Category Archives: Biography

Confessions of a chicken hawk

Biography, Ethics, Politics

This one is difficult.

I was driving around the Emory campus yesterday and saw a sign for Oxford Road. It made me want to hear Bob Dylan’s song “Oxford Town”. This song was especially relevant to me right now because I am in the middle of a book by Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was a Jewish leader in the civil rights movement. “What do you think of that, my friend?” I think what you do, Bob. All decent people must think that. We fucking know it.

I decided to listen to the “Free Wheelin’ Bob Dylan” album from the beginning.

The third song on that album is “Masters of War”. I tried to place myself in 1963, when this song and this attitude was new. It was difficult to do. The countercultural ethos has followed the well-worn path of religious degradation, from the shock of world-transformative revelation, to inspired movement, to new vital establishment, to commonsense conventional wisdom, to the default doctrine for all educated Americans, to ready-made attitude equipped with bromides and logical formulas.

And in this last, most degraded state, any war of any kind is automatically viewed as illegitimate, unnecessary and the manufactured product of masters of war trying to get rich on death.

The response to any war is a “surely there is another way” recited as automatically as a libertarian’s “deregulate it” or progressivist “institutional racism” or “cognitive bias” as all-purpose diagnoses and remedies.

They aren’t even responses. They are strings of words erected as a barrier to engaging the problem. I realize I am paraphrasing Hannah Arendt:

“Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.”

The particular reality that from which counterculture fundamentalists want protection is moral obligation.

We hate the idea — I, personally, hate the idea, and have always hated it — that there are times when people are obligated to kill and risk death to protect our own people from those who want us to suffer and die.

And, like it or not, people really do exist who actively want the suffering and annihilation of other people. This desire for suffering and annihilation of others is what evil is.

Suffering and annihilation are what war is about. But for evil, suffering and annihilation is the whole purpose, and war is its own end. Part of the joy of evil is forcing others to play their war games, and to taste violence, to face seduction of violence, in the effort to stop its spread. And if they can drag their enemies into evil with them, or create such confusion that people lose the ability to see the difference, so much the better.

Of course, masters of war want to paint every conflict as a simple Good versus Evil struggle. They are despicable moral manipulators. But to abuse this truth by using it to claim the opposite — that there is never Good versus Evil conflict — is hardly better. It is the evil of equating defense against evil with evil. It is the evil of denying evil, and relativizing everything so thoroughly that we willfully ignore evil and allow it to flourish.

Most left-leaners want that to not be true, or to treat this problem as one they can evade. They try to complicate the situation, blur it, muddy it, distance themselves from it. “I can’t understand something this complex.” “I cannot do anything about this, so it is not my problem.” “This is the outcome of a long and tragic process, so we cannot assign blame.” Or “Life is simply tragic. It will never not be tragic. So let it be tragic.” As if simply calling life tragic allows us to transcend the tragedy and look at it from above as mystical spectators and not within as participants. This latter is Christian nihilism, and this mystical nihilism can linger on long after Christian doctrine evaporates from the soul. Faith outlives its beliefs.

They all boil down to “I don’t want to care.” We might say “I don’t give a fuck” with punk bluster, as if we are proud of it, as if we are shameless. Hopefully we are lying, because dishonesty is less damning than genuine shameless selfishness.

How do I know any of this? Because I am guilty of it myself. I was even more guilty in the past, when I was young and draft eligible. I have never been brave enough for combat. I have always been mortified of war. That is shameful.

But I am even more ashamed to pretend shirking one’s war duty is not shameful. Most shameful of all is withholding gratitude and admiration of soldiers who do answer the call and risk their lives to defend their families, their people and all they hold sacred.

Of course, if nothing is sacred, there is nothing to admire or despise. There is no cause for pride or shame. Intellectually honesty knows better. We fucking know better, most of all when we refuse to admit it.

Martin Shaw

Biography, Enworldment

Susan and I went on a short road trip this weekend, and spent some of our time in the car together listening to a lecture by Martin Shaw. Shaw is a storyteller and mythologist, a sort of reflective practitioner of mythtelling. His speech is poetic, and uses rhythm and repetition in a way that reminds me of James Dickey.

