“She has been a powerhouse of creativity and business acumen for one of the world’s most innovative companies. Marissa Mayer is leading the way in keeping America number one.” —Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives
Original article: Marissa Mayer: The Visionary: Women of the Year: glamour.com
Read & Discuss
Apparently, it would look just like this. Tom Baker (via NotCot) has produced a stunning set of photographs of a car-free Los Angeles. It’s a tough concept to imagine, but it sure is a beautiful one to behold. Photoshopped or not, these images fill me with a bizarrely wonderful feeling. Though they do make me realize just how much asphalt there is in this city.
Thanks, Amrit.
Read & Discuss
How often do you buy a new computer? After two years? Four? For such complex products, we go through them pretty quick, and that adds up to a lot of ultra harmful e-waste.
It’s something computer companies are already striving for, but designer Je Sung Park is taking the idea of a recyclable computer to its furthest limits. His Recyclable Paper Laptop is made from pulp and reprocessed materials, and would be broken down into the…
Read & DiscussThe image above is for a presentation I put together for a writing course a friend of mine teaches at Boston College. My role at my company (Newfangled) involves quite a bit of writing, and so my friend asked me to talk about writing from the perspective of someone who does it in a business context, rather than as an author.
I’m willing to bet that there are many professionals who have similarly found themselves writing for…
Read & DiscussLet me introduce myself first. I’m a graduate student in Industrial Design from the Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA. I’ve been working on my thesis for quite some time and as the design gets closer to realization, i’m opening up the stage for some discussion, advice, comments or critiques. People who know others or have been in the field can any time shoot me an email or comment and I’ll be more…
Read & Discuss
There’s a post on Kottke today with the headline “I don’t read books anymore” that has me thinking. As recently as two years ago, I was reading between 15 and 20 books a year, most of them novels—and that was in addition to my magazine and blog roll. This year, I haven’t finished reading a single novel. I made it about 400 pages into Infinite Jest, and was absolutely loving it, but I put it…
Read & Discuss
It’s tax policy time! The Homebuyer Tax Credit (official site here) gives $8,000 of taxpayers’ money to people buying new homes. It was about to expire, but Congress just signed off on an extension through April. Everyone seems to think this was a big mistake.
Ezra Klein (speaking in the third person) says it’s pointless because most people who are buying homes aren’t moved to do it by a paltry $8,000:
Like a lot of renters, Klein took…
Read & Discuss
Thanksgiving is a myth, or at least it is as taught to school children. I don’t mean to be a spoil-sport. Thanksgiving is still my favorite holiday, in part because it sanctifies gluttony. More meaningfully, it also is the rare holiday that is framed by beliefs I hold dear: about nature’s abundance, the vitality of kinship across the generations, and the…
Read & Discuss
Only the ACLU would think of this: They have banded with parents and student of Palm Beach County and mounted a trailblazing class-action lawsuit, the only of its kind (ever?), claiming that students’ constitutional rights are being violated by the incredibly horribly awful schools there, which result in low graduation rates, particularly among blacks and Latinos.
The county, for its part, says it’d doing a fine job, of course. So let’s look real quick at the numbers.
According…
Read & Discuss
Learning Jobs
Cities could enable job descriptions to grow or expand to convert low-wage, low-value work into high-wage, high value work. For example, a “garbage collector” could become a “waste management consultant”—beyond the menial work typically associated with the job description, they would learn to be street-scapers, environmentalists, and more through job-relevant training. The expectation is that people can and should broaden the scope of their work to make an impact. Part of this program is…
The televisions in 6.5 million American households will stop working when stations are forced to switch to the digital format—and I don’t care.
Although it’s been pushed back time and again (yesterday the Senate voted to postpone the transition deadline once more, from February 17th to June 12th), the switch from analog to digital television will happen eventually. When it does, valuable radio spectrum will be…
Read & Discuss
As an English teacher and language columnist, I know as well as anyone that the world is full of errors, errors that sometimes seem more numerous than monkeys at a banana convention.
