The first principle. When using a product to help you do a task, the product should only help and never distract you from the task.

The second principle: An interface should be reliable.

The third princple: An interface should be efficient and as simple as possible.

The fourth principle: The suitability of an interface can only be determined by testing.

The fifth principle: An interface should be pleasant in tone and visually attractive.

A nearly one page summary of design rules, by Jef Raskin

You can spot them in coffee shops in Brooklyn and the West Village, clicking away on their laptops — when they’re not wasting time on Gawker, that is. You also see them at readings at Housing Works, KGB Bar and the Half King, dressed in black, leaning forward intently and sometimes venturing to ask a probing question. They idolize Lethem, Chabon, Eggers. They study The New Yorker religiously so that they can complain about how predictable the fiction is.

What Happened in Vegas ...

A roundup by Sarah Boxer.

With such riches to choose from, you might think it would be a snap to put a bunch of blogs into a book and call it an anthology. And you would be wrong. The trouble? Links—those bits of highlighted text that you click on to be transported to another blog or another Web site. (Links are the Web equivalent of footnotes, except that they take you directly to the source.) It's not only that the links are hard to transpose into print. It's that the whole culture of linking — composing on the fly, grabbing and posting whatever you like, making weird, unexplained connections and references — doesn't sit happily in a book. Yes, I'm talking about bloggy writing itself.

Is there really such a thing? A growing stack of books has pondered the effects of blogs and bloggers on culture (We've Got Blog and Against the Machine), on democracy (Republic.com 2.0), on politics (Blogwars), on privacy (The Future of Reputation), on media (Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation and We're All Journalists Now), on professionalism (The Cult of the Amateur), on business (Naked Conversations), and on all of the above (Blog!). But what about the effect of blogs on language?

Are they a new literary genre? Do they have their own conceits, forms, and rules? Do they have an essence?

Blogs - The New York Review of Books

The nasty truth about a new literary heroine.

Scandale Francaise

About Edith Grossman.

On top of a bookcase in the hallway outside her bedroom is a towering stack of books. “Those I’m waiting to read, though not in any order of preference. But after I’ve read a very long one, all I want is a short one.” Grossman is a reader’s reader, happy to have gotten cheap paperbacks from neighborhood stores like the old Shakespeare & Co., Labyrinth Books (now Bookculture), and Papyrus (now Morningside Bookshop). It’s about the content, not covers or first editions. “I like to buy books on the street, too, but I’m wary of it now because of bed bugs.” Her collection has also been fed by the places she traveled to in her youth. She grins large: “My clothes used to fit in an overnight bag. But my books took up trunks and trunks.”

sketches of spanish

Be a good soldier, or upright trustee,
An arbitrator from corruption free;
And if a witness in a doubtful cause,
Where a bribed judge means to elude the laws,
Though Phalaris’ brazen bull were there,
And he would dictate what he’d have you swear,
Be not so profligate, but rather choose
To guard your honour, and your life to lose,
Rather than let your virtue be betray’d;
Virtue, the noblest cause for which you’re made.

Juvenal—Remembering Why We Fight

On the theme of the acclaimed new book by Alex Ross:

In 1908, after being lambasted in the press and cuckolded by his wife, Arnold Schoenberg reinvented classical music. We're still trying to figure out what comes next.

More cuckoldry, maybe?

The atonal century

You may not always like Clive Thompson's work, but he may interest you here.

For whatever reasons — maybe the reality fatigue I've felt — a lot of literary writers are trying their hand at speculative fiction. Philip Roth used a "counterfactual" history — what if Nazi sympathizers in the US won the 1940 election? — to explore anti-Semitism in The Plot Against America. Cormac McCarthy muses on the nature of morality in the Hobbesian anarchy of his novel The Road. Then there's the genre-bending likes of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Susanna Clarke, and Margaret Atwood (whom I like to think of as a sci-fi novelist trapped inside a literary author).

Those aren't writers whose books are adorned with embossed dragons. But that doesn't mean they don't owe that dragon a large debt.

Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing

Here are the nominations for the Golden Guy:

80th Academy Awards

It will be very hard to pick winners here ... most of them are very well matched.

The Oscar Gun Goes Off

When "stand-up philosopher" Slavoj Zizek calls for "repeating Lenin" or praises Robespierre's defence of terror, some observers might be tempted to ask whether his entire intellectual oeuvre is not just some kind of act. No, says John Clark. "It's not just a pose; it's a position."

Acting up