Complexity is easy. It’s fun to come up with new ideas and it feels great to say yes to everything, to avoid making trade-offs.

It’s simplicity that’s hard. To make a great product, you have to define its core – a single challenge – and painfully, painstakingly eliminate creative features to stay true to the product and its purpose.

Steve Jobs smelled so foul that none of his co-workers at Atari in the seventies would work with him. Entreating him to shower was usually futile; he’d inevitably claim that his strict vegan diet had rid him of body odor, thus absolving him of the need for standard hygiene habits. Later, friends would theorize that he had been exercising what would prove a limitless capacity for sustained and gratuitous lying that came to be nicknamed the “reality distortion field.”

In the past, I've been as guilty as anyone else of turning a blind eye to racist things people have said to me. For the most part, I have nodded along with the calculus that says that because "our people" have achieved and because we "didn't have it as bad as others," we should just shut up and point to the scoreboard of Ivy League admissions. Or whatever. But a career of deflections and rationalizations leaves a residue. Linsanity, and everything ugly that inevitably came with it, has given us cause to clear our throats and expunge what can sometimes feel like a lifetime of silence and compromise.

Oncologist Brian Druker developed a new treatment for a deadly cancer, leading to a breakthrough that has transformed medicine

Much of rap is about business, whether the drug business, the music industry or work ethic, said Adam Bradley, an associate professor specializing in African-American literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder who wrote "Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop" and co-edited "The Anthology of Rap."

"It comes out of the fact that rap is such a direct mode of expression, maybe more so than any other music lyric, because of the emphasis on language, of words above melody or harmony," Mr. Bradley said.

People think of rap lyrics as being only about money, women, status and cocaine, he said, but more pervasive themes are leadership, collaboration and the vulnerability beneath the swagger -- all relevant in business.

David Foster Wallace would have turned 50 today. With that in mind, below is a fascinating letter he wrote at 33 years of age, to Don DeLillo — an award-winning author and playwright for whom Wallace held a great deal of respect. With Infinite Jest written and soon to be published (to huge acclaim), Wallace was faced with a problem: although the quality of his writing was improving, he was having less fun in the process.

Images from Vivian Maier's Undeveloped Rolls

More than 20 other Tibetans have set themselves ablaze in the past year to protest Chinese government controls

“At its core, fear is an emotional mechanism that increases survival chances by motivating fight, flight, or freezing responses to threatening situations,” they write. “Fear seizes one’s attention, halts current plans, and increases vigilance.”
As they point out, this dynamic is echoed in Burke’s description of the experience of the sublime, which the philosopher called “that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended.”

The conflict in Syria has become, for journalists, one of the most difficult and dangerous assignments in many years, with at least five having died while covering the uprising that began there last March.

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Lightweight and fast, Sparrow is the simplest way to get to inbox zero. Try it and never look back.

When an attractive woman looks at a great painting, or heralds a great novel, or holds her hands in tween prayer doing that little happy bounce of excitement in the front row of a show at the first chord she recognizes, a million young boys with no chance will know what they want to do with their lives.

This new model of memory isn’t just a theory—neuroscientists actually have a molecular explanation of how and why memories change. In fact, their definition of memory has broadened to encompass not only the cliché cinematic scenes from childhood but also the persisting mental loops of illnesses like PTSD and addiction—and even pain disorders like neuropathy. Unlike most brain research, the field of memory has actually developed simpler explanations. Whenever the brain wants to retain something, it relies on just a handful of chemicals. Even more startling, an equally small family of compounds could turn out to be a universal eraser of history, a pill that we could take whenever we wanted to forget anything.

All color schemes on this page are fully compatible with each of the stock Coda syntax modes: ActionScript, ASP-HTML, CFML, CSS, ERB, HTML, Java, Javascript, JSP-HTML, LassoScript-HTML, Objective-J, Perl, PHP-HTML, Python, Ruby, Smarty, SQL and XML.

