Via Aeon:

‘If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way,’ he said. ‘And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.’

Clay Shirky on Medium:

People often start multi-tasking because they believe it will help them get more done. Those gains never materialize; instead, efficiency is degraded. However, it provides emotional gratification as a side-effect. (Multi-tasking moves the pleasure of procrastination inside the period of work.) This side-effect is enough to keep people committed to multi-tasking despite worsening the very thing they set out to improve.

Kevin Ashton on Medium:

Like every other tool, a can of Coke is a product of our world entire and contains inventions that trace all the way back to the origins of our species.

Question: what are three large tasks on your to do list that have been there forever that you should choose – right now – to never complete?

Laurie Voss via Quartz:

You are looking for grasp of complex topics and the ability to clearly communicate about them, which are the two jobs of the working engineer.

From Marcin Wichary on Medium:

The perfect underline should be visible, but unobtrusive — allowing people to realize what’s clickable, but without drawing too much attention to itself. It should be positioned at just the right distance from the text, sitting comfortably behind it for when descenders want to occupy the same space…

I believe Medium’s fastidiousness regarding typography is one of the defining characteristics of their brand.

Clay Shirky on Medium:

Contrary to the contrived ignorance of media reporters, the future of the daily newspaper is one of the few certainties in the current landscape: Most of them are going away, in this decade. (If you work at a paper and you don’t know what’s happened to your own circulation or revenue in the last few years, now might be a good time to ask.) We’re late enough in the process that we can even predict the likely circumstance of its demise.

After 200 issues of A List Apart, Kevin Cornell is retiring as staff illustrator. I find Cornell’s work to be gorgeous:

I was fortunate enough to have him illustrate the very first (out of print) Rands t-shirt. Can’t wait to see what he tackles next.

My hunch is a lot of folks are going to have a bunch of questions that will easily be handled by this handy guide by Sebastien Gabriel:

This guide is designed as a “get started” or introductory read for the starting to intermediate designer who wants to learn or get more knowledge about cross-DPI and cross-platform design from the very beginning.