Kickstarter Hits $100 Million Mark for Publishing, Adds New Countries, New Tools in 2016 – Like much of self/independent publishing, crowdsourced publishing has been robustly growing, with $100 million in fundraising since 2009. Did you know that Kickstarter even has a director of publishing? Margot Atwell believes that Kickstarter has a ... more >
How Frederick Douglass Harnessed the Power of Portraiture to Reframe Blackness in America – If you’ve missed some of our latest national embarrassments, check out The Root‘s coverage of the Trump -Frederick Douglass snafu before reading the above essay on Douglass and 19th C U.S. portraiture. At least it’s an opportunity to ... more >
Novelist Haruki Murakami’s privacy violated by publication of library details – Apparently some old books at Murakami’s Kobe high school library were being discarded, and the cards showing the check-out records were discovered by someone going through the books. The cards were then shared with a local newspaper, which photographed and ... more >
Ta-Nehisi Coates Wins National Book Award – The least surprising, but nevertheless moving, win of the night was Ta-Nehisi Coates for his non-fiction work, Between the World and Me. Adam Johnson won the award for Fiction, Neal Shusterman for Young People’s Literature, Robin Coste Lewis for Poetry, James Patterson won the Literarian Award, and Don DeLillo won ... more >
The Beauty of the Automagical I once worked for a CIO who liked to call certain things “Automagical.” Obviously not original, but his point, really, was that software should strive to feel to the end-user as if it happens by magic. It just works.. You don’t want users complaining about ... more >
In this post, I’m sharing apps I use and like. I’ll even list apps I got all excited about and then …. :::crickets::: Because–and tell me if this happens to you–there are apps that sound like they will change your life from awesomeness, and then you get it and even ... more >