The NYTimes has a great article on the 40 years of portraits Nicholas Nixon took of his wife and her 3 sisters:

Throughout this series, we watch these women age, undergoing life’s most humbling experience. While many of us can, when pressed, name things we are grateful to Time for bestowing upon us, the lines bracketing our mouths and the loosening of our skin are not among them. So while a part of the spirit sinks at the slow appearance of these women’s jowls, another part is lifted: They are not undone by it. We detect more sorrow, perhaps, in the eyes, more weight in the once-fresh brows. But the more we study the images, the more we see that aging does not define these women. Even as the images tell us, in no uncertain terms, that this is what it looks like to grow old, this is the irrefutable truth, we also learn: This is what endurance looks like.

From 1996-1998 I worked at the Zabriskie Gallery on 57th Street & Madison Avenue in Manhattan. Nicholas Nixon was one of the photographers Virginia Zabriskie represented. I was lucky enough to put on white gloves and thumb through many of the photos mentioned in this article.

Nixon used 8×10-inch film to make 8×10-inch prints, so the details in them were hyper-real. When your film is that big, it doesn’t come in a roll and you can’t fire off a lot of shots (easily). You have to know your shot and have the confidence to shoot it. Nixon is one of those old school photographers who can do it.

Just keep going.

No more laptops in Clay Shirky’s classroom:

Over the years, I’ve noticed that when I do have a specific reason to ask everyone to set aside their devices (‘Lids down’, in the parlance of my department), it’s as if someone has let fresh air into the room. The conversation brightens, and more recently, there is a sense of relief from many of the students. Multi-tasking is cognitively exhausting – when we do it by choice, being asked to stop can come as a welcome change.

So this year, I moved from recommending setting aside laptops and phones to requiring it, adding this to the class rules: “Stay focused. (No devices in class, unless the assignment requires it.)” Here’s why I finally switched from ‘allowed unless by request’ to ‘banned unless required’.
Great move by Clay.
I did the same thing with my students when I taught web design at FIT in 2010.
I used to make everyone to put away their phones at the start of class. To back up my request, I’d hold my iPhone up above my head so everyone could see it, and place it face down at the front of the class with the ringer off.
[Because my class was about web design, they were all sitting in front of iMacs with Internet connections, so I’d still have to walk up and down every row to make sure the students weren’t on websites unrelated to their projects.]

MG Siegler on Microsoft and Windows 10:

Such a strange, yet predictable response to Windows 8 by Microsoft. Windows 7 was the de-Vista-ing of Windows. A return to Windows XP. Windows 10 is the de-8-ing of Windows. A return to WIndows 7.

How many development years has Microsoft collectively wasted on these OS boondoggles? It’s the epitome of a company that wants to change, but can’t.
Bingo.
Windows Phone and Windows 8 are really, really trying to be fun and useful and everything they need to be, but they’re having a bitch of a time.
Getting rid of Ballmer isn’t going to be a band-aid on everything.
In the same way that there’s an underlying culture keeping Apple on track well after Steve Jobs has died, so too does Microsoft have an underlying culture holding them back from making great software that doesn’t have a ton of baggage.

Keep Cal–

It seems Walter Isaacson is jumping on the innovation bandwagon with his new book, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.
Isaacson did a really shitty job with his biography of Steve Jobs. In the book you can see he doesn’t understand the industry or the technology and like John Siracusa explains in his scathing review of the Jobs bio, “he didn’t understand it and didn’t bother to learn!”
If you’re interested in understanding how badly Isaacson dropped the ball with the Jobs bio, I recommend listening to Sircusa on the Hypercritical podcast, episodes 42 & 43.
As for this new book on innovation? I’m going to pass.
(if you want to read an author who does know how to write about the history of innovation, I highly recommend Steven Berlin Johnson)

Oh shit.
DE contributor Bryan is at it again:

It’s the October Horrorshow! It’s no secret that I hate autumn. It’s a shit time to be alive here in the northern latitudes, where the air takes on a chill, the days become noticeably shorter, and every plant from here to Seattle looks like it’s dying. Thank goodness, then, for Halloween. The festival of death is a yearly finger in the eye to the fall season, when we, and by that, I mean me, watch lots and lots of horror flicks. I choose to embrace nature’s inexorable slide into hibernation by watching fake snuff films, paradoxical as that is, and I love every minute of it. Like last year, there’s a full slate of reviews this year. No gaps. And the first is a double bill.
Fall is the house.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have needed anyone since.
—William Faulkner, The Paris Review, 1956
via Twitter

Taken from The Verge