This talk was about a great many topics, but they all orbit around how mythical stories can reconnect us with fugitive parts of ourselves. They can help us find our way back to what he calls a “wild integrity.” If that expression makes your heart race slightly, you should definitely listen to his whole talk. The talk is filled with beautiful and consequential phrases, which Shaw always gently repeats and surrounds with just the right amount of silence. These little incantations do some of the same inner-reconnection work he describes myth doing.

Shaw is interesting not only as a source of information, but also as an exemplar. He manages to come off as primordially timeless — but, somehow, at the same time, Gen-X to the bone. In doing so, he offers something that art in its routine pastichery has forgotten. He offers an enworldment — a new way to inhabit our lives — a practical vision that we can enter and live from. This is what all great art offers us when it emerges and renews our sense of meaning. This was the true gift of the Ramones. What Shaw offers really does feel like a home.

Listening to him I realized how much I prize myth as a creative genre. Myth is a style of narrative abstraction, meaning that it discards all but a certain kind of truth. My favorite Borges stories have it. Casares has it. Asimov’s “Nightfall” has it. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, especially the prologue, is mythic. Dylan’s best songs have mythic lyrics. My inner-eye spontaneously visualizes all these stories in the same style, and this style is a reliable earmark. If my imagination responds to something I read or hear with this style of image, that something is mythic.

But I want to return to the enworldment question. I want to read some of Martin Shaw’s books, and so I did something I’ve been doing a lot of lately: asking ChatGPT to play librarian. “I’m interested in Martin Shaw. What should I read by him?”

It gave me a list. I won’t copy and paste it, because I’ve realized that hearing about other people’s AI adventures is even more tedious than listening to their dreams. ChatGPT asked me why I wanted to read him. And because I believe what ails our time is a crisis of inspiration I responded “I’m interested in myth as a way to reconnect with the desirability dimension of design — especially design of one’s own enworldment.”

And it then asked “Would you say your interest is more in personal enworldment (crafting how you experience reality) or shared enworldment (shaping the desirability of collective systems)?”

My own answer surprised me: “It has to be both! We need modes of self-determination that relate us — not alienate us — from others.”

In this overdue book stuck inside me — one that I now refer to constantly while reading almost anything else — where I play a tilted vision of philosophy, design and religion against each other like chords… In my overdue book, this opening-out and relating quality is what religion brings to philosophy (saving it from solipsism) and to design (saving it from empty production for empty consumption). The name of this saving relational power is Keter.

Inner and outer self-determination that deepens, strengthens and intensifies our relationships — with each other, with the world around us, with all of ourselves (tame and wild), and, most of all, with this radically shocking infinity who surrounds us and saturates us, in whom we live, in whom we participate, who wants something from us. Hineini.

Accounting for my anger

Biography, Judaism

I think my intense reaction to anti-Zionism has multiple sources.

My positive tribal loyalty only accounts for some of it.

Sadly, much more of it is a negative reaction to other tribes. More specifically, it is a bad reaction to the collective mind of these tribes — as it manifests in the personalities of members of these tribes. It is not even in the content of their beliefs, as expressed in opinions or ideological stances. The collective mind is most influential in in how thinking is thought, not what thoughts are produced or what facts are believed. The What is symptomatic of the How.

I don’t like any of the biggest, strongest tribes at large today who concern themselves with Israel, for or against.

And of course, Israel is always an object of intense concern for precisely the worst tribes. The tribes who claim to be the true heirs of the Jewish covenant are always a powder keg, even when they seem momentarily friendly. Their benevolence can always reverse in an instant, and with little warning.

And those latterday puritans who mistake themselves for secular, who imagine themselves above religious disputation, will have no god apart from their own ideoidol. To them this ideoidol is just self-evident, commonsense truth and morality, and not even an ideology at all. It is to be obeyed, not questioned.

There are other things going on, too. But watching so many people around me get picked up by these mental tornados and spun into generic strangers has been unpleasant and upsetting.

