Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: General

  • Fell on black days

    Rest easy, man.

  • The designer’s prestidigitation

    As Apple’s chief designer Jony Ive recalls, when he and his team sat down to redesign the iPhone operating system in 2012, it did away with many of the classic skeuomorphic elements: “We understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn’t need physical buttons, they understood the benefits. So there was…

  • Iron counsel

    China Miéville on the Bolshevik uprising of 1917: So to go back to the question: why does the revolution matter? Because of what was right about it, and what went wrong. It matters because it shows the necessity not only of hope but of appropriate pessimism, and the interrelation of the two. Without hope, that…

  • Pirsig

    To my great shame, I don’t recall the name of the school librarian who suggested I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Hiding out in school libraries was a habit I developed at boarding school, because it was a space of last resort. The habit persisted into my years at a (comparatively) normal grammar…

  • Immortality and infrastructure

    Every technology requires a physical infrastructure in order to operate. But this infrastructure depends on social institutions, which are frequently subject to breakdown. I made this point when I bumped into some ardent advocates of cryonic suspension in California in the 1980s. How long would it take to develop the technologies that were needed to…