Will Kujawa’s Squarespace 6 iOS Icons Solution

When I began setting up this site a little over a year ago, I knew I wanted to use Squarespace—I wanted the feel and functionality of an advanced CMS with the ease-of-use of a drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG CMS. But the devil is in the details and that’s where Squarespace’s support community shines.

E.g.: I really wanted the ability to add retina-quality icons to my site. Is it a vital detail? I guess not, but to me, every detail is vital. Luckily, I found Will Kujawa’s instructions on how to achieve this.

But then, the instructions disappeared.

Good news—they’re back again.

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I Paid That Bribe: Helping Amazon To Make My Life Worse

When I finished reading George Packer’s New Yorker article, “Is Amazon Bad For Books?” I planned on linking to it and maybe adding three or four sentences of my own thoughts. But the piece stuck with me for the rest of the day, and the next day, and the next.

I realized I had more to say.

I’m an Amazon Prime subscriber. I am also an author whose book is sold through Amazon, a company that has ushered in an era in which, as Packer quotes, “Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value.”

By shopping on Amazon as much as I do, I’m actively supporting the biggest threat to the industry I am trying to succeed in.

I’m, at best, a hypocrite, and at worst, helping to destroy my career, warehouse worker’s lives, and who knows what else—consumer culture as we know it?

I sat down and thought about all of this and about what it might mean for the future.

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Shackle the Viewer To Reality: The Kubrick Marathon

I don’t remember why I decided that watching all of Stanley Kubrick’s films in order was a necessary task. I mean, I know why—I like making lists and I like watching movies and I have a respect/fascination for/with perfectionists. I somehow convinced Danielle, my wife, that this project was a good idea—she was nine months pregnant with our daughter Luna at the time—and I think that I’d also subconsciously decided that if the fetus was subjected to so many hours of an auteur like Kubrick, she would emerge predisposed to greatness.

Now that we’re finished, let me tell you what we learned.

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Doing Only What I Love

On September 20th, 2013, I wrote:

I learned that now that my wife and I are back at work, that I’ve begun to say what is essentially a long series of goodbyes to my daughter, and that before each one I won’t want to say it, and after each one I will regret it. And that in that moment, I will regret bringing a child into specifically this world, only to thrust her into the hands of others, and through my leaving her day after day, force her to begin to understand the basic, shitty truths about our world, our lives, our existence.

The goodbye that prompted that passage came the morning that I left Luna for her first day of daycare.

A lot has changed since then.

And now I’ve got some news to share.

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“‘I have a lot of possibility,’ she says. ‘I do.’” →

Andrea Elliot, writing for The New York Times:

Children are not the face of New York’s homeless. They rarely figure among the panhandlers and bag ladies, war vets and untreated schizophrenics who have long been stock characters in this city of contrasts. Their homelessness is hidden. They spend their days in school, their nights in shelters. They are seen only in glimpses — pulling overstuffed suitcases in the shadow of a tired parent, passing for tourists rather than residents without a home.
Their numbers have risen above anything in the city’s modern history, to a staggering 22,091 this month. If all of the city’s homeless children were to file into Madison Square Garden for a hockey game, more than 4,800 would not have a seat.
Yet it is the adult population that drives debates on poverty and homelessness, with city officials and others citing “personal responsibility” as the central culprit. Children are bystanders in this discourse, no more to blame for their homelessness than for their existence.
Dasani works to keep her homelessness hidden. She has spent years of her childhood in the punishing confines of the Auburn shelter in Brooklyn, where to be homeless is to be powerless. She and her seven siblings are at the mercy of forces beyond their control: parents who cannot provide, agencies that fall short, a metropolis rived by inequality and indifference.

There is no snippet from this mammoth piece of reporting by Andrea Elliot that could ever do the writing justice, nor adequately summarize the nuance of the story being told. The basic facts about the piece are:

Andrea Elliott, an investigative reporter with The New York Times, began following Dasani and her family in September 2012. The series is written in the present tense, based on real-time reporting by Ms. Elliott and Ruth Fremson, a photographer with The Times, both of whom used audio and video tools.
Throughout the year, Dasani’s family also documented their lives in video dispatches from the Auburn Family Residence, which does not allow visitors beyond the lobby. Ms. Elliott and Ms. Fremson gained access to the shelter to record conditions there.
The reporting also drew from court documents, city and state inspection reports, police records, the family’s case files at city agencies and dozens of interviews with shelter residents. Most scenes were reported firsthand; others were reconstructed based on interviews and video and audio recordings.
The Times is withholding the last names of Dasani and her siblings to protect their identities. The nicknames of some of Dasani’s siblings are used in place of their birth names.