THE TWO SISTERS shared a bed, and each night, with their hearts hammering, they would listen for the turn of the knob and the push of the door.

Few reporters wrote so beautifully about such horrible things as Anthony Shadid, who died this week in Syria. Here are a few of his best stories, filed from Ramallah, Baghdad, and Syria.

YOU’VE GOT TO DIG IT TO DIG IT, YOU DIG?

Art critics, museum curators, private gallerists and major institutions all promoted Kelley’s work for the way they thought it anatomised (by dissecting and rewiring pop cultural detritus) the uptight schizophrenia that reigned in America’s public, private and domestic spheres (an aesthetic which reinforced their own delusions of panoptican superiority because in their eyes it articulated a process which they thought they were above and beyond). That’s the macro view. At a much lower level, he was a symbol for all that could, and usually does, go wrong whenever the visual art world moves in on rock ‘n’ roll.

Violence is a complex problem, which no simple biological approach can diagnose or remedy. Factors such as political instability, population density, and income inequality are associated with massive differences in violence across cultures, and these differences are observed while gender ratios remain constant. Of course, men still hold most of the power in the world, and it is no surprise, then, that they perpetrate most of the violence.  But that too is a historical fact, not a biological given.  If we focus on biology instead of economic and historical variables, we will miss out on opportunities for progress.

The graffiti artist who took Facebook stock instead of cash for painting the walls of the social network’s first headquarters made a smart bet. The shares owned by the artist, David Choe, are expected to be worth upward of $200 million when Facebook stock trades publicly later this year.

An intense debate about business models, bubbles, capitalism, quality of life, market share vs. profit share, running a business vs. selling a business, and a variety of other related topics from episode 46 of This Week in Startups.

Lists are created, and have been for many centuries, for all manner of reasons. It's my aim to feature some of the most notable examples right here.

Khao Man Gai, one of the most common street foods in Thailand, is, in short, a mutation, albeit controlled, of Hainanese chicken and rice. Overshadowed by the original dish and rarely included on the menus of most Thai restaurants in the West, Khao Man Gai (ข้าวมันไก่) is not widely known outside of Thailand.

David Chang, chef and owner of the perennially popular Momofuku restaurant empire in New York, has had a busy several months: He opened a new place in Sydney called Seiobo; launched Lucky Peach, which has single-handedly re-imagined the food magazine; and revamped a portion of Ssäm Bar, transforming it into Booker + Dax, an experimental cocktail bar (think science lab with electric pokers, centrifuges, and liquid nitrogen). We knew that the "Chef of the Year" title we awarded him back in 2007 was prescient. Chang carved out a few minutes to tell us the 10 things that he can't live without.

It was A$AP Rocky‘s first time in Atlanta and he was shown crazy love by DJ Drama as he stopped by the Hot 107.9 for an interview. The Harlem native and Complex February/March cover boy was asked about everything from his influences to working with ScHoolboy Q and what it was like to meet Rakim.

“Sometimes you do have a good time. But when it gets to the point where you’re sitting in your home and you’re just trying to cover what you don’t want people to know. It’s painful. And then you want more just so that you don’t let anybody see you cry.”

Sherman’s art is that of someone saving her own life in a mostly male art world, working from deep instinct, ferocious imagination, assertion, self-defense, all while fashioning an elaborate tapestry of grand visors, demon clowns, Beau Brummels, and Valkyries; frazzled club girls, crinolined courtesans, dandies, macaronis, hippie chicks in Hiawatha fringe, Hollywood housewives, and other women fighting for their places in the world. Sherman is a warrior artist—one who has won her battles so decisively that I can’t imagine anyone ever again embarking on a lifetime of self-portraiture without coming up against her.

Bret Victor invents tools that enable people to understand and create. He has designed experimental UI concepts at Apple, interactive data graphics for Al Gore, and musical instruments at Alesis.

