I said "Thanks to the mistrust of big tech, the creation of better tools for developers, and the weird and wonderful creativity of ord...

Back in the latter part of the 20th century, a lot of subcultures held onto a concept called "selling out", a nebulously-defined idea based on a nega...

The Webby Awards have recognized Kevin McCoy and I with their Lifetime Achievement Award this year , for "developing a blockchain powered way for artists...

If a company is debating whether a user's account should be suspended, they've already failed to build a modern platform that follows best practices. Why are t...

Thanks to the mistrust of big tech, the creation of better tools for developers, and the weird and wonderful creativity of ordinary people, we’re seeing an inc...

Here’s how you do it. Build a platform which relies on cultural creation as its core value, but which only sees itself as a technology platform. Stick to t...

You can't win unless you know what you're fighting for. Many of the most important and valuable milestones of progress in society have been achieved through...

I've been blogging here for more than 20 years, and the only organizing principle behind what I write here, if anything, is a fascination about how we make cul...

The key to protecting people's privacy on the internet isn't in trying to stop users' data from being sent to different services, it's in poisoning the well by...

One of the biggest sources of miscommunication is people having different styles of communication, or different norms about the right way to express emotion...

Recently, a motivated Prince fan created a spreadsheet that attempts to catalog the entirety of Prince's thousands of recordings over the course of his caree...

Amongst the many new publications that's popped up in the current newsletter boom, I've been enjoying Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci's "Embedded". One...

After a pause of a few years, Twitter announced today that they're going to resume allowing any user to request the blue verification checkmark for their acc...

Anytime a big new market pops up, people rush in to stake their claims and make their fortunes. Our culture loves creation myths, especially in technology. Fab...

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of the greatest games ever made, and one of the breakout hits of the Nintendo Switch platform, which is on its w...

On this day in 2007, Prince won Super Bowl XLI with a soaring halftime performance that climaxed with the skies opening up to honor his guitar solo. It is not...

It is almost impossibly difficult to explain Robin Byrd to anyone who was not an adult living in NYC toward the end of the last century, though everyone who...

I love any kind of advocacy for safer, more humane streets, so it was a real joy to get to guest on the wonderful The War on Cars podcast. Doug Gordon went d...

Duleshwar Tandi, better known these days as Rapper Dule Rocker, is one of the most successful and influential rappers to have ever come out of the Kalahandi di...

A while back, when I wrote out in plain words that we have a politically dominant death cult ruling America right now, I worried about the risks of saying my...

Ted Lasso, the standout series of Apple's new Apple TV+ streaming service, rightfully earned a place on many people's lists of the most-recommended new shows o...

About once a year, I do a little digital reset to help make my online life a little more pleasant. I’m not advocating that anybody do the same as me, but I h...

Twenty five years ago today, Microsoft released Windows 95. It was undoubtedly a technical leap forward, but its biggest, most lasting impacts are about how it...

With authoritarianism at our door, the policies that progressives are driving for will be dependent on whether the fundamental institutions of democracy are pr...

People are wrong on the Internet every day; generally I don’t try to fuss about that too much. But when Sam Lessin, a former VP of Product Management at Facebo...

A significant percentage of conservative culture in America defines “freedom” as death. This is causing a lot more problems right now than even its usual horri...

I almost can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of the work the Electronic Frontier Foundation was doing on behalf of all of us who care about the impact...

Today, for about half an hour in the afternoon, pretty much every app that you might try on your iPhone would likely have crashed upon opening it. It's probabl...

(Warning: this will be upsetting; you will not want to read this if you are already stressed.) [This piece was written in late February 2020, before there wa...

Every day, millions of people rely on independent websites that are mostly created by regular people, weren't designed as mobile apps, connect deeply to cultur...

We don’t even notice it anymore — “link in bio”. It’s a pithy phrase, usually found on Instagram, which directs an audience to be aware that a pertinent web li...

Congratulations to Function with Anil Dash for being named podcast of the year! In a media landscape absolutely littered with sound-alike tech podcasts reh...

I often talk about South Asian people, or how I identify as being an American of South Asian descent. Many folks outside of our communities don’t always know t...

Even though I watched the medium of podcasting being created since its inception, I'd always resisted a little bit participating myself. I think I just felt mo...

This week marks the 20th anniversary of this blog. I thought the best way to observe the milestone, and to try to pass along some of the benefits I’ve gained...

Playdate, the upcoming indie handheld gaming console from venerable software publisher Panic, is really important. But if you don't know the history of where t...

About seven years ago, inspired by Caterina Fake's seminal essay about fear of missing out , I wrote a bit about the Joy of Missing Out , and for a little...

With Janet Jackson's (woefully belated) acceptance into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it's well past time for a broader reckoning with her place in popular c...

“You can’t say anything anymore! You can’t even make jokes!” There’s a constant complaint from people in positions of power, mostly men, who keep making the...

I struggled for a long time when the nice folks at the Heat Rocks podcast asked me which Prince album I’d want to talk about on their show. Oliver Wang and M...

It’s always great to reconnect with old friends, and that especially holds true for old Internet friends. That must be why it was such a delight to spend some...

Back in November, I got to sit down with the amazing Krista Tippett for a lengthy interview in front of an incredibly warm crowd in Easton, MD. Now, that int...

There are going to be endless think-pieces and armchair analyses about why America elected Donald Trump as its next President. But you already know why. Don’...

