Tom MacWright

tom@macwright.com

Recently

Movies

Music

Reading

Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage, a piece by David Foster Wallace, absolutely won my heart this month. I read it on a flight and by the time I landed everything I heard reminded me of it, from the ideas on Politically Correct English to the fraught concept of purely descriptive linguistics.

This is [Politically Correct English]’s central fallacy — that a society’s mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes

Everything in Bret Victor’s Links 2013 is worth a read.

Clock of the Long Now, on the recommendation of Mike Migurski. I think it could have focused better on practical elements of design and planning rather than the kind of vague question-asking that it got caught up in. It also makes a few predictions about technology which went all wrong: Java taking over. Motorola being a thousand-year company.

San Francisco

I spent a week at Mapbox’s new office in San Francisco, located on the top floor of Code for America’s building. It’s a pristine, hard wood floor type place filled with great people.

Being in SF also meant meeting a lot of twitter & internet friends - now real life friends, running Twin Peaks at sunrise, and drinking freshly squeezed carrot and ginger juice on my walk from Corona Heights to SoMa each morning.

Next up I’m spending some time at Millbrook School co-teaching a class with my sister about the internet and programming.

Elsewhere