David Sleight is a design and product director who makes interactive things—mostly for the web, but always for humans. This is his website.
This recent episode of 99% Invisible is catnip for a type-lover’s soul. I’m a proud member of Team Em Dash, and have had its keyboard shortcut burned into muscle memory for decades. As the podcast notes, this lovely typographic device can help build or break up the rhythm of a text, letting it work more like how you and I actually speak. Usage? No surrounding spaces for me, please—it’s wide enough…
DPReview has coverage of a remarkable moment between two photographers at the Minneapolis ICE protests. The incident is striking on its own, but also renewed a long-standing wish of mine that camera manufacturers take photographer safety and data security more seriously. For years we’ve had the ability to quickly force a passcode-only unlock of our phones, preventing authorities from compelling…
Last night’s New Year’s Eve fireworks above Prospect Park, Brooklyn, as photographed by the author. Most years since we’ve lived in Brooklyn, my partner and I have ventured out on a cold late Fall morning to take part in the familiar Gotham ritual of cheering on the runners in the New York City Marathon. It’s always a good crowd and a great scene. People turning out to cheer on perfect strangers…
Normally, I wouldn’t feel compelled to pile on to what other’s have rightly called “ a culture war on wheels .” But this story from The Washington Post is reporting that I’ve expected to see for awhile. It lays out how design decisions baked into Tesla’s Cybertruck may actively hamper rescues from otherwise survivable crashes. I say “expected” because I grew up around first responders and attended…
Every December, the good folks at Nieman Journalism Lab ask people in news and media for their predictions about the coming year. What follows is a lightly edited version of my contribution to this year’s round-up. Predicting the future of journalism with any precision can be a fool’s errand, though the broad—and mostly bleak—contours are obvious enough: local news will still face collapse; public…
Mozilla quietly announced that it’s calling it quits on Pocket , the time-shifted reading app it acquired in 2017 . The news didn’t make a big splash, but it caught my eye as it overlaps with a bit of my own professional history. Years ago, I was an advisor to Readability , a pioneer in the read-it-later app space —Apple used the open source version of their code to build Safari’s Reader view —and…
A view of the eastern face of Manhattan’s much-maligned Port Authority Bus Terminal, graced by the afternoon winter sun. Under the right conditions, even this place has its charms. Reply via email 💌
Last night I walked up to Grand Army Plaza and just sat for a few minutes, staring at the spot in front of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch . It was there, four years ago, where I shot a photo of the spontaneous celebration that erupted when the 2020 Presidential election was called for Joe Biden. We were six months pregnant with our son then, and I remember being grateful that he would be born…
Ever more construction in the office neighborhood. Reply via email 💌
RIP Flaco, the Eurasian eagle owl who became a pandemic-era totem of NYC resilience and hustle . Whether you regard his year in the urban wild as the result of an act of vandalism or emancipation , his untimely demise is lamentable and sets back conservation efforts—however imperfect—of a species under threat. Regardless the cause, we all would have preferred a different ending. I shot this image…
For the third time in as many years, the fallout from far-flung wildfires reached New York City. The eerie ochre pall it cast over Manhattan recalled recent scenes from the West Coast , Australia , and at least one dystopian sci-fi movie (yes, really ). I was in the office during the worst of it and grabbed my camera, heading up to the roof to document what I could. All of these images were…
Last week’s episode of Ted Lasso resurfaced a 51-year-old Italian pop song that’s the perfect anthem for the generative AI boom. A montage late in the episode plays out to the tune of Adriano Celentano’s 1972 Euro-hit “ Prisencolinensinainciusol .” If you don’t pay close attention it’s easy to miss that, while it sounds like Adriano is singing in English, it’s actually complete gibberish . It’s…
If you’ve ever tried to cancel a newspaper or magazine subscription, you likely know how maddening it can be. While a lot of effort goes into making signups as frictionless as possible, let’s just say the industry swings the other way when it comes to unsubscribing. The most infamous variation on this theme is making readers call to cancel subscriptions, even if they signed up for that…
Well, this sucks. After almost 25 years, DPReview is shutting down . It’s hard to understate what a go-to resource DPReview has been over the years, especially their excellent technical reviews. Literally every digital camera purchase I’ve made for over two decades, from the slightly goofy but fun-as-heck Nikon 995 to my current Fuji X-T5 workhorse, involved checking in with one of their reviews.…
Scenes from the office neighborhood, shot one year ago to the day. Reply via email 💌
More legal shots fired in the AI world, this time by a heavyweight. Getty brings a player into the mix with the resources to mount a substantial and sustained legal challenge, as well as the deep experience of a large corporation whose entire existence revolves around vast intellectual property holdings. Despite all the drama, this legal challenge seems like the most straightforward and mundane…
Twitter was an accident from the start, and not always a happy one. Years of feckless leadership have brought it to the present crisis, a bit like that famous line from The Sun Also Rises about how Mike Campbell went bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Enter you-know-who, an erratic billionaire whose own tweets long ago crossed the threshold of self parody. Touting Silicon Valley’s…
To me, nothing says “haunted” like a tumbledown house with a mansard roof. Turns out I’m not alone . Happy Halloween, y’all. Reply via email 💌
A paint crew works on a building overlooking the Gowanus Canal. Shot during a morning walk. Reply via email 💌
A saxophonist catching some reverb in the downtown Canal Street 1 train station. Shot three years ago, during the before times. This reminds me of a story about Opus 40, near where I grew up. Sonny Rollins—known for exploring how sound bounced around and changed as he moved through different performance spaces—infamously jumped off the stage there in middle of a concert, broke his heel, and spent…