FontFace Ninja: A Tool That Answers 'What's That Typeface?' →

Adrienne LaFrance:

When you start thinking about the way words look, and how the shape of each one influences the way you feel about what you're reading, it's hard to stop. Pause for a minute and look around. Letters are everywhere, which means we're surrounded by typographical choices almost all the time.

I really, truly believe that you don’t have to be a typeface nerd to get some enjoyment out of this. And make sure you check out FontFace Ninja’s best feature: the ability to mask out everything but the text on a page so you can really get a nice, clean look, e.g.:

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Today’s Tweet of the Day

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Sounds about right. Oh, and here’s the article he was linking to.

Yabba Dabba Don’t

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/via Patrick LaForge and most of the Internet

Can Benefit Corporations Work? →

James Surowiecki:

Why would any company tie its hands this way? Neil Blumenthal, one of Warby’s co-founders, told me, “We wanted to build a business that could make profits. But we also wanted to build a business that did good in the world.” That sounds pretty, but it’s a kind of goal that can be easily discarded when running a for-profit business. Becoming a B corp raises the reputational cost of abandoning your social goals. It’s what behavioral economists call a “commitment device”—a way of insuring that you’ll live up to your promises.

Fascinating idea. Makes me glad (one of many reasons, actually) to have purchased several pairs of glasses and sunglasses from Warby Parker. It also raises the notion that perhaps there is a flip side to the Corporations-are-people mindset. Maybe the person that corporations model themselves after doesn’t have to be Scrooge McDuck.

A Depressing Figure →

Jared Sinclair:

I began work on Unread at the beginning of July 2013. I spent about six weeks on the overall design of the app, then plunged headfirst into Xcode, not coming up again for air until the following spring. I estimate that I worked sixty to eighty hours a week every week from July 2013 up until the launch of Unread for iPhone Version 1.0 in February 2014. Along the way were many challenges: building custom user interface navigation and controls, a vast sharing library, syncing and persistence architectures, performance tuning, etc.

I’ve been using Unread on my iPhone since the day it was released. $3 bought me an app that I check multiple times a day. In all, I probably use it for about an hour a day. Think about that for a second. Can you pinpoint anything in your life that you use as frequently that cost so little? I know I can’t.

After reading this piece last night, I immediately went and bought Unread for iPad. And honestly, I still feel a little guilty. My $8 still doesn’t seem like a fair transaction. I don’t think that was Sinclair’s intention, though. But I do think it’s worth him pointing out the hard truth about the situation and sharing, so that others, such as myself, can. Keep his story in mind the next time you hesitate about buying an app (or anything, for that matter, created by an independent creator or team). If you don’t make it worth people’s time to create the things you use and enjoy, eventually, they won’t.

You Are Not a Storyteller

Preach.

/via one of the best storytellers I know, Nick van der Kolk

‘The Largesse of the Sea Maiden,’ by Denis Johnson →

Denis Johnson:

But looking at art for an hour or so always changes the way I see things afterward—this day, for instance, a group of mentally handicapped adults on a tour of the place, with their twisted, hovering hands and cocked heads, moving among the works like cheap cinema zombies, but good zombies, zombies with minds and souls and things to keep them interested. And outside, where they normally have a lot of large metal sculptures—the grounds were being dug up and reconstructed—a dragline shovel nosing the rubble monstrously, and a woman and a child watching, motionless, the little boy standing on a bench with his smile and sideways eyes and his mother beside him, holding his hand, both so still, like a photograph of American ruin.

This story is from the March 3, 2014 issue of The New Yorker, and I’m re-reading it for the third time because I’m still in awe of how wonderful it is. If you haven’t read it yet, now’s the time. (Paywall—down!) And if you already have, it gets better with age.

‘Last Meal at Whole Foods,’ by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh →

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh:

Now Kruszewski is long retired and there’s a Whole Foods on Center Boulevard and my mother is dying. Across from the Whole Foods is Starbucks. Next to Starbucks is Penelope’s Boutique. Next to the boutique is another boutique, and so on, for the length of the boulevard, the sequence interrupted only by the Goodwill, the sole remaining evidence of the age when this boulevard was a wasteland inhabited by shirtless phantasms. The blue sign still beckons with its smiling half-face that looks as if it had been drawn by a child with a crayon, but now it beckons the hip, who go there to discover cheap vintage clothes that a poor person would never dare wear. The Goodwill will outlast Whole Foods; I’m sure of it. It’ll outlast Starbucks, too. When the boulevard crumbles and reverts to its genuine self, Goodwill will be the last man standing. That’s the cycle.

A gem of a story in the most recent issue of The New Yorker. Sparse and rich and driven by voice. I think this just jumped into my stories-to-teach rotation.

And because of the lack of paywall right now, you can also read another story he published in TNY, ‘Appetite.’

‘Ain’t nobody was really rhyming like that back then.’ →

Can’t wait for this.

/via Devour

Israel’s Other War →

Etgar Keret:

In 2014, in Israel, the definition of legitimate discourse has changed entirely. Discussion is divided between those who are “pro-I.D.F.” and those who are against it. Right-wing thugs chanting “death to Arabs” and “death to leftists” on the streets of Jerusalem or Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s call to boycott Arab-Israeli businesses protesting the operation in Gaza are considered patriotic, while demands to stop the operation or mere expressions of empathy about the deaths of women and children in Gaza are perceived as a betrayal against flag and country. We are faced with the false, anti-democratic equation that argues that aggression, racism, and lack of empathy mean love of the homeland, while any other opinion—especially one that does not encourage the use of power and the loss of soldiers’ lives—is nothing less than an attempt to destroy Israel as we know it.