Huber Horan: In reality, Uber’s platform does not include any technological breakthroughs, and Uber has done nothing to “disrupt” the eco­nomics of providing urban car services. What Uber has disrupted is the idea that competitive consumer and capital markets will maximize overall economic welfare by rewarding companies with superior efficiency. Its multibillion dollar subsidies completely […]

Johnson Banks: “If it’s ‘out there’, don’t we own it?” Well, it depends. To claim a ‘level of distinctiveness’, it’s usually down to time, and the rule of thumb is seven years. Use a logo for that amount of time, consistently, that people can see and recognise and you begin to establish some ownership of […]

Shannon Mattern: We’ve long conceived of our cities as knowledge repositories and data processors, and they’ve always functioned as such. Lewis Mumford observed that when the wandering rulers of the European Middle Ages settled in capital cities, they installed a “regiment of clerks and permanent officials” and established all manner of paperwork and policies (deeds, […]

Benedict Evans: There are about 5.3bn people on earth aged over 15. Of these, around 5bn have a mobile phone.

TidBITS: Have you ever wondered why, if Dark Mode is such a revelation, it took Apple 35 years after the first Macintosh to revert to the look of the light-on-dark CRT-based monitors of the Apple ][ and IBM PC era? Were those green-on-black and amber-on-black screens really so wonderful? No, they weren’t, and one of […]

Nicolas Kemper: Accretive projects are everywhere: Museums, universities, military bases – even neighborhoods and cities. Key to all accretive projects is that they house an institution, and key to all successful institutions is mission. […] So, why do cathedrals take so long to build? Because the finish line is besides the point. Cathedrals are so […]

Near-realtime Earth observation resources.

The takeaway: “What you eat matters a lot more than whether it’s local or organic, or what kind of bag you use to carry it home from the store.” Also, this on fish.

Alex Danco: As Cooking As A Service expanded from <10% to 25-30+% of our eating, we grew to consume and expect a far greater selection and variety of food compared to when we did all our cooking ourselves. Our consumption choices around what food we eat gradually pivoted from “What am I able to cook […]

New York Times: Thus is the business model of WeWork, recently valued at $47 billion, now only facially about commercial subletting. All its accessories serve to buttress its real product: “office culture” as a service. When people at the company try to explain that culture, they invariably resort to talk of positive energy sources and […]

The Pudding’s guide on how to get started with data visualisations. Part 2 is here.

Seth Godin: It’s probably easier to create heavily adorned mash-up than it is to produce a Field Notes notebook. Stripping away the artifice doesn’t always leave something pure. It often creates banality, the simple commodity that’s easy to buy cheaper one click away. […] If Nike announced that they were opening a hotel, you’d have […]

Basically an automated Bechdel Test.

Slate: “Do you know what ‘ttfn’ stands for?” I whipped around to see a lanky preteen girl browsing a rack of greeting cards with a friend. “No, what’s that?” asked the friend. “Ta ta for now,” the girl said. “People used to say it to text goodbye.” Back to when going AFK was an option […]

Logic Mag: The thing that still confused me is how reliable supply chains are, or seem to be. The world is unpredictable—you’ve got earthquakes, labor strikes, mudslides, every conceivable tragedy—and yet as a consumer I can pretty much count on getting what I want whenever I want it. How can it be possible to predict […]

In their own words: Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 2,850 genres by Spotify