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  1. Why the Southbank Centre redevelopment plan is sheer folly | Art and design | The Observer

    What is it that makes people want to change pleasant, distinctive locations into chain-filled, plate-glass-fronted, shopping centres? (via everyone with any sense)

  2. Some Practical Writing Advice From Douglas Coupland | LitReactor

    Number one in these lists should probably be, “Don’t spend all your time reading lists of writing advice,” but I still like this.

  3. How low (power) can you go? - Charlie’s Diary

    Charlie Stross takes Moore’s Law and Koomey’s Law (improving power consumption) for a walk and imagines a very, very conmected city. (via blech)

  4. Exquisite Tweets from @ftrain, @thelancearthur

    Lovely little improvised text adventure. (via @blech)

  5. 34 People You Probably Didn’t Know Were On Seinfeld

    I still don’t recognise a whole bunch of these. But the other night I noticed A.J. Langer, Rayanne off of ‘My So-Called Life’, looking much more grown-up than in MSCL, which was only a year or so earlier. The suit helped. (via Kottke)

  6. Underworld’s brief to ‘frighten people’ at the London 2012 opening ceremony | Music | The Guardian

    “The contrast between this summer’s two uber-spectaculars – the diamond jubilee concert and the Olympics opening ceremony – couldn’t be starker.” Yes, it felt like we’ve moved on from big events requiring 1980s musicians. (via Blech)

  7. London 2012: Danny Boyle’s story of Britain was a celebration of freedom | Shami Chakrabarti | Comment is free | The Guardian

    “Humility”, “democratic”, “optimistic”. Words Shami Chakrabsti uses in association with Danny Boyle, which also help explain the appeal of the Ceremony itself. (via Alex Balfour)

  8. Building workers stories

    Free PDFs containing oral histories from the men who built the Barbican, the M1, Sizewell A, the South Bank and Stevenage.

  9. Melissa Price

    Topographic maps of (only) London’s rivers or London’s hills. Nice idea, although monochrome relief seems rather dull after seeing Stamen’s terrain maps. And the labels seem rather OTT.

  10. BuzzFeed’s strategy - Chris Dixon

    “Many publisher sites … are Frankenstein products bolted together by a tech team that integrates other people’s products instead of building their own.” (via Kottke, bookmarking because I’ve needed it twice now)

  11. Collective Joy « LRB blog

    Also on the opening ceremony: “It was love as sentiment, a nostalgic cry for what has been lost. And it is lost. There is no party of the left with a different attitude towards the economy, privatisation and cuts in benefits and the NHS.”

  12. Britain: this is for everyone - newsmary

    On the Olympic opening ceremony: “The opening, pastoral and construction scenes showed clear class delineations; the joyous riot of music and popular culture that grew from it showed disparate, distinct but equal individuals. There’s a vision of utopia there, and it is neither homogenous nor segregated.” (via Blech)

  13. The night we saw our mad, fantastical dreams come true | Frank Cottrell Boyce | Comment is free | The Observer

    On writing the wonderful opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics,

  14. The Daily Mail, And How An NHS Death Means… Racism Is Fine? - Botherer

    The Daily Mail is the kind of dangerous thing that needs exposing, protesting against, fighting. Horrible. (via @D_Nye_Griffiths)

  15. BBC News - How to read London

    Paul Mason, brilliant on the nature of London. Well worth a read.

  16. Olympic Games opening ceremony: irreverent and idiosyncratic – a very British coup | Marina Hyde | Sport | The Guardian

    “I’m still reeling that a country that can put on a show that hilariously bonkers is allowed nuclear weapons.”

  17. (326) Pushpendra Mohta’s answer to India: What are some English phrases and terms commonly heard in India but rarely used elsewhere? - Quora

    I love this. To my eyes it reads entirely like language from science fiction. Brilliant. (via Kottke)

  18. Olympic opening ceremony a Labour party broadcast? Yup, that’s about right | Sport | The Guardian

    “This is it. This is Britain. Any idiot can industrialise. It takes a giant of a nation to make its healthcare provision free at point of need.” via @D_Nye_Griffiths

  19. London 2012: Beware billions bollocks. Ceremony to be huge TV hit, but not that huge « Sporting Intelligence

    This is needed for every major TV event. And this doesn’t even take into account that NBC in the US isn’t showing the opening ceremony live.

  20. Pin pages to the wall and examine them with binoculars

    Lovely, like a mini, themed David Markson.

  21. Dissent Magazine - Online Features - The White Negro (Fall, 1957) -

    Norman Mailer’s essay on the hipster. Which I’ve only read through Adam Curtis, so I should probably read the actual thing.

  22. The Entrepreneurial Generation - NYTimes.com

    This is good - this generation’s “thing” is starting small businesses. “Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur.” Although it falls apart a bit when suggesting hipsters have only been around for 15 years. (via Waxy)

  23. Thinking out loud in paragraphs

    Yes, there’s something here, between Twitter and blogging. See also Matt Webb’s “Instagram for Webpages”

  24. Road Test :: Boreas Bolinas

    Interesting looking backpack, with plenty more if you click through to Boreas’s site.

  25. #WHENINLONDON

    I do like this Tumblr. (via @iamdanw)

  26. Noisy Typer – a typewriter for your laptop. | F.A.T.

    Enjoying using this a bit too much. The audio feedback is surprisingly nice. Not sure how much longer the novelty will last, and it wouldn’t be too good in the office… (via Haddock)

  27. Google Maps - 3339 California 121

    Google Streetview of the hill from the Windows XP desktop wallpaper. The actual hill, not just “looks a bit like the hill”.

  28. Indietracks Festival

    Jolly nice, virtually free, 52-track compilation of twee/indiepop tunes. How can you go wrong, unless you hate nice things?

  29. Pareidoloop

    “1. generate random polygons. 2. feed them into a face detector. 3. mutate to increase recognition confidence.” All done in-browser. Lovely stuff from Philip McCarthy. Code on Github.

  30. Advanced Projects Series // Eiger Waterproof Field Jacket || Mission Workshop

    Mmmmm, nice (sold out) jacket.