In Portland, you can just put a bird on something and call it art (see also: Brooklyn)

I’ll echo my pal Neven – this is insane!

No. We cannot compromise.

If you tell your barber that you like it short, but your significant other likes it long, you’re gonna get a mullet.

—Among the many sage bits of advice Mike has on giving great design feedback. If you work with a designer, read this right now.

So You Want to Be a Journalist

The cover of this month’s New Republic is fantastic

And this is their response to the election of an extremely moderate half-African American candidate, who speaks better English than most and who has a model family. Revolted by this development, huge numbers of white people choose to demonstrate their independence and superiority by putting themselves eagerly at the disposal of a tear-stained semi-literate shock jock, and by repeating his list of lies and defamations. But, of course, there’s nothing racial in their attitude …

—Christopher Hitchens on the national embarrassment that is the tea party.

The Godfather Mansion is for sale

For a mere $3 million. It’s located in Staten Island so I’m hoping that The RZA scoops it up as a new Shaolin base of operations.

This is pretty amazing – a choropleth map from 1861 showing the distribution of slavery across the American south. It’s certainly arresting in what it shows but also wouldn’t be at all out of place alongside a modern map visualization. Kudos to the Times for digging this one up and adding some historical context.

Amazon is beta testing SDK’s to connect your mobile app to their web services

Build Android and iOS apps that can use Amazon’s storage, authentication and messaging infrastructure.

The New York Times talks a little about their election results on the iPad

I was really impressed with how their election pages looked on the iPad, down to the map working sans-Flash. Sadly, this blog post is pretty paltry on details, other than a few obvious pointers (use WebKit transforms for better animation!), but it is nice to see the Times embracing the web across platforms.