Everybody’s got advice on what Twitter needs to do at its current crossroads. The answer might lie in revisiting the moment they first broke geeks’ hearts....

There’s an oddness to working on a project that most people don’t (yet) understand. And the last year (or years!) of working on ThinkUp has definitely been p...

In my my latest piece , I wrote about an issue that’s been bugging me for a long time: Asian American men in tech don’t do enough to speak up about inclusion...

We all know tech is excluding most people from participating. But one group is actually over represented. And we’ve been conspicuously silent. The major tech...

We don’t do nearly enough to examine what it means when we perform common actions on our social networks. These aren’t just guttural, reflexive responses! Th...

I’m sick to death of this whole stupid topic, and fighting off a brutal chest cold, so I’m going to ask your forbearance on this piece; It’ll be a little less...

I read my friend Brendan Koerner’s The Skies Belong To Us straight through; On its surface, this is a book that tells a riveting true (not inspired-by-true...

Every single day, almost every mainstream news source in America offers live updates throughout the day on a few metrics which have almost no meaning for most...

Last week, I had a chance to sit down with Bill Gates as part of a small group, in a discussion focused around the release of his annual letter and the progr...

Update: A few months after this piece was published, I was invited by Harvard’s Berkman Center to speak about this topic in more detail. Though the final tal...

Oh, hello there! I didn’t see you come in. Well, as long as you’re here, let’s look at some links around the web that I’ve found to be related to what we’ve be...

The current fashion amongst alpha geeks is to reinvent many of the building blocks of the social web. Given that I’ve been obsessed with that particular inters...

The other night, we had a wonderful dinner made by chef Tien Ho, who’s best known as the founding chef of Má Pêche (I got to join Ed Levine when he had the mea...

One of the great struggles in trying to challenge racist aspects of culture is that we’ve moved from overt, obvious, overbearing racist practices to things tha...

Update: I just got off the phone with Popchips founder Keith Belling, who was sincere and contrite as he offered a thoughtful, apologetic response that indic...

Update: The students did it! The re-vote from the board yielded a unanimous vote in favor of forming the Coexist club. I’m sincerely thankful to the students...

Apropos of nothing, I’ve become somewhat obsessed of late with the evolution of Eddie Murphy’s career and persona. Some relevant links: An absolutely excep...

We’re twenty years in to this world wide web thing. Today, I myself celebrate twelve years of writing this blog. And yet those of us who love this medium, who’...

Recently, I’ve had the chance to talk to a lot of talented people who are working on new projects or new startups, most of which aren’t really companies yet,...

As ever, the best thing about blogging is the conversations it kicks off. Some nice responses to recent posts here and around the web: In a follow-up to...

For more than a decade, an intellectually bankrupt habit of maligning new media has reared its head in traditional media outlets, perpetuating a false impressi...

Some great responses to, and extensions of, the things I’ve been writing about lately In response to Forking Is A Feature , Rafe Colburn offers up The cu...

In improvisational theater and comedy, one of the first rules of participation is allowing co-creation. Basically, instead of saying “No, wait!” you respond to...

Even more fun news! Today, I’m thrilled to announce the other big project I’ve been working on: Activate . It’s a new consultancy, founded by Michael Wolf (...

Most of my career has been dedicated to communications, either in making tools for enabling it, or in trying to practice the art myself. My friends tend to be...

A few weeks ago, I asked the people who follow my Twitter account to describe the difference between lemons and limes. My immediate prompt was because I wa...

Major labels function with the assumption that 90 percent of artists they sign are going to fail — that should have been a red flag for everybody. I mean tha...

Today’s Blog of the Year Pick: Ill Doctrine . Put simply, Jay Smooth’s Ill Doctrine is the best video blog on the web. (At least the best one that’s i...

From lolcats to goatse to the Zidane headbutt , I’ve been at least tenuously linked to some of the web’s most notable and notorious memes. Naturally, when...

Though I’ve been familiar with the terms for years, I wasn’t sure of the exact differences between a pidgin and a creole. So: A creole is the combination...

To those of us who grew up after his artistic heyday, James Brown is some combination of legend, influence, icon, and inevitably, caricature. So on the day we...

Background: I once wore a funny t-shirt for a photo that appeared in the New York Times, and a bunch of people thought it was kind of amusing, albeit juv...

It’s worth taking the time to really enjoy this amazing recounting of an effort to duplicate the recipe for Patsy’s pizza. It’s great for a few reasons: Go...

We’ve got another chance for the mainsream press to either laud or dismiss blogs, and I’m curious to see how it turns out. The thing to note is that, for these...

Rebecca talks about finding offensive content on a Technorati tag aggregation page. Besides the usual tension between free speech and community standards (to...

A young up-and-coming researcher named Clay Shirky has just published Flaming and the Design of Social Software , which I think is useful in that it talks abo...

On beyond the power law, Chris Anderson’s got a fantastic article in Wired about the importance of all the parts of culture that don’t fit in the 1% or 10% s...

Every time there’s a resurgence in general-audience (non-techie) interest in Google, as after Newsweek’s recent Google fawning , the issue of privacy in a pre...

Never bad, almost always great, Salon’s Masterpiece series are masterly pieces....

Says Michael Sippey : after reading two multi-thousand word articles… i was reminded again (um, duh) just how radically different great journalism is from...

Today is break my own rules day. First I will talk about other people’s websites, which I usually hate doing. But I’ll make an exception since some people are...