Category: History
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Dreamgirls and the Self-Referential Musical
I saw Dreamgirls this weekend — it was great! I’ve been to my fair share of movies where the audience broke out into enthusiastic and spontaneous applause before, but they’ve almost always applauded some kind of triumphant action scene, never clapping and cheering for an individual performer. Which is to say that they are applauding…
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Bring Your Camera to your Polling Place
On Election Day (Tuesday!), please bring a camera with you to your polling place and take some pictures of American democracy in action. Then submit your photos to the ingenious Polling Place Photo Project, which will document every one of America’s election locations through good old fashioned web-based citizen journalism. I can’t even begin to…
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The Best Voting Technology
It seems laughably obvious that this supposedly cutting-edge voting device will feel positively ancient in only a couple of years. It already looks like a cheap peice of crap to me, hardly something worthy of being integral to the American democratic process. And believe it or not, this photo was taken in 2004 — even…
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Why I Blog About Politics
WWBFD? Benjamin Franklin took for granted that part of his role as a technologist with access to mass media (he was, after all, a printer and publisher) was to make public arguments about his own political views. If he were around today, and I know that this isn’t an original thought, he’d almost certainly be…
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Class and Web Design, Part 6: Breaking The Class Barrier
(This is Part 6, the final part of this series. Please check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3a, Part 4, and Part 5.) Despite my calls for increased class consciousness, I actually think that class may be less and less important as American culture evolves and as class exploration becomes more fluid…
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Clinton in the Fox Hole
Clinton on Fox. Notice the footnote: If Clinton hadn’t done this interview, Richard Clarke’s role in fighting terror (and Bush’s role in ending Clarke’s role) would drift further away from the Fox viewer’s consciousness. I read a post today at Sean Coon’s connecting*the*dots blog entitlted “and keep your enemies closer“, and I thought at first…
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Elegant Experiments
The classic Skinner box experiment. A comment by Steve Baty on my recent series about design research got me thinking about the fine art of experimental research design: Where research (in all forms) becomes a waste of time and effort is when the research design and methodology applied invalidate the conclusions _before_ they can be…
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Trusting the Arsonists to Put Out the Fire
During the 1800’s (before the formation of today’s FDNY) there were some private New York City “fire departments” who would deliberately set fires then demand payment from property owners to put them out. This is how the Bush Administration is treating America regarding Iraq today: “We set the fire, so you should trust us to…