For twenty years I’d been in possession of a strange, sad box. It contained the last earthly possessions of a woman named Eva Kaye who died with no heirs. A social worker, the executor of her estate, paid me to clean out her house when I was a poor college grad. I couldn’t bear to…
I am absolutely obsessed with subtle interventions that have outsized effects. I’ll give an example from my law school days. Every first-year law student takes a tort law class, and every tort law class spends a lot of time focusing on causation — the inciting incident that triggers the injury at the center of any tort suit. Tracing…
“I used to be a light bulb, but now I’m a laser.” I love this quote (spoken by Nicholas Negroponte, regarding his intense focus on the $100 laptop project). It helped inspire the development of Clara, a brain-sensing, environment-augmenting, focus-enhancing smart lamp I built with Marcelo Mejía Cobo and Belen Tenorio for our combined MFA…
I’ve been working on a bunch of mapping projects lately, mostly designed for pedestrians. Thither is a navigation concept that reimagines efficiency. You give it a destination and an arrival time within the next hour, and it will route you to optimize for that precise arrival time. If you’re in a rush, it will try…
I love my Yamaha A-760 Natural Sound Stereo Amplifier (circa 1981). I came across it on craigslist six years ago, and I knew that it was the one when I discovered this restoration project online. One doesn’t typically put that much effort into something without a good reason. It only confirmed my excitement when I…
If you are playing around with Yosemite’s SMS relay feature and pissing off all your Android-using buddies with your cropped text messages, boy have I got the fix for you. I experienced this problem firsthand as soon as I upgraded to Yosemite and eagerly started sending SMS messages via the Messages app. My friend was…
So, in late August, my girlfriend and I moved into a lovely new apartment in the Slope, and everything was right with the world. …until October. That’s when we were faced with our first true cohabitation challenge — the ginkgo tree outside our front door. Let me get this out of the way first: the ginkgo is…
I gave a presentation on contracts of adhesion last night, as the final project for my Introduction to Cybernetics and the Foundations of Systems Design course at SVA IxD. Here it is! So… what’s a contract of adhesion? In brief, it’s a contract in which one party dictates all the terms, and the other party…
Fall’s vogue flavor seems to be the pumpkin spice latte. This limited-edition Starbucks concoction comes around every year, but things have finally gone viral. As a result, about a third of all pumpkin spice latte tweets are nice and earnest, and the rest are mostly trolling misogynistic comments about white women in yoga pants. So…
I recently gave a mini PechaKucha-style talk at SVA IxD about habits and cowpaths and such, which I’ve reproduced here: One day, when I was about thirteen years old, I decided to bike from my house to Brooklyn Heights for the first time. All was going fine… until I nearly merged onto the highway. (Don’t…