The worrying trend of impersonation and the lack of legal protection against author identity theft — Between 1761 and 1788, France’s Royal Academy of Science released its magisterial survey of the nation’s arts, crafts and industry, the Descriptions des Arts et Métiers (faites ou approuvées par messieurs de l’Académie Royale des Sciences). The gorgeously printed 113 folio volume encyclopaedia with three supplements compiled the work of…

Can the film match Adrian Tomine’s novel? — Comics can seem like a laugh until it all becomes deadly serious. The worst atrocity that has been committed against cartoonists is the firebombing of the Charlie Hebdo offices that left twelve people dead. In the United States, it is the legal persecution of comic shop owner Michael Correra (prosecuted…

Adam Mosseri wants Threads to be a platform for culture rather than politics. Can the twain ever be separated? — Meta’s Threads is a runaway success. It is claimed that the platform reached 100 million users in only five days. News about it dominates the blogosphere. Threads, however, has its critics. In the design community, the new platform has been criticised for not allowing non-Instagram users to sign up; not…

The moral compromise confronting users looking to adopt Meta’s Twitter-killer app — A few weeks ago, news broke that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were going to participate in an MMA cage fight. Zuckerberg has recently won some BBJ medals (it sounds like a sex act but BBJ stands for “Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu”). Musk, unimpressed, claimed he could just flop down on Zuckerberg…

Enjoying the new Rick and Morty season, the joy of collage, and thinking about the influence of modernism on cartoon mouth shapes — It is well past the middle of June. A few of my recent stories over the last month have been: A mega-piece that in its essence explains why a font setting of 72 points in a word processing software should result in text equivalent to 1 inch on a printed…

The hostile water of the Atlantic continues to be a proving ground for hubris — The obsession with the Titanic strikes me personally as ghoulish. The catastrophe surrounding the OceanGate submarine and its five occupants is the main news at the time of writing. In the United Kingdom, it has edged out the impending meltdown of the economy due to a failure to control inflation…

Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money builds on research that financial decision-making is rooted in emotion rather than reason — About a year or so when I travelled back to India, it was clear that Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money was the no.1 national best-seller in the country. While foreign self-help books are perennial popular sellers in India, the scale of its success exceeded even peak Harry Potter mania. I…

Pride Month is a barometer to judge if our friends, family and colleagues are safe in our communities. The backsliding on their rights in 2023 is deeply unfortunate. — In May, 2023, Uganda made homosexuality a crime punishable by death. Uganda’s terrible law is a gruesome reminder of the fact that the LGBTQIA+ are continuing to be specifically singled out, disrespected, and dehumanised because of their sexuality. This is not a matter of closed history.

My theory is that an Aerosmith music video keeps Silicon Valley from learning that headsets are not the answer to immersive virtual reality experiences. — The high point of the VR headset was in 1993 when the Aerosmith video Amazing was released. Starring Alicia Silverstone, the video made it seem that even geeks could be racing super-bikes, making out with supermodels, and sky diving from biplanes in the not-so-distant future.