Anil Dash

I've spent a couple weeks using a new 14" Apple MacBook Pro daily (as a replacement for my last machine, which was a similar, but rather terrible, 2016 MacBook Pro) and thought it might be valuable to share a few observations that might help you assess whether it's a useful

The key to protecting people's privacy on the internet isn't in trying to stop users' data from being sent to different services, it's in poisoning the well by having user data be so inconsistent, disconnected, spurious or expensive to collect that today's surveillance infrastructures (often referred to as "ad tech"

One of the biggest sources of miscommunication is people having different styles of communication, or different norms about the right way to express emotion or context even if there's agreement on more straightforward aspects of verbal communication. Things like "ask vs. guess" cultures are one common manifestation of this, and

Recently, a motivated Prince fan created a spreadsheet that attempts to catalog the entirety of Prince's thousands of recordings over the course of his career. Beginning in 1973 as a then-15-year-old Prince taped his first few tracks, and going through (so far) the end of the 80s, it's a remarkable

Every year, for twenty years now, I've written an observance of this day. Sometimes it's for myself, sometimes it's for the small cohort of folks who've checked back in with me on this day every year since then, a group which has shrunk a bit over the years. But this

Amongst the many new publications that's popped up in the current newsletter boom, I've been enjoying Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci's "Embedded". One of the biggest reasons why is the recurring feature "My Internet", which details the way one person uses all the common aspects of the internet that we

Here are some before-and-afters from a set of photos my parents took on a visit to Manhattan in 1985. I tried to replicate the angles as best I could in the modern photos. MacDougal StreetSixth Avenue

The Konami Code is one of the longest-running inside references amongst both gamers and coders, acting as something of a shibboleth for a certain kind of nerd. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. I never owned a Nintendo Entertainment System, didn't care about most Konami games,

After a pause of a few years, Twitter announced today that they're going to resume allowing any user to request the blue verification checkmark for their account. The social and technical dynamics around Twitter verification remain as fraught and fascinating as they were in the earliest days of the service,

Anytime a big new market pops up, people rush in to stake their claims and make their fortunes. Our culture loves creation myths, especially in technology. Fables about lone geniuses are ubiquitous in the tech industry, with their fundamental falsity doing nothing to undermine their utility for most people in

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of the greatest games ever made, and one of the breakout hits of the Nintendo Switch platform, which is on its way to becoming one of the 10 most popular video game consoles of all time. But now, years after

It is almost impossibly difficult to explain Robin Byrd to anyone who was not an adult living in NYC toward the end of the last century, though everyone who recognizes the name immediately responds with unbridled enthusiasm. This comes up in conversation for me from time to time because I

I love any kind of advocacy for safer, more humane streets, so it was a real joy to get to guest on the wonderful The War on Cars podcast. Doug Gordon went deep, really pushing into the connections and surprising resonances between what makes communities safe and healthy in both

Duleshwar Tandi, better known these days as Rapper Dule Rocker, is one of the most successful and influential rappers to have ever come out of the Kalahandi district in Odisha, where my family is from. I jumped into his catalog of videos this weekend and was blown away not just

A while back, when I wrote out in plain words that we have a politically dominant death cult ruling America right now, I worried about the risks of saying my opinion so straightforwardly. As you might expect, I did get a good number of people saying I was exaggerating, or

These days, I'm a hobbyist web developer. That used to be a common thing people did; it was like having a crafting hobby, but with web pages. Over the last decade or two, though, making a website became either something done by professional developers using incredibly complex tools, or the

Over the weekend, we had the chance to explore the newly-opened Moynihan Station, the massive new expansion to Penn Station that's been in the works for decades. Though it ostensibly serves as a welcoming and modern new facility for Amtrak and Long Island Railroad passengers, it's very clearly also meant

Ted Lasso, the standout series of Apple's new Apple TV+ streaming service, rightfully earned a place on many people's lists of the most-recommended new shows of 2020. But what's best about it is what makes it so different from most other highly-acclaimed shows, especially "prestige" TV. You'll see lots of

I was delighted to discover Omar Rizwan's TabFS, a brilliant hack that lets you see your browser tabs as folders and files on your computer, because it's incredibly clever on its own, but also opens a view into how a shift in metaphor  can totally change the way we see

In the early days of Twitter, there was a pleasingly low-tech tradition called "follow friday" (which people later denoted with the #FF hashtag), wherein people listed other accounts that they suggested you might follow. It did a good job of providing a manually-curated form of discover on the platform until

About once a year, I do a little digital reset to help make my online life a little more pleasant. I’m not advocating that anybody do the same as me, but I hope that sharing some of what I do might help inspire you to manage the technology in

Twenty five years ago today, Microsoft released Windows 95. It was undoubtedly a technical leap forward, but its biggest, most lasting impacts are about how it changed popular culture's relationship to technology. For context, when Windows 95 was released in August of 1995, only about 30% of American homes had