Salon's Glenn Greenwald points out that last week's flood of Steve Jobs hagiographies mostly tiptoed around one inconvenient facet of the Great Man: he took LSD. He not only took it, he regarded having taken it as one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. Greenwald: Unlike many people who have enjoyed success, Jobs is not saying that he was able to succeed despite his illegal drug use; he’s saying his success is in part — in substantial part — because of those illegal drugs (he added that Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once”). An excellent...

09 October, 2011

The most unusual Steve Jobs obituary this week might be the one that appeared in PDN Pulse, the blog of Photo District News. Jobs, it seems, was a legendarily truculent photo subject. PDN Pulse recounted some of the legends. “It was the joke among photographers. He was like the nightmare subject,” said San Francisco photographer William Mercer McLeod, who photographed Jobs five times. In 1986, Fortune magazine hired Doug Menuez to shoot a portrait of Jobs for the magazine's cover. Menuez wanted to photograph him in the NeXT offices, on a staircase Jobs had commissioned from architect I.M Pei. Jobs arrived, looked...

08 October, 2011

A line from Steve Jobs propelled Emory University student Ien Chi to produce a remarkable YouTube film: Click here to view on a flash-impaired IOS device. (Impaired by decree of S. Jobs, that is!) H/T: Silas...

03 March, 2011

At the D8 conference, via the New York Times, Apple CEO Steve Jobs muses about the future of the personal computer: Mr. Jobs also predicted that the ongoing shift in technology away from the PC and toward mobile devices will continue. But rather than disappear, the PC will become a niche product, he said. Mr. Jobs compared the role of the PC, the workhorse of computing for the past three decades, to the truck, when America was primarily an agrarian nation. “All cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farm,” he said. Now trucks are one in 25...

02 June, 2010

CBC led its hourly radio newscasts this morning with a headline touting the release of the Apple iPad. Well, so did Contrarian; No complaint there. But it turns out the headline was only a teaser. Listeners had to wait 'til the last item in the newscast before hearing about Steve Jobs's latest gift to early adopters. And before getting there, they had to sit through a one minute-40 second "news story" about a CBNC contest to pick Canada's most hockey-crazed town. The humiliating chore of filling, oh, 20 percent of the radio service's flagship morning newscasts with this witless advertorial fell...

03 April, 2010

April 3:  Is this the transient alcoholic flicker on a too sweet rum cake, or a nuclear flash that will mark April 3 as a milestone we'll observe 20 and 40 years from now? According to David Pogue and Leo LaPorte, techies are scornful and users are awestruck, in which case, the smart money will be on the users. But there’s a big problem. To some, Jobs and Apple are a modern version of Bauhaus: elegant utilitarian design with fascist undertones. Apple’s singular control over what media its machines can play, and what machines can play its media, represents a giant backward...

03 April, 2010

As an antidote to Keillor's unpleasantness, check out this short, sweet talk by Apple founder and design genius Steve Jobs, his 2005 commencement address to the graduates of Stanford University. Contrarian doesn't usually link to YouTube videos with three million views, but perhaps some of you missed it, as we had. Hat tip: Doug MacKay....

26 December, 2009
Seminal environmentalist (and sometime Cape Breton summer resident) Stewart Brand promotes a series of environmental heresies in this surprising talk. In 1968, Brand created the Whole Earth Catalog, which Apple founder Steve Jobs described as the conceptual forerunner of the World Wide Web. A counter-cultural touchstone, the Catalog helped inspire and galvanize the environmental movement. Today, Brand calls himself an ecopragmatist. This talk previews Whole Earth Discipline, a book he will publish this Fall challenging contemporary environmentalists to reconsider objections to nuclear power and genetically modified foods. Brand is pro-city, pro-genetic engineering, pro-nuclear, and so profoundly worried about climate change, he believes geoengineering will probably be necessary. After the jump, some excerpts from the talk.
14 July, 2009