iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Maggie Gram

KQED Forum @kqedforum.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

🎧 Listen to the podcast! Historian and designer @maggiegram.bsky.social spoke with @alexis-madrigal.bsky.social about her new book "The Invention of Design," how the field of design has evolved and the peril, and promise, of design thinking. 🔗:

buff.ly

Can We Really Design Our Way Out of Our Problems?

KQED's Forum · Episode

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Maggie Gram @maggiegram.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Excited to talk with @printmag.bsky.social this afternoon. Register here: l8r.it/VBTi

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Maggie Gram @maggiegram.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

I love that @myhnn.bsky.social published this excerpt, AND I feel compelled to emphasize that "Irrelevant at Best, or Else Complicit" headlines an excerpt (it's a quote) rather than a review 😆🫠

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Andrew Simon @simongandrew.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

One of many moments in Omar El Akkad’s new book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” that will stop you in your tracks.

There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they'll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they'd tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.
No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience.
Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness. Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.

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Beth Popp Berman @epopppp.bsky.social · 23/02/2025

I like that my mid-range financial decisions now include considerations like "will money be worth anything"

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Cyd Harrell @cydharrell.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

@emilytav.bsky.social articulates beautifully what is different about civic tech (imperfect yes) & DOGE (disastrous)

screenshot from Emily’s article “But all of the work was driven by an unshakable belief that the public deserved more from its government, and that the government was capable of doing better.

For the US Digital Service, tech was a means to an end: an effective government that people can rely on & easily interact with instead of having to go through a Kafkaesque maze of websites and phone numbers and apps and forms.”

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Brian Goldstone @brian-goldstone.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

Love this letter from David Velasco (the former Artforum editor fired for publishing an open letter against the carnage in Gaza) responding to that Harper’s piece lamenting the contamination of contemporary art by politics.

"Sorry, I could barely get through Kissick’s orgy of grievances. I lived through the years he elegizes, saw some great art and even more middling art. Anyone reading his piece with a gimlet eye will notice that it was speculation, not ‘politics,’ that sucked the air out of the room. I do agree with him on one point: the art world is boring right now. But you’re not going to save it by being boring yourself. And you’re definitely not going to get art that ‘tears open [your] consciousness’ through nostalgia for Hans Ulrich Obrist. Go outside, look around. Stop being sad because markets and institutions aren’t pandering to you. Go where the energy is. Go make some real friends. Break a magazine. Go to a protest. Free Palestine.

David Velasco
New York City”

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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

I have some of those 1970s 📚 on cardboard furniture, but I was unaware of their cnxn to the 💐Workshop for Learning Things 🛠️, a Whole Earth-y resource + learning center for teachers (same as the 60s Ctr for Understanding Media, predecessor to my old dept @ The New School!) (via Eames papers LoC)

And assortment of brochures from the workshop for learning things, including brochures, listing workshop costs, course, offerings, etc. – on cream, yellow, + green paper

A postcard for the Workshop for Learning Things, from Philip Morrison to Ray Eames

A list of classes, including cardboard, carpentry, classroom, photography, and simple printing

Yellow course catalog from 1976. I can’t quite tell what the image is depicting!

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David Buchanan @retr0.id · 18/09/2024

what if computers were stupid? what if they could do less, with more? what if we had no idea who our target audience was supposed to be? what if we had more vc funding? what even *is* a use case? our new startup asks all these questions, and more

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dr. thrasher, an american writer in ex(archia)(xile) @thrasherxy.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

JUST PUBLISHED: It has been the honor of my career to co-author "Queer, HIV+ and Running Out of Medication in Gaza" with Afeef Nessouli @theintercept.com —a story about Palestine, AIDS, genocide, and an extraordinary survivor named E.S. Please read & share. theintercept.com/2025/01/13/i...

theintercept.com

Queer, HIV-Positive, and Running Out of Medication in Gaza

A year in Palestine, living in fear of not just genocide — but AIDS.

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Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran.com · 08/01/2025

As we witness these heartbreaking scenes from the fires in LA, an important reminder that incarcerated people make up over 30% of California’s forest firefighters.

motherjones.com

30 percent of California's forest firefighters are prisoners

About 4,000 inmates battle blazes in the Golden State's woodlands.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Useful data on car ownership in NYC. Cars are clustered heavily in low-poverty neighborhoods, and the highest-poverty neighborhoods with significant car ownership tend to be distant from the congestion-pricing zone.

Chart from article linked in next post, showing strong inverse correlation between car ownership and poverty level in NYC neighborhoods. Car ownership is by far the highest in locations with poverty rates below 20%, and a high proportion of the relative outliers are in the Bronx and outer Brooklyn.

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

We found him. The user from every user story

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David Leheny @davidleheny.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

There are 12 other answers but, as you'll see by reading the first two responses, @colsonwhitehead.com pretty much sums it up www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/o...

Roland Busch, the chief executive of Siemens, the industrial company based in Munich:

2025 will be the year of industrial A.I. It will be a powerful tool to address skilled labor shortages and boost productivity, creating substantial growth opportunities.

Siva Sivaram, the chief executive of QuantumScape, a developer of solid state lithium-metal batteries based in San Jose, Calif.:

In 2025, the race for global battery supremacy will intensify amid growing demand across sectors like transportation and A.I. The battle for lithium-ion batteries is lost to China, but the future depends on next-generation technologies that outperform them. I hope the United States leads in this new era of energy storage.