And those whose feet are still on the ground have done so through the magic of compete, alienated indifference.

One other thing I am anxious about. The more right-wingers make Israel their own cause, the more the enemies of the right will make hating Israel their cause. Zionism and anti-Zionism will become another signifier of tribal allegiance, like wearing an N95 mask, getting a vaccine, adopting new pronouns.We should not cultivate prejudices for and against different categories of person, but when we proudly adorn these prejudices as tribal emblems, no good can possibly come of it.

Mutuality, again

Biography, Ethics, Politics

I will say this again, because it is relevant to at least three imploding relationships I am currently witnessing:

When a relationship lacks mutuality, it cannot be repaired in any normal mutual way, nor can it be destroyed by mutual consent.

Trying to reach an agreement with someone with an inert understanding, who lacks motivation to seek the validity of alternative understandings is futile — and the pursuit of mutuality where mutuality is impossible is a participation in the brokenness.

Someone who refuses to listen to what you have to say, will listen even less to what you have to say about their refusal to listen.

It doesn’t matter why they won’t listen. They might believe they already know. They might believe they have a right to not hear you. They might think you are so deluded or stupid that their understanding must replace yours. They might think you are consciously or unconsciously motivated by wicked motivations, called bias or demons based on whether they prefer to express the same concept in secular or religious jargon. They might think they will be harmed by listening. They might use emotion or moral outbursts to make communication impossible. But in all likelihood they’ll just find ways to perpetually delay conversing. They’re very, very busy. An urgent matter requires their attention,right now,at this decisive moment.

Whether they cannot listen or simply will not does not matter. Listening will never happen.

I’ve learned to stop trying.

I learned it with individuals. Now they are no longer my friends.

I am learning to do it with collectivities. Ideologies whose members to refuse to hear dissenting views lose their rights to reason.

I can’t find an old post, so I’ll rewrite it:

A: There is a problem with our friendship.

B: I disagree.

A: And that is the problem.

And while I am repeating myself:

Ethics are the rules of participation in an ethos.

Mutuality is for the mutual.

Peace requires mutual commitment to peace.

That so few people understand this is profoundly telling.

May your wanting… wait, no — letterpress

Biography, Design, Letterpress

Rabbi Jeff Roth taught my wife a blessing: “May your wanting be wiser.”

This is something very much worth letterpress printing.

I do not see how I can go on without a printing press.

Some other things I want to print:

  • The Pragmatic Maxim: “To ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might result from the truth of that conception — and the sum of these consequences constitute the entire meaning of the conception. — Charles Sanders Peirce”
  • The full Shema prayer in Hebrew and English. Basically, I want to print the full text of a mezuzah, but printed and with translation.
  • Rabbi Simcha Bunim’s two slips of paper: 1) “I am a speck of dust.” 2) “The world was created for me.”
  • Shabbat prayers chapbook
  • Pesach Seder chapbooks (this is ambitious. I will design these specifically to “wear it well” — bearing the patina of wine and food stains with grace, like a yixing teapot, an oriental carpet, a well-used lugged steel bicycle, one of Christopher Alexander’s clay garden path tiles, or an old family Bible. We need more things in our lives who gain, not lose, value through wear!)
  • “For the Last Wolverine” by James Dickey. (I already typeset it.)
  • The Emerald Tablet. (I already typeset this, too.)
  • Phi (the Golden Ratio) to the 10,000th decimal place. (I already typeset this, too.)
  • My weird little snakes and trees poem, which I’ve been rewriting since the early 2000s, and I believe accurately anticipated the absurd metanaivety of now, a time when fancy folks using fancy jargon naively accept at face value their theory-infused perceptions of other folk’s naive perceptions, without a twinge of irony. A gorging ouroboros, starving as it stuffs itself on itself.

Or maybe I should just write and print my Enworldment book one chapbook at a time.

My very next project, though, is re-printing the Sefirot on a variety of papers (some hand-made) that are wandering their way across the country to my door. And hopefully, a third plate will also arrive from the die-maker soon, and unlike the first two, will be unblemished. I’m doing all these with the magical glow-gold ink I used on the 2025 pi posters.

