New York to deny gun ownership to those convicted of domestic abuse:
Convicted domestic abusers in New York are now required by law to turn in all firearms, expanding a state law banning them from owning handguns. New York passed the original legislation in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre.
This is fantastic news.
So, for our health, the “best” diet is a theme: an emphasis on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts, seeds, and plain water for thirst. That can be with or without seafood; with or without dairy; with or without eggs; with or without some meat; high or low in total fat.
The best foods don’t even have labels, because they are just one ingredient: avocado, lentils, blueberries, broccoli, almonds, etc.
From The Last Conversation You’ll Ever Need to Have About Eating Right, a conversation with Mark Bittman.
I have a poor diet. Out of laziness, mostly. It helps to read articles like this occasionally to remind myself to be better.
Michelle Goldberg is not the first nor the only person to make clear why my generation is so quick to balk at capitalism, but I particularly liked this quote:
After the fall of Communism, capitalism came to seem like the modern world’s natural state, like the absence of ideology rather than an ideology itself. The Trump era is radicalizing because it makes the rotten morality behind our inequalities so manifest. It’s not just the occult magic of the market that’s enriching Ivanka Trump’s children while health insurance premiums soar and public school budgets wither. It’s the raw exercise of power by a tiny unaccountable minority that believes in its own superiority. You don’t have to want to abolish capitalism to understand why the prospect is tempting to a generation that’s being robbed.
When you put out a survey to my generation asking in blunt terms, “Capitalism: yay or nay”, you’re going to get a lot of Nays. But I’d argue that nearly all of those Nays are a middle finger to the greedy people currently running things in America. Very few of us are truly anti-capitalist. Very few of us are honestly interested in socialism. Every single article I’ve read arguing that Millennials are killing capitalism comes off as fear-mongering. They read blatantly disingenuous. What we want is simple to understand: We want the Baby Boomer generation to stop stealing from our generation.
This quote from Robin Rendle struck a chord with me.
In fact, it takes a lot of time to design robust systems that can scale across every part of a UI/product and doing all that work weirdly enough doesn’t feel like work, instead it’s more akin to unnecessary hassle and stress. But I can’t help think that this is what should differentiate the work of product designers from the work of graphic or print designers—and orgs should really incentivize simple and perhaps even boring additions to a system or a product.
At the Journal, I’ve been feeling this acutely. So much of my work is just being focused on not unnecessarily doing anything new, as apposed to designing new stuff. We have a growing UI kit and our goal is to keep it tight. This means I’m constantly pumping the breaks on my designs. Is a new component too unique? Is there another UI element I should be reusing? Does this new component expand the UI kit in a way which opens us up to potential off-brand visuals? It takes a good deal of time to think this stuff through. At some point, it becomes clear that doing less is actually doing more, if that “less” is paired with extra thought.
Fascinating article about people who hear voices. It corroborates what I've long believed; these people are experiencing real things in their mind and body, but they're misattributing physical and chemical reactions to metaphysical causes. A psychic's talent isn't speaking with spirits. It's being highly sensitive to microemotions and moods and feeling their way through a conversation kind of like a psychosis sherpa.
I hear voices all the time, but it's not like someone talking to me. I hear dialogue, like a play happening in my mind. Imaginary conversations as a form of thinking. I suspect this is extremely common, especially among writers and heavy readers. I can easily imagine a person who takes this one step further, and hears these voices as breaking the fourth wall. A non-religious person would hear them for exactly what they were. A spiritual or unstable person might think it was ghosts or god.
Josh Clark clarifies a misconception about Atomic Design, which helps explain exactly why its so useful. He explains:
Right from the start, when Brad was first developing his tools and methodologies in our designs of TechCrunch and Entertainment Weekly, our process constantly zoomed back and forth between page level and atomic level. It’s never a linear path from small to large; it’s a constant roundtrip between the two scales.
Atomic Design prescribes a small-first process, but, like Josh says, it's a cycle. Sometimes, it's pretty chaotic, with design play often driving the car. But the structure of Atomic Design means you're always going back to defining and redefining the smallest elements (atoms), which are then used to construct larger ones (molecules, organisms, etc.). By the time you have your sights on the finish line, you'll have a highly structured design and front-end code architecture for building out nearly anything else in the future.
I've seen this play out a half-dozen times or more now on large projects. If you pay close attention to the detail (the atoms), and maintain control over the depth and breadth of your style guide, what you build will be highly efficient and easy to work with going forward.
Albarn revealed today that he has around 40 to 45 Gorillaz tracks in various states of completion, tracks which aren’t on Humanz. And also that he hopes to continue releasing these songs over the next 18 months or so. To this Albarn fan, the idea of a new Gorillaz track nearly every week is amazing. Please let this happen. Gorillaz, more than most any other project out there, is perfectly suitable for this kind of release cycle.
I’m in total agreement with this article deriding the nature of cuteness in so much of the software and products we use today.
“We’re in the middle of a decade of post-dignity design, whose dogma is cuteness. One explanation would be geopolitical: when the perception of instability is elevated, we seek the safety of naptime aesthetics.”
Ben Chestnut pushed this esthetic with Mailchimp, and wrote a book about it. I actually happen to be smitten with Freddie, the company’s mascot, and how he is used in the overall brand. The trend caught on like wildfire, however, and now so many apps feature illustrated animals hidden among the edges.
The popularity of Tumblr, gifs, and emojis has pushed them into the world of marketing. It really does infantilize the world we live in. There are plenty of sad reasons for why my generation feels a little less like the adults we figured we’d be by now. I’d prefer brands refrain from assuming it’s all a joke worth marketing upon.
This article in Curbed is the first I’ve seen to correctly diagnose the home-buying difficulties my generation is facing.
Homebuilders also aren’t responding to the needs and updated preferences of millennials fast enough to meet the demands of a group entering prime homebuying years. While many expect the millennial preference for cities to remain unchanged, even those moving to the suburbs desire aspects of that urban layout and lifestyle.
“Millennials want walkability and convenience,” says Ducker. “They have a higher transit use propensity than those in the past, and they want to be within walking distance of shopping and dining. The problem with the existing suburban housing stock in America is that it just doesn’t provide that.”
There are plenty of places in the US to live, but developers need to start building homes and neighborhoods which match our minimum requirements. I really can’t see my peers moving into most neighborhoods built during the last 30 years. The over-sized houses, absolute lack of style, and intentional disconnect from any town center are all major deficiencies. I intend to own a home one day, but it seems the number of existing homes I’d consider acceptable is very very small.
The more I think about it, the more ready I become for the end of Twitter. If it went away, I, personally, would not be so terribly inconvenienced. I would lose a few things, but I’d gain others, too. I’d gain back time. I would put greater emphasis on articles and books in my life. I might even write more. There are conceivable benefits of a world without Twitter.
But what about what we lose. We lose a very important online town square. We lose a chunk of free political discourse. We lose trustworthy, second-by-second real-time breaking news. We lose diversity in voices.
Can these lost things be found again in blogs? Are there other platforms for less privileged voices to ring out? I suspect the answer will be “no” on both accounts for a long while.
What I want to build is something which exists in that world between RSS readers, personal blogs, and Twitter.
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