One Thursday this fall, Louis C.K. was in a dressing room at Manhattan’s Beacon Theatre, passing time between two back-to-back stand-up performances and feeling, as he so often does, like a piece of shit. “I was so upset,” he recalls, sitting in the same dressing room a couple of evenings later. The Thursday performances were being taped for an upcoming special, and although they’d both sold out in no time, and although he’d polished his jokes in clubs for months, C.K. had suddenly convinced himself that his material was garbage. “It happens every time,” he says, his stocky frame parked in a plush armchair, his thinning red hair freshly trimmed. “I tape two shows, and the first one feels lackluster and uninspired. The audience feels judgmental and disappointed. I’m going, ‘This was a mistake. This material’s not as good as last year. This is gonna be the one where they say, “He didn’t do it this time.” I didn’t do anything right. All this stuff is shit.’” He grins. “Then a few minutes before the second show, I go, ‘No. This is fun. I enjoy it.’”

I distrust the perpetually busy; always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters.

No possible set of notes can explain our paintings. Their explanation must come out of a consummated experience between picture and onlooker. The appreciation of art is a true marriage of minds. And in art, as in marriage, lack of consummation is ground for annulment.

"(I spent my) youth in front of the endless space of the landscape of Oregon lying covered by wintery snows, in front of the monumental emptiness that is nothingness and at the same time part of it 'all.'" Mark Rothko

In the July/August 2001 issue of the late, great magazine Lingua Franca, James Ryerson published an enthralling article about an anonymous benefactor who was paying professors huge sums of money to review a strange 60-page philosophical manuscript. Slate editor David Plotz talked about “The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician” on this week’s Political Gabfest, citing it as one of his favorite magazine articles of all time. Ryerson gave Slate permission to republish the story in full. 

Like Jin before him, what Jeremy Lin represents is a re-conception of our bodies, a visible measure of how the emasculated Asian-American body might measure up to the mythic legion of Big Black supermen.

For this particular revenge fantasy, our hero needed to be able to understand every single racist thing said to him on the court and respond by dropping 30.

I put in there that they detest organization of any kind. I use part of their jargon - "feral" and "spontaneous" protest - whereby you walk down a street and nothing is planned. You walk by a window and you break it. They feel that any kind of attempt to plan immediately imposes a kind of hierarchy that they oppose. That's in the piece. There's a limit to expounding upon the internal - I didn't get into primitive anarchism and all this kind of stuff. But that was certainly part of the piece. It's precisely because they detest - there's a line in the article that says that they are opposed to those of us on the organized left. The operative word is "organization."

Walt Whitman, ultimately revered as “America’s Bard,” began his career as an obscure newspaperman. In 1855, seeking to expand his audience, he mailed his self-published collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who replied with a laudatory note. Emerson was dismayed to discover that Whitman went on to publish the note in several newspapers, as well as having it printed up in a new edition of Leaves of Grass. But Emerson’s tribute notwithstanding, the book was met with widespread indifference.

In 1959, a clique of New York artists tried to crack their whole world open. Abstract Expressionism was beginning to feel played out, and they were constantly thinking about what would come after that. This group, which had coalesced around an artist and Rutgers professor named Allan Kaprow, started to wonder about taking the painting out of “action painting”—to try doing what Jackson Pollock had done, but without a canvas. They were asking basic questions: why an artist’s actions must be in service to a physical thing; why poetry, music, and theater were such separate worlds; and why the studio and everything that happened in it (whether wild or banal) couldn’t be fodder.

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I've been using SASS for pretty much everything I do recently. Here's some musings on the journey. From hold-ups, to trip-ups, to turn-offs. From apps and teams to workflows and syntax.

I don’t want to think about technique, because technique blocks your mind. The best way is to be open — to feel the atmosphere of the street or the place where you are; to connect to the people. I saw Bruce Davidson lecturing about “Subway.” Someone asked him, “What do you think about what Capa said, that if your picture is not good enough, you are not close enough?” He said that it’s very important to be close in a mental way. Because if you are close mentally, the pictures are very personal. Many times it’s better to show emotions than beautiful composition.