I really need a printing press.

Pi poster 2025

Biography, Design

In 2022 I made a poster for Pi Day. It was pi to the first 10,000th place, color laser printed on a 10.5 x 17″ sheet of some kind of fancy paper and each digit was color coded.

This year I did a follow-up project. Even in 2022, I originally wanted letterpress print the poster. I sent out for estimates, but it was too expensive. But now, I have access to a letterpress studio, and have begun relearning the craft.

And so I spent the first two weekends of February 2025 with master letterpress printer and print studio owner Bryan Baker and my old friend Brian McGee cranking out the Pi Day 2025 poster on letterpress. It is the same size as before (so it matches the first edition), but is now printed for real, with proper Gutenberg technology, with each digit inkily mashed down into the paper.

Behold!

Continue reading Pi poster 2025 →

Letterpress sefirot

Biography, Design, Judaism, Letterpress

An old friend of mine introduced me to a master letterpress printer who lives in the Atlanta metro area. The printer connected me with one of the nation’s best die makers. I immediately ordered a plate for my first project, which will be a letterpress sefirot.

I am doing this project because nobody else has. I have been unable to find a beautiful letterpress printed sefirot, so in order to have one I will have to print it myself. This is something that should exist. I’m excited to have a supply to give away to friends.

The final printed artifact will look like this:

Dark glass

Biography, Judaism, Philosophy

Twenty years ago when I was first reading Nietzsche, fully on fire and burning to pure ash, I became convinced that Nietzsche was a crypto-Christian of some weird variety. The belief lacked evidentiary foundation. Not only could it not be proved, but proving it seemed somehow wrong.

The belief was rooted in hermeneutic experience: having sacrificed my old truth at the altar of interrogation, a new kind of truth could emerge. That truth made the clearest and most vital sense of the Gospels. Please notice — it was not only a new truth, a new “belief system”, a new set of opinions on what was and wasn’t true, good or existent. It was a new kind of truth and entirely different way to approach truth. This new kind of truth was not a set of facts to look at and to accept or reject. Rather, this was a truth to be looked through, which revealed a new world of givens — and that new given world was infinitely preferable to the old one.

Nietzsche’s comments on Christianity, on Christians, Jews, Jesus, Saul/Paul and his use of polyvalently charged appellations — like “the founder of Christianity” — make his attitude toward the Judeo-Christian tradition highly… multistable. Depending on the tone of our reading and the care we take in considering everything Nietzsche might have meant in each of his statements, we could take his utterances as a whole to be radically atheistic or passionately (but covertly) evangelical. Or something else entirely.

When we look through a dark glass what we see is a matter of focus.

We can focus into the dark glass and see what images the glass reflects, which includes the image of our own selves as objects, and all the objects that lie behind and around ourselves. Our human-all-too-human eyes are magnetically drawn toward our self-image. “There’s me!”

Or we can focus through the glass to see what images the glass transmits — the objects on the other side of the glass.

If we never reflect on focus and just take the image we see at face value, we naturally assume we have seen what there is to see in the glass. We look into it and never look through it, or we look through it and never look into it, and, consequently never understand the full reality of the dark glass, which is, whether we look into it or through it, always involved — unseen — in the act of seeing.

I just know that something good is going to happen

Biography

I have always felt — and I believe this is a generational feeling — that something inconceivably good could happen.

Kate Bush sang of it in Cloudbusting.

I just know that something good is going to happen

I don’t know when

But just saying it could even make it happen

We also felt knew something inconceivably bad could happen. We fully expected to be annihilated in nuclear war. Every generation has its apocalyptic anticipation. Ours was nuclear holocaust. We cannot conceive our own inevitable nonexistence, so we channel the dread of this inevitability into some end-time event, and make it an object of all-consuming fear. Nuclear holocaust, the apocalypse, global warming. Every generation is the first to face the real existential threat.

