One slight drawback: experiencing the work of any of the interview subjects is left as a homework exercise for the reader; Brand Thinking is strictly text-only. It’s an interesting counterpart to more visually oriented books like Sean Adam’s Masters of Design (Sean Adams is himself one of Millman’s interview subjects).

needs more demons? No. I thought this book was terrific. Recommended for anyone interested in branding and identity design.

It doesn’t go deep. It mentions typeface classifications like “Didone” and “Garalde” without exploring the distinctions. The authors frequently discuss the mood or tone of a group of typefaces but rarely discuss the elements of the font that establish the tone; when listing similar fonts they seldom explicitly discuss the differences between them.

Although I read the second edition, updated in 2002, the section on web typography is, perhaps inevitably, dangerously out of date.

Overall this was substantially more useful than Never Use More Than Two Different Typefaces. It should help an amateur do a less amateurish job of laying out type; and it should enable a design professional without a solid typography background to talk with one who does.

I’m not an expert in this field, so I don’t know how it ranks among books about identity design, but I certainly found it accessible, engaging, and informative.

needs more demons? no.

I had two big problems with the book. First, since the quotes are short, and must demonstrate the contributor’s position on the rule, they seldom actually support the position. I frequently had the sense that the paragraphs in the original work following the citations were where the challenging/edifying content resided.

Second, the brevity of the quotations might be less of an impediment if they were the sort of one-liners you can really chew on for a while, but far too many of the “rules” are just restatements of aesthetic principals familiar from other disciplines — “there is no such thing as a bad typeface” is really the same as “there is no such thing as bad art” — or fundamentally an examination of the tension between typography as artistic expression and as a utilitarian craft. (I suppose you can chew on these for a while if you’re so inclined, but I think they’ve already been well and truly chomped.)

On the positive side, the set of selected contributors certainly includes several important voices, and some of those are cited frequently enough that the reader can begin to develop a sense of the contributor’s approach to typography, and whether further study might be called for. And thankfully, the references to Spiekermann and Ginger’s Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works were attributed, and plentiful enough to convince me that’s the book I really should read.

needs more demons? kinda sorta.

Black Mass lays out, in eminently readable and often shocking detail, the incredible story of how Bulger and Steve Flemmi co-opted the Boston FBI, using their role as informants against the Mafia to eliminate their rivals and evade other local and federal law enforcement agencies. They even “tipped off” the Feds to crimes they committed (or ordered), casting suspicion on players they would like out of play. I read the first chapter thinking Black Mass must be a glamorized and highly speculative account — and then I reviewed Lehr and O’Neill’s copious and rigorous notes on their sources, and revised my opinion. (This was a two-bookmark book for me: one for the body of the text, one for the endnotes.) In fact, Lehr and O’Neill, career journalists both, are studiously careful to avoid speculation (or any possible grounds for libel). They stop short, for instance, of suggesting that Bulger and Flemmi’s “handler” at the FBI, John Connolly, or his boss John Morris, might literally be described as gangsters with deep cover as FBI agents. Lehr and O’Neill point out Connolly’s boyhood in Bulger’s turf, and the amazingly paltry quantity of established bribes to Morris, and leave the reader the option to make inferences. (Morris allegedly sold himself out for roughly 7 grand and some wine, which even in 80’s dollars seems awfully cheap.) Lehr and O’Neill are likewise cautious in how they characterize Whitey Bulger’s relationship with his brother, former President of the Massachusetts Senate, William Bulger. But they do ensure that I will never look at the State Street building quite the same way again.

I did form some reservations as I read the book. First, the extent to which Connolly and Morris are demonized tends to largely exonerate others in the FBI. Second, many events presented as fact in the book are primarily sourced by sworn testimony from professional criminals — individuals for whom lying effectively is an essential skill. (Lehr and O’Neill are careful to note when testimony disagrees, in fact, but almost always portray one version as authoritative in the main text. Finally, Lehr and O’Neill’s role in shaping the story clearly renders them very much non-impartial: their own reportage helped focus public opinion and create pressure to prosecute Bulger and to examine his relationship with the FBI. So I’m not inclined to accept absolutely everything at face value; their are clearly agendas at work. But the preponderance of evidence that it’s all mostly true seems overwhelming.

needs more demons? nuh uh.

needs more demons? no.