Colson Whitehead, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author:

I have no hopes for 2025. Humanity is disappointing. We killed the Earth. Villains triumph and the innocents suffer. I imagine these trends will continue.

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Cyd Harrell @cydharrell.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

🥰🙏 I don't promote my book as much now that I work in government, but I did write one & I believe it's still pretty useful as we enter a time of major shifts & messy information in both government & tech www.goodreads.com/book/show/55...

goodreads.com

A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide

This friendly guide is for technology people who work, …

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lukelukeluke @lukelukeluke.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

Here are some nice mushrooms

A moss speckled tree branch lies above a forest floor of fallen oak leaves, several large colonies of white Splitgill mushroom grow toward the camera, their swirling gills creating flowing patterns on varied scales. Photo taken by me December 2023

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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

fundamentally this is what Trump administrations are all about: the guys. there will be new guys every week. they will startle you, you'll be astounded by them, and then as quickly as they appeared they will fade into an indistinguishable mass, leaves on the forest floor.

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Maggie Gram @maggiegram.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

fascinating—from newsletter of @hcrichardson.bsky.social, on industry reaction to trump’s intended climate policy

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Maggie Gram @maggiegram.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

I’m feeling like Bluesky is a thing

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 06/11/2024

i think that the people interested in recriminations and score settling right now aren’t seriously grappling with the magnitude of what happened and the implications for the rest of our lives. most of us will probably die living in the political order that will emerge out of this election.

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Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · 17/05/2024

Consider my mind boggled. In 1968, Columbia demonstrators literally held a Dean *hostage* for 26 hours, and not only did he not retaliate after being released, HE WROTE SOME OF THEM REFERENCE LETTERS. But now it is just straight to the cops. www.nytimes.com/2024/05/17/n...

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Ingrid Burrington @lifewinning.com · 18/04/2024

Ever just find yourself thinking about the daily genocidal horrors and the feeling that the walls are closing in and feel totally baffled that you have to keep doing your little tasks

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Maggie Gram @maggiegram.bsky.social · 11/03/2024

Still think daily abt this brilliant & devastating piece by @gabrielwinant.bsky.social, written the week after Oct 7, on Israel as “a machine for the conversion of grief into power”: www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

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Nate O @nateo.bsky.social · 31/01/2024

A pediatrician’s two weeks inside a hospital in Gaza www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

And if I could offer an example around how that manifests: a seven-year-old had deep lacerations to his leg and needed some suturing. It wasn’t a life or death case—it was very simple—but the only pain relief we had was Motrin, which was frankly cruel, and a cruel undertaking. There was no ketamine. And so I tried to use one of my pediatric tools as a distraction. And so I had a light flasher, but he wasn’t interested in any of those designs that I put on the wall. So I tried to distract him from the pain. Usually what I would do is ask questions like, “So who’s your best friend?” I can’t ask that because what if his best friend’s dead? “What’s your favorite subject at school?” He hasn’t been to school in three months. “What’s your favorite food?” I don’t know when the last time he ate would be. Every single facet of their society has been ripped apart. ♦

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wyx! @wyx.gay · 11/01/2024

I have never done phone calls before and this website Helen linked has made it so easy to even engage the process. I have bad phone anxiety and it giving me the exact numbers and a template of what to say about asking for a ceasefire made a huge difference. It took me about 5 minutes. Please call

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doleful moo of a cow @oulipien.bsky.social · 11/01/2024

Someone on twitter noted that neri oxman's dissertation contains an apparently irrelevant digression about samurai swords, so I looked it up, and … (a) this sentence is a stunner in its own right (b) this sentence is also plagiarized

Pristine in its entirety, yet the creation of the Samurai sword surmounted a technological impossibility: the blade has to be forged in order to hold a very sharp edge and, concurrently, not break in the ferocity of a dual. To create steel both brittle (it must be hard enough to take a sharp edge), and soft (it must not break) was an almost unfeasible metallurgical challenge

The Samurai Sword: The Weapon That Embodied Japan's ...
HistoryNet
https://www.historynet.com › weaponry-samurai-sword
Sep 1, 2006 — The blade had to be forged so that it would hold a very sharp edge and yet not break in the ferocity of a duel. To achieve these twin ..[continues on the site itself: objectives, the sword maker, or cutler, was faced with a considerable metallurgical challenge.]

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Maggie Gram @maggiegram.bsky.social · 12/01/2024

Had missed this letter to the Columbia U administration, re: its actions to curtail pro-Palestinian discourse, by the brilliant Columbia historian Rashid Khalidi www.instagram.com/p/C1LF6NeuM3...

instagram.com

FSJP @Columbia Barnard Teachers on Instagram

Prof. Khalidi in an open letter to Columbia administration, in response to an email sent by deans on 12.21.23 writes, "this statement amounts to a ...

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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 12/01/2024

Substantial (~40%) reduction of #LongCovid via Covid vaccines in 4 large multinational cohorts, and ~15% greater with mRNA than AZ vaccine thelancet.com/journals/lan...

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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 09/01/2024

Brain injury, loss of grey matter, and cognitive dysfunction at 1-year in people initially hospitalized compared with controls #LongCovid researchsquare.com/article/rs-3... preprint "cognitive deficits...equivalent in magnitude to 20 years of aging"

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pixelatedboat aka “mr bluesky” @pixelatedboat.bsky.social · 11/12/2023

People on bluesky love complaining about the pot but as the frog inside it I can tell you the water isn’t THAT hot

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skáld @danglinghemmie.bsky.social · 24/11/2023

what if our bodies fused in the bike lane

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