There are spoonerisms, which are unintended reversals like “The Lord is a shoving leopard.” There are spellchecker-caused boners, like a recent student who wrote me, “Thanks for the calcification.” There are plain ol’ malapropisms, which give George W. Bush a grand…
Read & Discuss
Imagine Nevada’s Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, as a great sand pit, and imagine the population of the western United States as a colossal ostrich burying its head in the pit. And now, imagine the sand level dropping so fast that the willfully ignorant bird is forced to confront the…
Read & Discuss
There is an article in the Times about a new book promoting veganism by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson called The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food. I have a hard relationship with vegans and vegetarians. Partly because the idea of that diet repulses me, partly because I am pretty sure that I would need a disgusting amount of vegan food to get the number of calories I need on a daily basis (I’m not saying this…
Read & Discuss
About a year ago, my undergraduates had to explain to me what they meant by “Facebook group.” About six months ago, they tittered when I told them I had joined: professor- and parent-types were embarrassing, slightly unwanted invaders into their youthful site. About two months ago, I started getting frequent friend requests from, well, friends. Facebook is now officially open to oldsters.
Me and my peeps love Status Updates. We…
Read & Discuss
That’s the primary conceit of Urban Mole, a conceptual project by designer Phillip Hermes. He suggests using the existing sewer infrastructure to transport all manner of packages via robotic messenger—a series of tubes, if you will (reminds me of pneu-mail). The sudden lack of street-clogging delivery trucks could have a profound effect on congestion, both in terms of traffic and air quality. You can see a similar project called UNITX, including an actual prototype, here.
If…
Read & Discuss
Early on a recent Sunday morning I boarded a train to San Francisco’s Mission District to learn how to butcher a whole hog. The class, taught by the chef-turned-butcher Ryan Farr, was held in La Cocina, a non-profit shared-use community kitchen that Farr is using as a temporary venue until he opens his new butcher shop, to be called…
Read & Discuss
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most prevalent greenhouse gas. It is emitted when fossil fuels—such as gasoline, oil, and coal—are burned, and it traps heat in the atmosphere. We produce more CO2 than the environment can process, raising the temperature of the planet. It’s getting hot in here.
Clearly the carbon situation is a challenge. We recommend opting for public transportation more often, shifting to renewable energy sources, and recycling. Are there…
Read & Discuss
Bees, as we all know, unwittingly help flowers reproduce as they collect nectar. But humans have a strange and symbiotic relationship with plants, too—and it’s one in which we are manipulated more than we realize. That relationship is the subject of The Botany of Desire, a documentary adaptation of Michael Pollan’s eponymous 2000 book that will air on…
Read & Discuss
GOOD readers, our friends at Design 21’s Social Design Network (read about them here) want to pose a challenge to you. They want to know how you define social design. It’s very simple and very broad. Let us know what you think in the comments. The first 25 commenters will get a GOOD t-shirt and a stainless steel Allumonde ring from Design 21. Make sure you’ve included your real email with your GOOD profile, or we won’t…
Read & Discuss
It sometimes feels like stuff this wonderful doesn’t happen anymore. Fortunately YouTube is there with seemingly every moment of television available so we can still enjoy it:
Watch as the unflappable Mr. Rogers leaves a senator with goosebumps and saves PBS.
Thanks Folkert (via Spacecollective).
Read & Discuss
A look at the technology, design, and people behind the Mission One motorcycle
The world’s fastest production electric motorcycle was built in San Francisco’s Dogpatch—an industrial neighborhood bordered by the city’s waterfront. It is an amalgam of drydocks, former steel mills, and factories. Constructed in the 1860s and having largely survived the 1906 earthquake, the zone maintains a smoke-stacked atmosphere of sturdy stone and brick, the streets redolent of coal- and oil-powered commerce. It is appropriate…
Read & Discuss
Solar technology is nothing new. For literal millennia, humans have been harnessing the sun’s rays for energy. Over the past few decades, the dream of a solar-powered future has mostly conjured up images of rooftops covered by photovoltaic panels, turning every house into a mini power plant. But a somewhat lower-tech and much older solar solution…
Read & Discuss
Data visualization guru Ben Fry has created a unique map of the United States by displaying all of the nation’s 26 million roads—and nothing else. As he says:
“No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population.”
The resulting image of a transportation network sans substrate is very reminiscent of the plastinated human circulatory system pieces from Body Worlds. One…
Read & Discuss
Recent Comments
Hmmmm, let me see, how about we take a look at the parents of... Read & Discuss
[...] to see if you agree with the methodology, or if you can even put an... Read & Discuss
[...] http://www.good.is/post/is-owning-a-dog-worse-than-owning-an-suv/ ... Read & Discuss
[...] Good: Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems [...] Read & Discuss
you bet. free coffee for those who tweet about x shop. longer tail of... Read & Discuss