In this age of changing habits, if print is the stairs and screens the elevator, then what could the escalator be?

And maybe I live in the future more than many, but I realized that sort of not having a future was inhumane in that part of what meant to be human was to have a future, was to look forward, was to in some ways be future oriented and live in the future a little bit. I think that is part of what being human means because when I didn’t have a future I felt my humanity shrinking.

I started my career writing about travel, but very early on I had an opportunity to participate in an online world and I began to write about that as a foreign country. That’s where I got involved in the future by actually experiencing it online.

Portal is a nerd fantasy. You’ve got this gun and when you blast a wall with it, you literally rip spacetime wide open with an entry portal. Blast another wall and there’s the other half of your portal.

How. Cool.

That’s the beginning of the cool and the simplest part of the game. As you progress through the increasingly complex puzzles, Portal does something even cooler. It teaches you the game, it teaches you how to improvise solutions to the puzzles, and it eventually makes you a master of the Portal gun and its associated physics — without a single page of documentation. You learn about the Portal universe intimately, but you don’t notice the learning because you’re too busy playing.

The mystery of the player not having a clue what the hell is going on is the initial incentive to learn.

Success is not measured with points, timers, or headcrabs. Success is measured by the satisfaction you receive when you use the mechanics you’ve incrementally learned to solve the puzzle and exit the chamber in a not-dead state.

Like father, like daughter: For how many generations, I sometimes wonder, has this internal clock been keeping my relatives awake—and why?

Staying up at night is, among other things, an act of communitarianism; an act of love.

I believe I was supposed to outgrow that habit. Instead, I grew into it. Left to my own devices, I write best from ten at night to 4 a.m.

Those who have shared my bed—when I am in it to share it, anyway—have observed my nighttime habits with reactions varying from indulgence to incredulity.

It starts, as I said, around 10 p.m., when something ticks over in my mind, as if someone had walked into a shuttered cabin and flipped all the switches in the fuse box to “on.”

My normal indiscipline, the ADHD-ish inability to keep my head inside my work, finally drops away. For the next few hours, I write steadily, cleanly. If my body is producing a drug during that time, it is a natural methylphenidate—a dose of pure focus, side-effect-free and sweet.

If I put my work away and go to bed, I will fall asleep almost instantly, and can be up and functional again at nine. If, instead, I cross the 3:30 a.m. threshold, I will write all night.

The sun will fill my bedroom, and I will close my laptop and cover my eyes, and sleep maybe two hours, from six to eight or eight to ten—I have lost, alas, my childhood ability to sleep till noon—or sometimes not sleep at all. Either way, I will be awake the rest of the day, and utterly destroyed.

It’s hell on your social life, bad for your body, contraindicated by every piece of emotional and physical health advice you’ll ever see.

I love the quiet and the solitude; love, especially, nighttime’s strange combination of adventure and calm.

Running, you may have noticed, is a terrestrial activity, pretty much one hundred percent about gravity. And yet, when I run at night—or walk at night, or write at night, or do almost anything at night—I sometimes seem to slip its bounds. In darkness I am freer, less weighted down, my perspective wholly altered: a kind of noctonaut.

I don’t know what it is, but I know what it should be in this or any other field. Generosity of spirit. Regard for the other person. The laboring woman, the writer whose work I’m editing, the person who is a shell of his former self and is dying. And these days, someone on Twitter with different political or spiritual beliefs or the person with 75 followers who all the “cool kids” ignore. God, we’re all just trying.

When I taught at Harvard in the Art History department, and the students asked the faculty to talk about their favorite work of art, I said - the alphabet.

Very few people ever hold language in their hands.

Writing for format.

Amber Frid-Jimenez is a designer whose recent research explores the role of design and technology in the formation and disintegration of communities under unstable conditions. Her work investigates the cultural mechanics of the network through experimental platforms and visual systems. Frid-Jimenez is an associate professor at the National Academy of the Arts in Bergen, Norway, a researcher at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands, and an affiliate artist at the MIT Program for Art, Culture and Technology.

Lo and behold: footnotes, marginalia, commentary. I suddenly understood. A text is not a thing. It is a site of contention, debate, and social exchange, in a snapshot moment.

[W]e tend to look at static media as if they were fixed, final, and self-evident things. They are not. They are not self-evident. They are provocations for performance. Every act of reading performs a work. It makes the work. It constitutes the work.