It’s a marvelous little book, providing a brief, but insightful look at baseball’s oddest pitch from a variety of perspectives: how to throw it, how to hit it, how to catch it, how to call it, among others. Clark’s writing is lucid and accessible; Phil Clark’s line drawings are illuminating and useful; several great pitchers are typically enigmatic and epigrammatic. I learned a lot.

needs more demons? the knuckleball is demon enough.

I don’t know how any nerd could not love the knuckleball, or, as I prefer to call it, the “chaos pitch.” It’s thrown — at the velocity of a cheetah, mind you — with almost no rotation. Its path to, and hopefully over, the plate is determined, as much as anything else, by the eddies formed by the ball’s stitches* as it shoves its way through the air.

And to me, the knuckleball is emblematic of baseball’s appeal. As much as fans love to describe the game with statistics, the game is interesting because statistics can’t accurately predict what happens next. And nothing embodies that like the knuckleball. As the pitch leaves Wake’s hand** he has scarcely a better idea of its trajectory than anyone else.

No one personifies the knuckleball for me like Tim Wakefield, perhaps the last of baseball’s greats to throw the pitch. As I’ve learned about the game over the past 8 years or so, he’s been the constant inconstant: sometimes brilliant, sometimes terrible — often both in the same game, or even the same frame. I dearly love to see him win, but I admire him most in the grim losses where he grinds through out after painful out, sabotaging his stats and saving the bullpen’s arms. There’s an equanimity to him in these innings, a grace and lack of ego that seems very rare in professional sports. Then again, it’s awe-inspiring to see a guy pitch one of the best games of his career in his forties.

Massarotti’s book*** opens with some historical context on the knuckleball, outlining the careers of pitchers whose careers ended before I became a fan of the game, and describing the pitch in relation to the rest of baseball’s arsenal. Then he dives into Wake’s career, wich mirrors many of his games: improbable comebacks against long odds, devastating setbacks. Longtime Boston Herald writer Massarotti offers some interesting insights throughout. His analysis of what it costs a team for a pitcher to record each out uses some suspect math, but still makes a convincing case that Wake has been quite a bargain for the Sox. It’s also fascinating to see well-documented history through Wake-colored-glasses; Schilling’s bloody sock performance in game 6 of the 2004 ALCS is a mere aside, primarily relevant to the state of the rotation and how many days of rest Wakefield has going into the World Series.

The book is marred by some copy editing gaffes, with a score going from 5-0 to 4-1 to 5-2 in the 2003 ALCS perhaps the worst. And it’s written as if Wake’s career was effectively over in 2010, with no opportunity to contribute significantly to the 2011 season. That’s not quite how it worked out, but of course, most folks had written him off in 1994, too.

needs more demons? Despite some flaws I found it both entertaining and illuminating.

* or, in baseball parlance, “the stitches of the ball.”
** i.e., “the hand of Wake”
*** Massarotti and Wakefield confusing refer to themselves as author and writer, a fallacy I won’t perpetuate. The book is written in the third person; Wake’s voice is present as an interview subject.

My first CD Baby order was #17697, for 8 discs, in 2000. When I got the now-famous colorful shipment notice I thought I’d actually been the first brand new customer to order as many as 8 albums. I thought the email had been crafted for me, in particular. I felt special.

A little later, I placed an even bigger order, and it happened to be while CD Baby was moving across the country. It was delayed long enough that I eventually contacted support, and I promptly got a very nice and apologetic email from Derek Sivers himself (along with the discs, in short order). Again, I felt special.

Later on I learned that everyone got the crazy shipment notice, even for ordering a single disc, and that at the time Derek emailed me, he was one of just two people in the CD Baby “organization.”

And for a little while I felt less special. But eventually I realized that a key part of CD Baby’s value proposition for customers — artists and purchasers alike — was making everyone feel special.

Which, when you think about it, is no small trick.

Reading Sivers’ story of how and why he started, grew, and sold CD Baby, I was strongly reminded of interviews with Dischord’s Ian MacKaye. Partly because they say some of the same things, particularly about not having business growth as a goal. Both describe awkward conversations with “suits” who really can’t grasp this.

