How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy

No one would accuse Jaroslav Flegr of being a conformist. A self-described “sloppy dresser,” the 63-year-old Czech scientist has the contemplative air of someone habitually lost in…

Crickets 'forewarn' unborn babies about spiders

ScienceDaily (Feb. 17, 2010) — Just because cricket moms abandon their eggs before they hatch doesn't mean they don't pass wisdom along to their babies. New research in the American Naturalist…

The Case Against Google

For the last two months, you've seen some version of the same story all over the Internet: Delete your search history before Google's new privacy settings take effect. A straightforward piece…

The myth of the overnight success

Angry Birds was Rovio’s 52nd game. They spent eight years and almost went bankrupt before finally creating their massive hit. Pinterest is one of the fastest growing websites in history, but…

Prisoner's Dilemma

There are three stages in the history of baseball. In the first stage, which ended about 1920, if you stood up in the front row and bellowed, "Hey, Cobb, I hear your mudder used to work bachelor…

The Obvious, the Easy, and the Possible

Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to…

The Best Browser is the One You Have with You

The web as we currently know it (and therefore build it) has primarily been accessed from the desktop. Current trends indicate this is about to change. The ITU predicts that in the next 18–24…

For a Future-Friendly Web

It is time to move toward a future-friendly web. Our current device landscape is a plethora of desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets, feature phones, smartphones, and more, but this is just the…

Jonathan Swift - A Modest Proposal

It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors, crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed…

Many, lightweight, interactions over time

Technology is driving some dramatic shifts that will change the face of business, and change the fundamentals of marketing and advertising in particular. I’m constantly thinking about better…

Groupthink

In the late nineteen-forties, Alex Osborn, a partner in the advertising agency B.B.D.O., decided to write a book in which he shared his creative secrets. At the time, B.B.D.O. was widely regarded as…

Give it five minutes

A few years ago I used to be a hothead. Whenever anyone said anything, I’d think of a way to disagree. I’d push back hard if something didn’t fit my world-view. It’s like I…

Don't Let Culture Vultures Scuttle Your Strategy

This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert's views alone. Step inside any company, no matter the size, stage of development, or level of success, and…

How One Con Man Used OkCupid for Fun, Fraud, and Profit

He is Dan Kaufman, Dan Kay, Dan Katze. He is a celebrity chef, an internet entrepreneur, a television producer. He has worked for Apple, Google, AOL, the Rainbow Room. He hangs out with Steve Case,…

Where’s Earl?

How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy

No one would accuse Jaroslav Flegr of being a conformist. A self-described “sloppy dresser,” the 63-year-old Czech scientist has the contemplative air of someone habitually lost in…

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts,…

Searching for Silver Linings in Indianapolis

Like every other New England Patriots fan, I spent the hours after Super Bowl XLVI trapped in some sort of catatonic trance. It happened again? Against the same team? How could THAT happen again?…

Bad, Bad Lori Arnold

Author Karl Taro Greenfeld Illustrator Dave McKean By Lori Arnold as told to Karl Taro Greenfeld / Illustration by Dave McKean South Phoenix is quiet, and I m up early, drinking coffee at a round…

The Story of a Suicide

Dharun Ravi grew up in Plainsboro, New Jersey, in a large, modern house with wide expanses of wood flooring and a swimming pool out back. Assertive and athletic, he used…

The Mystery of the Duane Reade Drugstores

Inside the Duane Reade on the corner of Delancey and Ludlow on the Lower East Side, a thick white guy in dusty construction boots ruminates on a display of Ben-Gay and its generic counterparts.…

Fresh to Death and Sick as Cancer

So go figure — Lana Del Rey turned out to be not exactly the DIY up-from-nowhere straight-out-the-Lynchian-trailer-park untouched-by-human-marketing self-created computer-ghost we all thought…

Setting up a lab in your agency

It’s become fashionable over the past few years for agencies to establish a Lab. In December of 2010 we decided to create a Labs group at Teehan+Lax. While to the outside it may seem like we…

In Which I Fix My Girlfriend’s Grandparents’ WiFi and Am Hailed as a…

Lo, in the twilight days of the second year of the second decade of the third millennium did a great darkness descend over the wireless internet connectivity of the people of 276 Ferndale…

Microsoft keeps it old-school with a pricey text adventure game,…

Microsoft has jumped onto the free-to-play bandwagon with its latest game, a text-driven adventure called Visual Studio 2010. The innovative new game marries the traditional interactive fiction text…

An Important Time for Design

Design is on a roll. Client services are experiencing a major uptick in demand, seasoned design professionals are abandoning client work in favor of entrepreneurship, and designer-co-founded startups…

On the Welcome End of a Black Year

At the beginning of 2011, all I wanted was a year of single-minded focus on our work at Simple. 2010 was a frenetic year for me, full of change and excitement, risk and commitment. I had made a…

For Enterprise Social Networks, how much adoption is enough?

In traditional enterprise change initiatives, you tend to start with a defined set business requirements to address a given problem or opportunity. Socially-driven enterprise change, however, is…

What Defines a Meme?

What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a spark of life. It is information, words, instructions, Richard Dawkins declared in 1986. Already one of the world s…

Solitude and Leadership

All Points - Spring 2010 Print If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts By William Deresiewicz The lecture below was delivered to the plebe class at the United States…