Text *is* visual.

Once you get into the flow of things,
you're always haunted by the way that things could have turned out.
This outcome, that conclusion. You get my drift.

The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene.

The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.

They chose to broadcast their ignorance. And that choice is a new thing.

Literature isn’t alien to technology, literature is technological to begin with.

Their eyes will photograph fields rather than, as ours do, or did, follow tracks.

Made me excited for when street view will not only allow you to navigate space but also time. It’s potentially already possible with the documents in the Municipal Archive, it would just need to be hooked up!

Also figured out a way to manage revisions of writing and projects, which is super exciting.

Had a good discussion about DeconstructionNnNN.

I think the one time he called one me I was like: I hate all these theorists. All of them. Not going to talk about Rosalind Krauss. And he kind of moved on.

I would hate having myself in class a lot of the time. That criticism discussion also reminds me of ways that I want to be a better classmate.

Rather than wondering if alien beings exist in the cosmos, let's assume that they are all around us, everywhere, at all scales.

Why should a new aesthetic [be] interested only in the relationship between humans and computers, when so many other relationships exist just as much? Why stop with the computer, like Marinetti foolishly did with the race car?

Being withdraws from access. There is always something left in reserve, in a thing.

The idea of power, or of powerful people, seems to repel him as much as it fascinates.

This kind of knowledge does not come easily or cheaply.

The books come along when they come along.

Caro is a little like Balzac, who kept fussing over his books even after they were published.

“What makes [Caro] such a genius of research and reliability is that everything is of exactly the same importance to him. The smallest thing is as consequential as the biggest. A semicolon matters as much as, I don’t know, whether Johnson was gay. But unfortunately, when it comes to English, I have those tendencies, too, and we could go to war over a semicolon. That’s as important to me as who voted for what law.”

“There was never a plan,” Caro said to me, explaining how he had become a historian and biographer. “There was just a series of mistakes.”

I’m an active reader, and I mostly read to write.

I’m so far onto the left of the copyright issue. I believe that the natural home of all creation is in the public domain.

Money follows attention. Wherever attention goes, money will follow.

And what a book is, in my kind of formulation, is a coherent, sustained long argument or narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end.

I’m not a born writer. I’m a natural editor.

A website does not want to be a book.

A book was a very powerful device because it did so many different things. We’re taking some of those apart.

There’s no reason in my mind that you can’t make an e-book that’s a sheaf of flexible electronic pages that resemble a book that you turn.

PABLO GARCIA runs a collaborative and multidisciplinary research studio based in Pittsburgh. His work is dedicated to experiments in the spatial arts--architecture, design, and the visual and performing arts, in a variety of scales from the portable to the urban. Pablo is the Lucian and Rita Caste Chair in Architecture and Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon, Pablo was the 2007-2008 Muschenheim Fellow at the University of Michigan College of Architecture + Urban Planning. From 2004-2007 he worked as an architect and designer for Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Pablo has taught at Parsons The New School for Design and Princeton University. He holds architecture degrees from Cornell and Princeton Universities.

Metadata is what will help us deliver on the dream of personalized content.

Progress requires that forms must be filled. Thus it is a critical choice of any adult as to where they will perform their free labor.

Like, only the spear that made this wound can heal it.

We are, in principle, free to start over.

Marry your best friend.

Photograph (or draw) everything.

Listen more than you speak.

Music.

On the internet today, reading something twice is an act of love.

This is the paradigm—the relational model that shapes so much of our public life. Its primary components are intimidation and fear. It is essentially authoritarian. If not principally about the abuse of power, it rests, nonetheless, on a generally accepted notion of power’s privileges.

A futurist (in Marinetti's original sense) wants to burn down libraries. A bookfuturist wants to put video games in them.

Now, as the whole industry's moved towards multimedia tablets and touch interfaces, I find myself thinking, "you know, maybe just focusing on text, and making that experience as useful and enjoyable as possible, is a really good idea.”

Bookfuturism turns out to be not just about books as such, but a kind of aesthetic and culture of reading, literacy, history, in connection with (only rarely in opposition to) other kinds of media culture. And reading here would also obviously include newspapers and magazines, and even things like maps and advertisements and data visualizations, plus whatever's displayed on the different screens most of us look at all day at home or work.

We're tinkerers. We look to history for analogies and counter-analogies, but we know that analogies aren't destiny.