We inhabited a vacuous present, which is an interregnum preceding the inconceivable good or bad event. This present offered us only tedium under fluorescent lights, a long, pointless trudge through the Stations of Quotidia to pointless retirement, all utterly impossible for any person to want. We were commanded to want it, anyway. We had no way to comply. You can’t make yourself want something unwanted (though you can want to want and use that as a counterfeit for wanting). But we discovered that we could extract some meaning and dignity from defiantly refusing to do what was impossible, as if we were choosing not to comply out of spite. (Punk was our pica. We didn’t have proper nutrition, so we ate soil and cigarette butts, and it was, to our impoverished palates, delicious.)

I think young people today have been taught to sneer at inconceivable hope, and to take every signal from within the soul literally. They are fixated on a literal climate apocalypse, and are too knowing for salvation. In another age they would be Father Ferapont, or one his modern secular politicized echoes.

Their ideology blinds them to the connection, because for them the gulf between scientistic believing and creedal believing is absolute. The one thing they do have right is that they are not religious. Father Ferapont confuses his creedal ideology with a religious faith.

The one thing the adherents to the post-postmodern doom cult cannot conceive is the possibility that they are not the moral pinnacle of humankind — judges fit to condemn (or faintly and tentatively praise) the present and all that has come before. There is a covert moral narcissism hidden in this attitude that brings to mind the words of Nietzsche: “Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.”

The metacognitive incompetence of these young judges in their self-assessment of their own judgment defies all comprehension. Ironically, moral judgment is the only place where they have any confidence at all, but it is precisely here where their confidence is least warranted.

Viddui: I have mysticized

Biography, Judaism, Religion

Mysticism reduces one’s relationship with God to one’s own experience of God. It belongs to a more general tendency to reduce all relationship with being (and beings) to one’s own experience of being (and beings). Like all religiosities, including, especially, fundamentalism, mysticism can even take forms that dispense with God. It goes like this: “I experience something that points beyond my experience, and that experience-beyond-experience is a kind of revelation of a mystery: the mystery of inexhaustible moreness.” Spiritual-but-not-religious Nones fall under this category.

Mysticism takes root in souls who have nothing against which to contrast this reflexive comprehensive mystical response: “Experience… as opposed to what?”

I can describe mysticism because mysticism is a personal vice of my own: O God, I pray to “you”, be way over there, blessing me and this world with your opalescent existential backglow. I ask nothing of you, except that you ask nothing of me. Make me unspoken promises that can never be broken, but infuse my life with an enchanting hopefulness, which is hope for nothing in particular. Drape my life in a protecting veil of the gentlest contempt toward all who expect from me what I give only to you. Amen.

To tease out the truth of a mystic, to get a glimpse of their soul, need something from them, ask them for something, even something very simple, and notice what ensues. Parallel lines are held apart by a sacred void. Thou shalt not obligate.

Mystics want freedom, and will pay whatever price they must for their redemption from obligation. But this payment for freedom does not redeem. It isolates.

Martin Buber says this:

That there is no justification for invoking the “are one” is obvious for anyone who reads the Gospel according to John without skipping and with an open mind. It is really nothing less than the Gospel of the pure relationship. There are truer things here than the familiar mystic verse: “I am you, and you are I.” The father and the son, being consubstantial—we may say: God and man, being consubstantial, are actually and forever Two, the two partners of the primal relationship that, from God to man, is called mission and commandment; from man to God, seeing and hearing; between both, knowledge and love. And in this relationship the son, although the father dwells and works in him, bows before him that is “greater” and prays to him.

All modern attempts to reinterpret this primal actuality of dialogue and to make of it a relationship of the I to the self or something of that sort, as if it were a process confined to man’s self-sufficient inwardness, are vain and belong to the abysmal history of deactualization.

— But mysticism? It relates how unity within duality feels. Have we any right to doubt the faithfulness of this testimony?

— I know not only of one but of two kinds of events in which one is no longer aware of any duality. Mysticism sometimes confounds them, as I, too, did at one time.

