Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
★ David Pogue’s ‘Apple: The First 50 Years’
David Pogue: ‘Apple and Me’
David Pogue, on his new blog at Substack:
When the iPhone was about to go on sale in 2007, a thousand people lined up around the block at New York City’s Apple Store.
I’d written a parody of “My Way,” with the crazy idea of filming a music video with the participation of people standing in that line. It was a total blast; everyone in line was game. I edited the results together and uploaded it — and for six hours, ladies and gentlemen, it was the most watched video on YouTube. (It’s still there.)
Anyway. That night, I got a call from Jobs’s assistant. “I have Steve on the line,” she said. “Can you take the call?”
I was out to dinner with my family, but I said yes.
“David?” Jobs said when he came on the line. “I saw that song video you posted today.”
Oh GREAT, I thought. I steeled myself for another epic reaming by the CEO of Apple.
“I just wanted to say, it was the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.
Trump’s White House Ballroom Design Is Shit
The New York Times (gift link):
Critics warn it still has many issues — its portico is too big, its stairs lead nowhere, its columns will block views from inside the ballroom.
And that’s just the portico.
This is a really good piece, with animated-as-you-scroll illustrations pointing out specific problems with the design.
Such details affect how people passing by experience these iconic places, and how each structure fits into a capital city that has been planned around civic symbols and sightlines since the 1790s. The deliberation is also an expression of democracy, said Carol Quillen, the president and chief executive of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has sued the administration over the ballroom.
“Even if we are slow and we make mistakes and we fight, that process has meaning to us,” Ms. Quillen said. No project belonging to the public should be the vision of just one man, she said.
That is, however, how the ballroom has often been described.
“President Trump is the best builder and developer in the entire world, and the American people can rest well knowing that this project is in his hands,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. Past administrations and presidents have wanted a ballroom for more than 150 years, he said, and Mr. Trump will accomplish it.
The way that these lickspittles talk about Trump exactly the way North Koreans speak of Little Kim, or that anyone in any other cult speaks of the cult leader, is just revolting. Even the Chinese don’t speak of Xi “The Pooh” Jinping like this. No one in China pretends Xi is a genius architect.
Chris Espinosa, Employee #8, Profiled in The New York Times
Kalley Huang, writing for The New York Times (gift link):
As that happened, Apple laid off staff “again and again and again,” Mr. Espinosa said. His manager told him that he had been spared because he had worked for the company for so long that his severance package would be too expensive.
“I was wondering what I was going to do because I had no college degree and I had only worked at one company,” Mr. Espinosa said. Then he figured: “I was here when we turned the lights on. I might as well stick around until we turn the lights off.”
Lovely read.
The Talk Show: ‘Apple at 50’
Who better to join the show to commemorate Apple’s 50th anniversary than John Siracusa?
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