The story of Dasani and her family is terrifying and frustrating and maddening and even joyous (at times). No matter where you land on the political spectrum, you will, at points, find facts that move you and facts that infuriate you.

I don’t believe that there is an easy answer or a quick fix to the litany of issues at play here. And it would be so much easier—simpler—to say that what they, and the families like them, need is either more assistance or less assistance. The hard truth is that it might take a little of both, or worse, something we haven’t thought of yet. Honestly, I’m not even sure that every issue can be fixed here—I think that some are just inherently part of the system that Dasani and her family—that we all—exist within in this country.

Capitalist society is a triangle; there just isn’t enough space at the top for all of us. The weight being supported at the bottom—by the bottom—is crushing. Relentless. And that fact manifests itself in a myriad of ways over time.

Dasani and her family’s plight, and the internal and external factors that contribute to it, isn’t fair, isn’t right, isn’t something that can just be ignored. How can it be all of those things at once?

Andrea Elliot is going to win a Pulitzer for sure, so there’s no wishing the tale away. And the initial fad of sending this article around seems to have already passed (I wonder how many who emailed it, tweeted it, posted it on Facebook did so without actually taking the time to, you know, read all of it.), so there’s no reason to be concerned with speed or popularity.

But, in light of the time of year, I implore you to spend some time this weekend reading the story in its entirety—all five parts. It isn’t nearly as based in an emotional narrative as you would suspect, although I admit to tearing up at several points during parts four and five. It is objective and unflinching and told in straight-forward, stripped-down language; there’s no need for anything more.

I don’t know what I can do, what any of us can do, to help Dasani and her siblings and her parents, and the thousands of people in situations similar to theirs, do to 100% overcome the obstacles in their life.

I do know where you can start, though.

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Duplicates and Individual Components and Things Missing

Does music (or art in general) owe it to the listener to explain everything up front? Is outside research necessary? Should it matter if part of your enjoyment depends on knowing something that isn’t explicitly supplied?

There have been reviews of Arcade Fire's latest album, Reflektor, that hail it as a triumph and others that mock its mere existence. It appears to be destined to become one of those albums that, cliché be damned, you either get or you don’t.

But what happens if the album, like other albums from them in the past, winds up meaning more to you than even the band could have imagined?

Two weeks ago, I decided to write a review of Reflektor. I wound up writing an essay about art and criticism and my life and the soundtrack that accompanies it and death and birth and even a little bit about Arcade Fire’s music.

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A Toast to Several Beginnings: A Review of Stanziato’s Second Craft Beer and Food Pairing

When it came time for my wife and I to go out on our first Date Night since having a baby, it seemed thematically appropriate for the outing to double as our third anniversary celebration. We’re both very efficient people. And as a bonus, because of the venue, every drink over the course of the evening would serve as a toast to not one, but several beginnings.

Our decision to attend an event at a local restaurant that we've come to love since moving to the woods of Connecticut—Stanziato's Wood Fired Pizza—brought into focus how much our life has changed since our wedding three years prior.

But was it a change for the better?

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You Can Only Live Inside One Fake World At a Time

In 2006, during my senior year of college, I began writing a novel called Tomorrow is Friday.

As I wrote, I was concerned by the strip-mining of my life in service of my material. I wondered if this would be frowned upon in the Creation Game. I also recognized how untenable of an approach it was to creative writing. All of my fears coalesced into a bigger, pulsing, at times all-encompassing thought: this is the only novel I will ever be able to write. I have no other ideas.

What's worse?

This wasn't the last time that this fear would haunt me.

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I Have To Have It Bad For My Writing To Be Good

Write fiction for a living and at some point, you’ll convince yourself that you need to set yourself on fire in order to be able to accurately describe your third degree burns.

Write fiction and not for a living, maybe only with the hopes of one day making a living from it, and you’ll convince yourself that any prolonged happiness is a roadblock and that you need to suffer more in order to create.

Do this for too long and you will find yourself in the unfortunate position of resenting your happiness.

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I Miss the Comfort In Being Sad: A Very Specific Review of the In Utero Reissue

Nirvana was my first favorite band, my first musical obsession. When I discovered them in 1995, Kurt Cobain was dead, the band was no more, and I was left with nothing but their music.

20 years later, their final album, In Utero, has been reissued—remixed, remastered, and repackaged. After several listens to twelve of the songs in particular, I sat down to try and figure out what it all meant, to decide if this was just another attempt to squeeze blood from a stone, and most importantly, to hear if there was anything new left to discover.

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