Social-Creature

A month before the premiere of True Blood’s third season earlier this summer I wrote a post about the first 21st century superhero. The new Iron Man, as reimagined by Jon Favreau and portrayed by Robert Downey Jr., had broken the mold constricting the superhero archetype since its inception back in the late 1930′s, and [...]

In 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, a relatively new medium called the comic book unleashed a new kind of character into the consciousness of American youth. Created by writer Jerry Siegel and illustrator Joe Shuster, this character possessed superhuman powers and a dedication to using those powers for the benefit of [...]

Oh boy. This is not typically the kind of stuff I write about here, but it is something I feel quite strongly about, and, if nothing else, it makes for a case study in cross-cultural communication — not to mention some interesting neuroscience. Last week, as the New York Times reported, French President Nicolas Sarkozy [...]

It first occurred to me as I was watching the trailer for Star Trek: First Contact, back in March. The cast seemed so typical of the racial and ethnic diversity reflected in the TV shows we’ve all been watching for years now, like Lost… and Heroes… It seemed completely natural for 2009, and yet what [...]

The latest short film from London Squared Productions. Urban Anthropologists, Andy and Carolyn London interview some of New York City’s more overlooked citizens. Love it!

Have you ever been in a meeting where everyone in the room is using a Mac except one person? Ever notice what happens when suddenly everyone starts to get on that person’s case about the fact that he’s the only one not on a Mac? I have, and it kinda looked a little bit like [...]

Amanda Lepore in an ad for the Jawbone headset. Just saw it in Vanity Fair (the one with Marilyn Monroe on the cover). The image on the opposite page, was of a “surgeon”: Definitely makes you look.

The goal of all human activity can’t be reduced to the leaving of descendants. Once human culture was firmly in place it acquired new goals. – Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee right as i was in the process of rereading the third chimpanzee (i had to read it in college for sociobiology, and recently realized [...]

this weekend was the 27th annual sunset junction music festival, a kind of cross between oldskool urban summertime carnival and indie rock block party. think: stale cotton candy and amusement park rides, local shops and art galleries trapped in the warpath shelling beer, dancing in the streets to mobile soundsystems, and the major stages blaring [...]

photo by: anearthling One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that “you are not the user.” If you work on a development project, you’re atypical by definition. Design to optimize the user experience for outsiders, not insiders. – jakob nielsen much the same way that the developer is not the user, the marketer is not [...]