Rahm Emanuel visited the Chicago Everyblock office today. His tweets from the event were inspired.

In 2011, one large segment of the population, the roughly 16% of Americans who are unaffiliated with any particular religion, remains completely unrepresented on Capitol Hill. Not one of the 435 members of the House of Representatives or one of the 100 senators serving in the 112th Congress lists his or her religion as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.”

—So, does this mean that American atheists and Hindus don’t have to pay taxes?

This strikes me as exactly right. My only nit with Readability’s new payment sharing plan is that I wanted a little more control over who I gave my money to. Sometimes, I’m only clicking the Read Now button because the layout of your site is crap, which I don’t necessarily want to reward with my hard earned nickel.

This fits with my current flow and lets me dole out my micropayments in kind.

Instapaper now has a full blown API

And an intriguing business model: the full API is available to all developers but only users who pay for the $1/month subscription can use those features in the apps. Sounds good to me.

See that?

That’s a Kevin Cornell illustration1 for an article I wrote for A List Apart. I’m pretty proud of that.

It turned out really differently than when I started, much more proscriptive than I’d hoped, took me way too long2 to finish and seriously had to try the patience of the entire staff, the wonderful Carolyn Wood most of all. But there it is, a real thing, live, at a URL I hold in the highest regard, alongside a fantastic design article.

Like a lot of web nerds of a certain generation, I cut my teeth on A List Apart. Zeldman and crew taught me so much of what I know about working online. Beyond just the facts or the techniques (I still consult the classics like taming lists), being a regular ALA reader gave me a framework for thinking about the web, how it works, how people work on it.

These days, largely owing to being in the right place at the right time, I get to call Jeffrey and others like Ethan and Ryan and Carolyn not just colleagues but friends. I’m pretty proud of that, too, and happy that they let me give just a little bit back.

With a sly self-reference ↩︎

Seriously, I checked the git init date – last August! ↩︎

There are really so many things to love about this. The ridges on the nigiri. All of the specialized utensils. The spherized roe!

(Thanks, Anna!)

Speaking of great Kickstarter projects…

My pal Carolyn Wood is helping Andy McMillan and Jez Burrows with The Manual, a thrice-yearly magazine of design inspiration, and it looks like a beaut. It’s about the web, but on paper! I love it.

Come comrades, come collectivists! Join our march against the capitalists!

I see a vase (ollymoss via Christa)

Jeff Croft wrote a great guide to the neighborhoods of Seattle

I’ve written a bunch of these as emails to friends-considering-moving-here myself and agree with just about everything Jeff has to say about the neighborhoods of my beloved Seattle.

Remember Panic’s awesome status board? A soon as they started talking about it, people came out of the woodwork asking them to “open source” it or some such thing. Geckoboard appears to be taking a crack at building a product out of “widgetizing” the various stats you might want to collect about your business.

It’s an interesting idea and an interesting business model (charging per device per month), though, I wonder how useful such a thing will be using public feeds and stats instead of the kind of custom feeds the Panic guys built. Oh, hey, how about that, they have an API for your custom data feeds. Well that’s smart.