Our job across America is to create communities of choice, not of destiny, and create conditions for neighborhoods where the odds are not stacked against the people who live there.

The awesome paper-like effect made for HTML5

You have to ask yourself how you allow people to communicate what's in their lives," says Systrom. "I don't like the idea of Instagram as a photo sharing service, and I don't think it is," says Systrom, "it's very much a communication tool, it's a visual communications tool."

I’m appalled. A successful marketing guy asked me a question recently — a real no-brainer — which led me to believe he didn’t know the difference between strategy and tactics.

The insanity of silence.

Die Antwoord.

Stories online aren’t really stories right now. They’re like fragmentary reactions to things for the most part. They’re like little nerve firings. Very rarely are they fully formed thoughts and expressions and so on. So, I think creating a space that’s more about slowing down and contemplating and being introspective is a prerequisite for getting people to tell stories that have impact. When you design a space that encourages short, reactionary verse, people are going to give you short, reactionary verse. Maybe when you design a space that’s not encouraging that, people will use more depth in their self-expression.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

at the time, i figured he was just trying to push my buttons and steer the conversation somewhere else, but in the end, his comment began to weigh on me, and i realized he was, once again, trying to get me to realize that a certain kind of preciousness can be dangerous, debilitating, and growth stunting... a very important lesson that enabled the work to move forward... and i have no doubt that there is a large group of former students who are now better artists for having worked with him.

My relationship with my muse is a delicate one at the best of times and I feel that it is my duty to protect her from influences that may offend her fragile nature.

The best stories about Mark Zuckerberg and his company.

The films of David Lynch seem anything but “commercial.” Disturbing, incomprehensible, they shine a flashlight into the darkest regions of the subconscious mind. When you walk out of a theater after watching a David Lynch film you feel like you just woke up from a vivid and unsettling dream.

Each participant gave us capsule descriptions of their own first principles (professional or personal, organizational or individual), and talked about how those principles have changed over time and about the place where they began. We invite you to carry on the conversation by posting the underlying principles of your own work in the discussion section below.

When I’m working, I’m not aware of any literary influence; I mean, I’m sure it’s there, but it’s not conscious. I get an idea and I sit down and write, and I never think about anyone else. There are a few sort of mantras I keep in mind, and those tend to keep me focused. But they’re not other books, mostly they’re sentences, and some of them are kind of weird.

About two months ago, The Millions joined the Tumblr community. So far, the going has been great. The platform is perfectly suited for dynamic storytelling, and as a direct result, it is home to some of the friendliest book lovers around. However, the site’s SEO (or lack thereof) is regrettably unkind to Tumblr outsiders, and this leads to two things. On the one hand, the insularity stokes the kind of kinship that makes its community so tightknit. On the other, the lack of easy searching reduces each blog’s chance of attracting new (or outside) viewers. I’d like to change that. By creating this list of my favorite “literary Tumblrs,” I hope to turn you on to some of the sites that make The Millions’ dashboard that much brighter.

Not many artists count as a game-changer for art. Mike Kelley did. His work altered the international conversation about art, and it changed the Los Angeles art world. His death Tuesday at 57 is an unspeakable loss.

Each member of A$AP has a full-fledged personality and purpose within the group. Sure, a lot of them rap, as you know and expect, but you'll also find managers, stylists, producers, designers, and more role players branching out from the same collective.

In this special edition of the Macworld Podcast, recorded on the Macworld | iWorld show floor, I'm joined by a pair of Mac luminaries—Daring Fireball's John Gruber and Chicago Sun-Times columnist Andy Ihnatko. Our topic: The State of Apple.

Mike and Katie sit down with John Gruber himself and discuss the trouble with “booth babes,” conferences, and iconic jerseys from the biggest asshole teams in the USA.