But both also display an element of self-contradiction. Sivers says the money didn’t matter — an easy thing to say when your life is not severely constrained by the lack of it — but he did, after all, build a music store, not a music give-away service. Perhaps more tellingly, some of his biggest regrets are about decisions with significant cost impacts. And although Sivers repeatedly says that growth wasn’t a goal, but not only did he consistently make decisions that furthered growth, one of his most provocative epigrammatic guidelines is explicitly about facilitating growth. (It’s to try to make your business practices support double your current volume, which sounds very smart. If you, you know, want to grow the business.)

These cavils aside, this is a pretty great book. Sivers is unusually candid about his mistakes as well as what he did right, and he’s lucid and entertaining. (He says he learned to prize clarity and brevity when crafting emails to CD Baby’s subscriber list, and demonstrates mastery of both here.) You’ll probably be thinking about the contents of this brief book for much longer than the time it takes to read it.

needs more demons? no.

Conti is a computer scientist who researches things like security and information disclosure. As this job description requires, he’s both sharp and paranoid. I bookmarked a dozen or so passages that showcased one attribute or another. He starts out by saying that he considers Google “a sovereign entity equivalent to a nation . . . because of its top-tier intellectual talent, financial resources in the billions of dollars, and world-class information-processing resources,” a viewpoint which strikes me as patently absurd. Throughout there are asides like, “every time an old friend contacts you from a webmail account, a little piece of your privacy dies.” But in the chapter on maps, Conti offers this provocative scenario:

Let’s say [your company] has 1,200 employees located at 10 locations, some not publicly known. Imagine mapping activity form the IP address ranges used by our corporate headquarters, as well as the other locations, all seeking directions from Ministeri Pistarini International Airport in Buenos Aires to the street address of a meeting site at the outskirts of the city. Because this activity is out of the norm, you’ve just created a unique set of characteristics that ties together your various company offices with a potentially sensitive meeting. You’ve also disclosed with a high probability, the travel plans of the meeting participants, as well as given a clue to the strategic importance of Argentina to your company’s planning.

In the chapter on cross-site tracking via embedded content, after dissecting the roles of the (many) sites involved in serving up content for a typical MSNBC.com page, he makes the trenchant point that, “your real privacy in terms of visiting a web site is the equivalent of the worst [privacy] policy of all the sites embedded there.”

Far from accepting Google’s famous “don’t be evil” precept at face value, Conti continually ascribes the worst possible motivations to Google. He makes insinuating comments like, “Note that these are the publicly acknowledged uses of machine processing of communications. It is a safe bet that many other uses will never be discussed overtly.” In discussing the Google Analytics javascript, which has been through a “minification” process that makes the code hard to read, he saves the admission that “the density of code could also be seen as an attempt to reduce the size of the file, to improve response time.” He fails to mention that minifying javascript for performance reasons is standard practice for high-performance, real-time websites. Conti assumes Google (ab)uses information in ways it has publicly states it does not; one could imagine that at least some of the data mining Conti describes might be technically challenging even for an organization like Google.

But Conti makes another interesting point: Google won’t endure forever, certainly not in its current form***. The individuals who defined Google’s culture and ethics won’t live forever, and there is no guarantee that their principles will be adhered to indefinitely. If Google doesn’t, or even can’t, exploit data in certain ways now, it’s impossible to say with absolute certainty that that will always be true. This sorts of threat isn’t even hypothetical to me — when I signed up for a Flickr account, I was comfortable with Flickr’s privacy policy. I was not at all comfortable with Yahoo!’s privacy policies, which are the ones that matter now.

I don’t plan to make many changes to my web browsing habits as a result of reading Conti’s book, mostly because I already aggressively filter tracking cookies and minimize my use of problematic sites like FaceBook. But I did find it interesting and thought provoking, if sometimes a little shrill.

* I also didn’t remember the author or the exact title. I made a game of trying to track down the book without using Google, pretending that showing interest in this book might set some blackmark flag in Google’s servers. I searched on Amazon, Yahoo!, and even Bing. But I couldn’t track it down without recourse to Google.

** Or at least that someone is trying to establish a connection, which may be interesting in an entirely different way.

*** If nothing else, the end of normal matter in the universe will eventually impose significant changes on Google’s technical infrastructure.

needs more demons? I wouldn’t want to wish more demons on Conti; he seems to have enough of his own.