Masturbation: A Short History of a Great Taboo
This film by Lori Malépart-Traversy is a fascinating peak into the legacy of the Graham Cracker guy, Sylvester Graham, And the Kellogg’s guy, John Harvey Kellog, and other Presbyterian and…
Reality testing: measuring the long term impact of journalism
When Margaret Wente was getting busted repeatedly for plagiarizing, her publisher, The Globe and Mail, more or less defended her. Critical commentators’ noted that no one spins harder or better…
Cognition trick: the Google Effect
The Google effect is a kind of digital amnesia that permeates this internet age. Explored by Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner, this variety of cognitive bias reveals the fascinating relationship between…
The stickiness of so-called “reverse racism”
“Reverse racism” has been debunked many times. It’s a bogus idea. Unfortunately, it is also a bogus idea that is widely believed. Like other rightwing tropes such as “the nazis…
A new generation of queer love: Bloom by Kevin Panetta and Savanna Ganucheau
Bloom is a graphic novel about a young man in a small town, working in his family’s bakery. It is a meditation on patience and slowness and joy.
Martin Speckter, type design, and the interrobang
99% Invisible did an episode on the interrobang recently. I was interested to learn that early Greek and Roman writing didn’t have spaces! Rack that up to stuff I took for granted. Apparently an ad man in the sixties developed the interrobang…
Some thoughts on microblogging with self-hosted WordPress
So I’ve been experimenting with microblogging on Mastadon, micro.blog and Tumblr. I decided it’s time we have our own self-hosted WordPress microblog…
Fixing the HTTPS on a Knight Lab TimelineJS instance
Last year I used TimelineJS to create a nice interactive timeline of some misogynist tweets by Colby Cosh. After we added HTTPS to our website, the article never properly encrypted…
UX failure of the Save-On-Foods receipt
The Save-On-Foods grocery receipt has 50 bits on information, but not the information I was looking for which is incredible…
“Today in Three Panels” with Dean Mang-Wooley
In which I talk to Dean, an illustrator, and the creator of Today in Three Panels, and we discuss the thin membrane between private and public moments…
Art and the politics machine: Imagine Our Parks
In which Sherwin reflects on how artists allow us to question what is politics, what is shared space, and what is community…
The failure of “Movements in Art Since 1945”
Stories of history, and art history, are too important to be left to the colonial, white, patriarchal views of of a few…
Friendship to the Max! A Review of Lumberjanes!
I recently discovered Lumberjanes, a comic published by Boom! Box, an offshoot of Boom! Studios. I strongly recommend …
Making 5 by 5 Videos
The rules are pretty simple. Create a 25 second video with 5 five-second clips, using only natural sound. To my surprise, I found these constraints liberating…
Holy hell, Batman; I’ve been wrong
There are known-knowns. And then there’s all the fucked up arbitrary shit we believe, and impose on others, for no really good reason, like for example the use of quotation marks …