A little over a month ago, the magazine Red Herring, which focused on venture investments in technologies and new products, closed (on March 3, 2003 to be exact). While I was never a subscriber to the magazine, I am slightly saddened by its death, only in that it was a remarkable publishing artifact from a time when money and ideas met in strange ways.
There are plenty of magazines out there, however, and I’m certainly not hurting for good daily, weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly publications. I made a list of all the magazines that regularly come into our home. There are a lot of them, but I’ve always adored magazines, which are simultaneously useful and useless, timeless and time-sensitive, shallow and sure. Some are free, most are paid subscriptions. Some are excellent, others are worth a perusal. Some are sublimely produced; others are barely worth the postage. But here they are, like a barrel of herring:
All Animals
Brown Alumni Monthly
Business 2.0
Emigre
Entrepreneur
Fast Company
Gourmet
Graphic Design USA
How
MacAddict
MacWorld
Mother Jones
Parenting
Print
Salon
Spin
The New Republic
The New Yorker
Utne Reader
Utne Reader
Wired
Working Mother

Emigre, the 20-year old type design company, has just released its latest magazine/book, called, of all things, Rant. It’s a pretty important issue, in my humble opine, as it lays out what is at stake in the future of graphic design. With a number of strong contributors, from Andrew Blauvelt to Shawn Wolfe, the issue re-focuses its attention on the critica issues related to design. Rudy VanderLans, owner of Emigre, says in the introduction that the return to Helvetica usage and what I call the “plain-ification” of design has meant the dumbing down of graphics and graphic artists.
For me, simple and simplified design is extremely difficult — and is worth attaining at all costs, but not at the true expense of meaning, beauty, or discovery. The plain-ification that so many artists and designers are employing right now is partly the fault of folks like Jacob Nielsen, who asks of us to make sure that form is always over function. But it’s also designers who have caught the unfortunate vanilla virus whose DNA reads A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D, A, B. Anyway, Rant does a better job of ranting than I do. Importantly, it asks where the analytical voices of design currently exist. I think they’re surely around but perhaps no one really cares to hear them in this crazy market.

Salon recently featured a piece on a hactivist network’s siteRe-Code.com : Re-Code Your Own Price for food, electronics, software, movies, music, and more!. The admittedly critical hacking idea is simple: punch in any UPC code into their website, push a button, and out comes a brand new barcode that you can use to set your own price. Just paste the new code over the old one at the store, ring it up, and pay a dollar instead of five. The site looks and feels like Priceline.com and is clearly stated as being satirical. Yet, the site does ask us to think about how prices are set, how stores raise and lower prices with coupons, giveaways, and sales, and what role brands have in the maintenance and administration of product pricepoints.

It was exactly three years go to the day that the Nasdaq fell in a large way (well, it essentially crashed) and I embarked on a new career at a company called OVEN Digital. It was at this time that Barnes & Noble was launching barnesandnoble.com, spinning off its online from its “offline” and profitable business. The .com portion was going public, and the expected feeding frenzy on the stock was mammoth. We were all very excitable. What saddens me about that day three years ago is that many, many idealistic and thoughtful and smart ideas went away with the collapse of the dot-com frenzy, and I do miss those days of sheer possibility.
Today, the best part of barnesandnoble.com is its shortened web address. And the best part of being three years away from the Nasdaq’s collapse is that I’m much happier working with the Internet than in the Internet “industry.”

In this week’s The New Yorker there is an excellent story about PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, and the activities that animal rights movment is tackling in whole or in part lately. I guess I didn’t quite realize how much of a kook Ms. Newkirk, with her will that features cannibalism and her absolute equation of pigs and boys, which I had thought was a joke. The timing is quite appropriate for Pavement lead singer Stephen Malkmus’ Pig Lib, which was released a few weeks ago and is quite a strong album. It’s not as sonically innovative as any Pavement (I highly recommend the recently remastered Slanted and Enchanted double album), but it does well on its own and has nicely executed awkward cover art.

Like I noted a few days ago, the images of Saddam Hussein’s effigy being dragged around, burned, decapitated, and mutilated is very powerful stuff. I was fortunate enough to be able to witness on live television Iraqis putting that well-intended rope around the neck of the large statue of Saddam today in downtown Baghdad. I couldn’t help but notice also that:
1. Some Marine thought it might be cool to drape an American flag over his head. This complex act of symbolism, while understandable in the moment, will not endear the Arab public to our ways of doing things.
2. The entire square was filled with Iraqi men – no women and no children. I’m not sure what this means but it’s evident that the war for freedom in Iraq is going to have to take many fronts.
3. It’s quite miraculous that after three (albeit long) weeks, the regime has toppled, more or less, and citizens are not afraid to publicly pound away at a statue of Saddam Hussein.

In just a few days, New York City is celebrating Keep a Poem in Your Pocket Day, sponsored by the City and a number of businesses here. It’s an absolutely cool project: the idea is to celebrate National Poetry Month (April) by carrying around a favorite poem in your pocket and sharing it with someone on Friday, April 11. I somehow find it hard to imagine my sitting down on the subway and pulling out a crumpled piece of paper with a short poem on it by Czeslaw Milosz and then reading it to the guy next to me who is quietly sipping a Snapple, but hey, you never know. Perhaps the poetry of that moment would awaken greater worlds than the content on that small scrap of pocket parchment.
Thanks to my friend R.P. for sending the link.

While it’s a very good thing that troops have been able to more or less easily enter the palace(s) of Mr. Hussein, I’m disappointd that the “symbols of the Iraqi regime” are being destroyed for two reasons. First, it seems that if anyone is to destroy these cultural artifacts, it should be Iraqis themselves; the Berlin Wall and the statues of Lenin came down by citizens, not by militias. Second, these artifacts, whatever their value or ultimate worth, are important signs of a regime that will eventually be needed to remember, to re-think, and to recall the times of the brutalist Saddam Hussein regime. It’s an unusual case of form over content — these forms should be preserved for future exhibitions for the children of Iraq.

There once was a time when tech magazines were free. All you had to do was work at a company, sign your name on a form on the Web, and the magazine would be yours. (I’m exaggerating only slightly.) Only a few trade mags, like InformationWeek still offer this service. Others, like Wired, have dramatically reduced their subscription rates ($10.00), while most others have gone bye the bye.
I’m old enough in tech years to remember Mondo 2000 which came out almost at the same time as Wired in 1993. While Wired focused on the technology and politics of the coming “revolution,” Mondo was a kind of screwy, culturally-California look at the oddballs of computing. It seemed to reference punk and complexity while Wired was, well, more relevant to the Alleys sprouting on both coasts. Interestingly, I’m amazed at what turns up on a Google search for “Mondo 2000” — because the magazine never went “wired” (or online), it pretty much doesn’t exist on the Net, save for a few oddball diarists. Alas, I’d much rather be getting M2 than IW, which pretty clearly states the kind of world we’re in today.

There is a lot going on in this war with Iraq that we don’t know about; while many people may look for nefarious things (and there may be those), there are also a tremendous number of hidden, secret, or otherwise unknown activities that are being undertaken to unseat the Saddam administration. I’m very interested in articles like this one — Is the CIA spamming Iraqi generals? — and others which show that the U.S. is using advanced (and “traditional”) Internet technologies to bring down the regime. In non-virtual conduct, I learned today on NPR of the probable existence of numerous safe houses, inside Baghdad, that have been carefully advertised to Iraqi military officials.
Many new books will be written about the the West’s use of new technologies in this war — and while the most important ones are those preventing missiles from hitting civilian residences, the others will make for good reading.