From Michael Wolf’s brilliant essay which likens the crumbling Murdoch empire to a mafia family in decline…
It’s a superior and blind kind of loyalty. “Can you…?” Murdoch says to several executives visiting with him on his boat (this is the old boat—much smaller than the grander one he has now) when he receives a phone call that he needs to take in private. The executives jump in the water and swim around the boat until the call is done (and this story is not apocryphal).
Google’s new Twenty Things I Learned About the Internet is both a great illustrated reference of how the Internet works, and also a good example of how to build beautiful documents that live online. Delightfully illustrated by Christoph Nieman.
Perhaps there’s something to the idea that designers are more prone to sarcasm than the average person. According to Katherine P. Rankin’s new study of Alzheimer’s patients, the part of the brain we use to appreciate sarcasm is not in the left brain where most of us process our primary language, but in the right hemisphere. As explained in the New York Times:
…the magnetic resonance scans revealed that the part of the brain lost among those who failed to perceive sarcasm was not in the left hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in language and social interactions, but in a part of the right hemisphere previously identified as important only to detecting contextual background changes in visual tests.
“THE STUFF OF THOUGHT: Language as a Window Into Human Nature” is a new book by Steven Pinker reviewed by William Saletan in today’s New York Times.
The medium isn’t just reason; it’s language — and language isn’t the manifestation of one mind; it’s the joint manifestation of millions. The reason language works is that it reflects the world as we jointly experience it.