Weekly resources about our rapidly evolving cyborganic relationship with technology. Topics include humanity inside computers, technology culture, digital artifacts, and augmented productivity for 21st-century knowledge work.
Soulful Computing Newsletter
I'm in Austin over the 4th of July weekend to visit family. Every time I come back to Texas I have incredibly mixed feelings about how this town is metastasizing away from Richard Florida's utopian vision of a "Creative Class rising." He predicted Austin
Soulful Computing Newsletter
Today we launched a new MIT Museum website, and started our 100 day countdown to the opening of the Museum in its new building at Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA (October 2! If you're in Boston around that time, hit me up and I'll make sure
Soulful Computing Newsletter
Computational nostalgia haunts me. I have become the vintage computer, to be sold off at a garage sale.
Soulful Computing Newsletter
Hello friend, Thank you for all the outpouring of kind words for my newsletter last week. It was a huge catharsis to write it, and I was so touched that it seemed helpful to many of my readers. I'm still working through responding to the many of you
Soulful Computing Newsletter
Thank you for the overwhelming feedback on this essay. I had a couple of good cries while writing it and I'm crying as I read all of your kind words in return. I'm doing my best to write back to every one of your letters. It
Soulful Computing Newsletter
Hello friend, Uhhhmmm… Happy New Year? This week, we watched unprecedented events unfold at the United States Capitol, and as I am writing this, we don’t know how many more twists remain in this Shakespearean drama. I regret my jokes at the end of last year about how “it
Soulful Computing Newsletter
There's something about December that sends me into a frenzy of trying to wrap up projects as if I'm trying to make up for not being as productive as I could have been all year. Resolutions are unmet. Projects are incomplete. Life is still in disarray.
Soulful Computing Newsletter
I have a confession. Somewhere in middle of Act II of Hamilton, I think between "The Adams Administration" and "We Know," I fell fast asleep. This was the original cast on Broadway, mind you, and I was sitting in some of the best seats in the
Soulful Computing Newsletter
Hello friend, Due to my choices, I died many, many times when I was a child. Luckily, I kept my fingers inside the pages and could always undo my mistakes. My brothers and I grew up with a shared library of Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books. These non-linear stories
Soulful Computing Newsletter
Hello friend, This is another Bricolage episode of the newsletter. From the first Bricolage: I made a plan for weeks like this, where an extended essay on a single theme is a bit out of reach for me. Every once in a while, I will publish a much shorter, skimmable
Soulful Computing Newsletter
Hello friend, Today is Election Day in the United States in the middle of a pandemic. Citizens will participate in a presidential election that will be a crucible for the American form of Democracy. President Donald J. Trump has spent the last four years characterizing the election process in the
Soulful Computing Newsletter
Aboard the Lunar Module Eagle (LM-5), Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were 30,000 feet above the moon surface and rapidly descending. It was July 24, 1969, and The Apollo 11 mission had been proceeding relatively smoothly. About 4 hours later, the astronauts would make history as a man took