First, the soul may become one. This event occurs not between man and God but in man. All forces are concentrated into the core, everything that would distract them is pulled in, and the being stands alone in itself and jubilates, as Paracelsus put it, in its exaltation. This is a man’s decisive moment. Without this he is not fit for the work of the spirit. With this — it is decided deep down whether this means preparation or sufficient satisfaction. Concentrated into a unity, a human being can proceed to his encounter — wholly successful only now — with mystery and perfection. But he can also savor the bliss of his unity and, without incurring the supreme duty, return into distraction. Everything along our way is decision — intentional, dimly sensed, or altogether secret — but this one, deep down, is the primally secret decision, pregnant with the most powerful destiny.

The other event is that unfathomable kind of relational act itself in which one has the feeling that Two have become One: “one and one made one, bare shineth in bare.” I and You drown; humanity that but now confronted the deity is absorbed into it; glorification, deification, universal unity have appeared. But when one returns into the wretchedness of daily turmoil, transfigured and exhausted, and with a knowing heart reflects on both, is one not bound to feel that Being is split, with one part abandoned to hopelessness? What help is it to my soul that it can be transported again from this world into that unity, when this world itself has, of necessity, no share whatever in that unity — what does all “enjoyment of God” profit a life rent in two? If that extravagantly rich heavenly Moment has nothing to do with my poor earthly moment — what is it to me as long as I still have to live on earth — must in all seriousness still live on earth? That is the way to understand those masters who renounced the raptures of the ecstasy of “unification.”

Which was no unification.

And then he describes the precise error Julius Evola made in his starkly solipsistic book on sex, where he claims a woman’s essence is revealed to a man in the moment of climax:

Those human beings may serve as a metaphor who in the passion of erotic fulfillment are so carried away by the miracle of the embrace that all knowledge of I and You drowns in the feeling of a unity that neither exists nor can exist. What the ecstatic calls unification is the rapturous dynamics of the relationship; not a unity that has come into being at this moment in world time, fusing I and You, but the dynamics of the relationship itself which can stand before the two carriers of this relationship, although they confront each other immovably, and cover the eyes of the enraptured.’ What we find here is a marginal® exorbitance of the act of relation: the relationship itself in its vital unity is felt so vehemently that its members pale in the process: its life predominates so much that the I and the You between whom it is established are forgotten.

I will conclude now with an image (from despair.com) that I have used more than once in project post-mortems and in summaries of my long and twisting career path.

3,007

Biography

This is my 3,007th post since August 2008, when I stopped using LiveJournal and switched over to WordPress. 257 of them were private and some others are password protected. This is not counting the 1,045 posts I abandon as drafts.

Now I want to count my LiveJournal posts and tally my total output since 2003.

Update: I counted 4,094 posts on LiveJournal between 2003 and 2009.

This brings the total to 7,101 posts.

If you care, I care

Biography, Ethics, Love

Friend, if you care about something, I care about it, too.

I care about it for the sake of its importance to you. I may care solely for that reason and no other.

I may not be able to care about it as energetically or as exhaustively as you do. I may not reach the same conclusions you have reached, and we might never agree on what is true and right on this matter.

But if you care about something, I will do everything I can to understand why you care. I will try to see the validity of your understanding, and in light of that understanding, care with you. I will see how far I can go in sharing your convictions. Where I am unable to share your convictions, I will try to explain why and justify it.

In this way, I will make both my agreement and disagreement with you an expression of our friendship.

I cannot promise to believe what you want me to believe. I cannot promise to feel what you want me to feel. But I can promise you this: I will care as much as I am able about what you care about.

And where one or the other of us refuses to care, there we find the limits of our friendship.

The beauty of tradeoffs

Biography, Design

I was talking to my friend Blondeau about the oddball glory of the Brompton foldable bike, and I found myself saying something that seems worth keeping:

The belief in absolute perfection — perfection without compromise — is the death of design. Design is the art of relative perfection — perfection within constraints for some limited purpose.

I intended to link Brompton to my description of how foldable bikes design always involves stark tradeoffs, optimized to some purpose, and sacrificing other desirable qualities, and how this constraint, precisely, is what makes foldable bike design beautiful. Except, it turns out I never posted on this subject. So I will dig through old emails and texts and try to patch together a post I should have written years ago.

