Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how.

“When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,” said Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris. “There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain.

“And it seems that this circuit is contributing in unique ways we didn’t realize,” he continued. “Learning is made easier.”
—Maria Konnikova, NYTimes: What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades
Thinking and creativity intimately connected to our ability to sketch things out—to take our thoughts out of the ether and put them into the physical world. And this is not just important to “creative” types, but everyone.
I’m reminded of the slogan for Field Notes: “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”

First Round Capital has a great profile on the brand development of Harry’s (the guys behind Warby Parker).
I particularly like where they zagged to after Movember’s zig:

Last year, Harry’s launched National Shave Day on December 1 to much fanfare — riding on the coattails of another cultural facial hair phenomena: Movember. In doing so, they appealed their target market, and not only appeared timely, but prescient. After not shaving all month, men everywhere were in desperate need of a good razor.

“The holiday created more story around the brand. We had an event at our barber shop, put it on the web, promoted it on social media, and we watched the conversions explode,” says Morin. “When we tell stories that connect with people, it’s obvious. On National Shave Day we saw a 360% lift in traffic to the website.
Smart guys.

The new Android logo looks like something I’ve seen before, I just can’t put my finger on it.

—Dieter Rams

John McDuling at Quartz on the college textbook racket:

Even so, the trend is clear. College textbook prices have more than doubled since December 2001, the first month data were broken out for college textbooks. Over the same period the overall consumer price level is up just 35%.

Help may be on the way. A range of new digital entrants are offering textbooks at much cheaper prices, or even for free. In the research note, Morgan Stanley analysts point to Boundless Resources, Flat World Knowledge, OpenStax and Bookboon as notable, would-be disruptors in college textbooks.
Cheaper textbooks is a welcome disruption. Fuck the publishers.
And what do I mean by the college textbook industry being a “racket”?
From [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_(crime)): “A racket is a service that is fraudulently offered to solve a problem, such as for a problem that does not actually exist, will not be affected, or would not otherwise exist.”
College textbooks get updated every year, many times with little to no relevant updates to the content. This is all done so students have to buy the newest version every year. So textbook publishers are offering to solve a problem that does not actually exist. The existing books don’t need updating.
This is bullshit.

Robots aren’t going to replace designers, Kanye-fucking-West will:

Kanye West has offered to redesign Instagram, suggesting that it would be “a simple task” for him to beautify the popular photo app. Speaking at a seminar at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, West cited the success of his instagrammed wedding kiss with Kim Kardashian, which is already the most-liked photo in the history of the app.
West knows how to produce an album, I’ll give him that. But to consider the act of redesigning a mobile application ‘a simple task’ is insulting. Kanye knows the creative process well. Whether you’re creating music or creating a mobile applications, you have to gather resources, and then iterate and iterate and iterate until you achieve what you’re aiming for. Once that’s done you might even need to go back and refine and rework what you’ve made.
I think mobile applications suffer from the perception they’re “simple” and couldn’t be that hard to make because they’re (usually) simple to use, (usually) free to download and have small, cute little icons on your screen.
Custom iconography? Secure databases to store user accounts? Wireframes and user flows to map out the experience of the app? Interactions, animations and transitions? Quality assurance testing? Bug fixing? Image optimization, uploading and storage?
Now take all your requirements and multiple them by a potential install base of 100,000,000 (1/8 of the total number of iTunes accounts, I’m being nice).
Designing and building mobile applications is not a simple task.
But hey, it’s Kanye. I expect batshit crazy comments from him every now and then.

In a memorable scene from the 1996 comedy “Swingers,” Jon Favreau’s romantically inept protagonist, Mike, deluges the answering machine of a woman he’s just met at a bar with a spate of excruciatingly self-sabotaging messages.

If the movie were remade today, Mike would have to find another outlet for his miscues. The concept of leaving (and checking) voice mail is, to millennials, as obsolete as swing-dancing and playing NHL ’94 on Sega Genesis. That red number on their iPhones announcing how many voice mail messages are waiting? Ignored. The recording? Instantly deleted. Mike’s oral-to-aural disaster? Averted.
—Teddy Wayne, NYTimes.com

Harley Davidson has made a new electric motorcycle, but what about the grumble of a Harley?
Oh, they thought about that:

They also didn’t want to fake the roar of the engine. Instead, the engineers carefully tweaked the arrangement of the motor and the gear box until it created a sound that’s a little like a jet flying by.

This week Michael and Bryan discuss bandwidth speeds, the Amazon Fire Phone, the post-employment society of the near future, working less than 40 hours a week and still being productive as shit, more suckiness factors in soccer, molasses, Cumberbitches and why Wall Street sucks.
The episode opens with the exhaust from a 1969 Charger.
Weekly Exhaust, Episode 5
If you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, contact Michael.

What a gem.

via Head Like An Orange

To play devil’s advocate to my vinyl post, some things do die:

Wednesday’s demise of Code Spaces is a cautionary tale, not just for services in the business of storing sensitive data, but also for end users who entrust their most valuable assets to such services. Within the span of 12 hours, the service experienced the permanent destruction of most Apache Subversion repositories and Elastic Block Store volumes and all of the service’s virtual machines. With no way to restore the data, Code Spaces officials said they were winding down the operation and helping customers migrate any remaining data to other services.
What he said.

Analogue, meet Digital. Digital, meet Analogue.

Osmo. Play Beyond the Screen

Mr. White’s latest release, “Lazaretto” (Third Man/Columbia), opened at No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart with 138,000 sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and 40,000 of those sales were for its “ultra” vinyl edition. That is the biggest week for a vinyl album since SoundScan began tracking music sales in 1991; the last title to hold the record was Pearl Jam’s “Vitalogy,” which sold 34,000 copies on LP when it came out in 1994.
—Ben Sisario, NYTimes.com
Keep stories like this in mind whenever you’re feeling the urge to declare something “dead”. Vinyl won’t ever beat digital download sales, but it’s far from dead.