I guess I’ll start with an email I wrote Blondeau.

One word of warning: If you get a Brompton, you’ll never be able to do without one again, especially if you’re living nomadically. Any Brompton-less bike stable will feel incomplete.

What sold me on Brompton was looking at the design problem different foldables tried to solve. Each optimizes for some purpose.

Some are all about easy shipping of mostly-normal bikes from one location to another. Set up and breakdown requires significant effort. Once the bicycle arrives at a location, you set it up, and leave it set up. The design is optimized solely for providing a conventional cycling experience, and ease and speed of folding and unfolding is sacrificed.

Brompton is designed for multimodal transportation. It breaks down and sets up in about 1 minute. The folding-unfolding is assumed to happens one or more times in the course of a trip. You set out for a train station on the Brompton. There you fold it down and carry it onto the train. When you arrive at your stop you unfold the Brompton and ride it to your hotel. There you fold it down again and take it up to your room. If you are Eurailing around the continent and want cycling to be part of how you get around, you cannot beat Brompton. They make all the right tradeoffs for that style of getting around, and I love that.

If you just want to have a bike with you in Spain and maybe other places you visit having a normal bike that folds might be better. You’ll get a smoother, more refined ride.

Brompton is pure quirk. 

Another design that made clear, decisive tradeoffs is the Mazda MX-5 Miata. The origin story of the Miata is one of clarity of vision and refusal to blur it in order to live up to the bland ideal of meeting the expectations of most people for most purposes. The product managers, designers and engineers behind that car sacrificed passenger and storage space and engine power for a very specific roadster driving experience. They knew exactly what the car was for, and what it was not for, and every decision was driven by that clarity.

Another beautiful story of tradeoffs was the development of the Palm Pilot. That team watched Sculley-era Apple try to brute-force design the first PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), the Apple Newton. The device tried to be a handheld computer that could do anything. Consequently it did nothing well. It was too big, so it did not fit in a pocket. It tried to recognize natural handwriting, but failed comically most of the time. It supported syncing with computers, but the process was similar to a data backup procedure. Palm optimized its device for data lookup. It assumed most data would be entered on a computer and synced to the device. They devised a clumsy but reliable text entry scheme called Graffiti instead of relying on immature handwriting recognition technology. Best of all, the device was tiny and pocketable. And it came with a syncing cradle that supported one-button sync. The product took off, despite being vastly less advanced that the doomed Apple Newton.

If you read these two case stories, you’ll notice crude prototypes play a central role in refinement of the product, but also in building alignment around the vision, and enthusiasm for that vision.

Funny. I’ve been watching videos and listening to audiobooks by product management guru, Marty Cagan. I’ve been thoroughly unimpressed. What he describes as a revolution is stuff we’ve been doing for the last 30 years in UX and Human Centered Design.

But today I’m wondering if the problem is that designers try to do this work from a position of weakness. Maybe when we do this work from a position of strength, and take responsibility not only for the user experience, but also the feasibility and viability of the product (all power entails responsibility!), we are no longer just designers. We become product managers.

I wonder if that is the profession I should have pursued? I love tools. I love beautiful, clearly-conceived, faithfully executed products. But this difficult work cannot be done by charm, influence and lobbying alone. It requires power.

Hmm.

(Now I’m thinking about the app reviews I’ve written over the last decade. The majority of them are addressed to the product management — usually bad — of the app, not the features or the design. I get angriest at the product management philosophy behind wrongheaded design decisions.)

Jack going to sleep

Biography

The whole family watched Jack put himself to sleep last night on the baby monitor. He seemed to be reviewing his day, drowsily chattering about cars and fire trucks and bicycles. He spent a few moments on the matter of Shoshi’s bike, which he pronounces with a nasally “Hngm-Hngm’s byckle.” Then he started singing. “Car, car, truck. Car, car, Mimi’s car. Car, car, dog.” We watched him until he dropped off into sleep, and shared a hanging sadness that was not disappointment when his song stopped.