Anil Dash

It is almost impossibly difficult to explain Robin Byrd to anyone who was not an adult living in NYC toward the end of the last century, though everyone who recognizes the name immediately responds with unbridled enthusiasm. This comes up in conversation for me from time to time because I

I love any kind of advocacy for safer, more humane streets, so it was a real joy to get to guest on the wonderful The War on Cars podcast. Doug Gordon went deep, really pushing into the connections and surprising resonances between what makes communities safe and healthy in both

Duleshwar Tandi, better known these days as Rapper Dule Rocker, is one of the most successful and influential rappers to have ever come out of the Kalahandi district in Odisha, where my family is from. I jumped into his catalog of videos this weekend and was blown away not just

A while back, when I wrote out in plain words that we have a politically dominant death cult ruling America right now, I worried about the risks of saying my opinion so straightforwardly. As you might expect, I did get a good number of people saying I was exaggerating, or

These days, I'm a hobbyist web developer. That used to be a common thing people did; it was like having a crafting hobby, but with web pages. Over the last decade or two, though, making a website became either something done by professional developers using incredibly complex tools, or the

Over the weekend, we had the chance to explore the newly-opened Moynihan Station, the massive new expansion to Penn Station that's been in the works for decades. Though it ostensibly serves as a welcoming and modern new facility for Amtrak and Long Island Railroad passengers, it's very clearly also meant

Ted Lasso, the standout series of Apple's new Apple TV+ streaming service, rightfully earned a place on many people's lists of the most-recommended new shows of 2020. But what's best about it is what makes it so different from most other highly-acclaimed shows, especially "prestige" TV. You'll see lots of

I was delighted to discover Omar Rizwan's TabFS, a brilliant hack that lets you see your browser tabs as folders and files on your computer, because it's incredibly clever on its own, but also opens a view into how a shift in metaphor  can totally change the way we see

In the early days of Twitter, there was a pleasingly low-tech tradition called "follow friday" (which people later denoted with the #FF hashtag), wherein people listed other accounts that they suggested you might follow. It did a good job of providing a manually-curated form of discover on the platform until

About once a year, I do a little digital reset to help make my online life a little more pleasant. I’m not advocating that anybody do the same as me, but I hope that sharing some of what I do might help inspire you to manage the technology in

Twenty five years ago today, Microsoft released Windows 95. It was undoubtedly a technical leap forward, but its biggest, most lasting impacts are about how it changed popular culture's relationship to technology. For context, when Windows 95 was released in August of 1995, only about 30% of American homes had

With authoritarianism at our door, the policies that progressives are driving for will be dependent on whether the fundamental institutions of democracy are protected at all. I believe every vote needs to be earned, and every candidate needs to be worthy of that vote on the strength of their policies.

People are wrong on the Internet every day; generally I don’t try to fuss about that too much. But when Sam Lessin, a former VP of Product Management at Facebook, publishes a wildly wrong recommendation about online identity in a credible media outlet, it’s worth correcting because others

I almost can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of the work the Electronic Frontier Foundation was doing on behalf of all of us who care about the impact technology has on society and culture. They describe their work as protecting digital privacy, free speech, and innovation,

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to watch the most definitive record of Prince and the Revolution at their commercial peak, on one of the biggest musical tours ever mounted to that point. It's to raise funds for the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for WHO — and you can donate

Today, for about half an hour in the afternoon, pretty much every app that you might try on your iPhone would likely have crashed upon opening it. It's probably worth understanding why, but more importantly, worth understanding what that reality means. And here, I'm addressing people who aren't coders, aren't

There could be no more fitting remembrance of Prince than Questlove going deep into his catalog and spinning some of Prince's greatest works into a multi-hour DJ set. Unless Quest did that five nights in a row. Which he did! It was an absolutely monumental marathon of nightly live streams

(Warning: this will be upsetting; you will not want to read this if you are already stressed.) [This piece was written in late February 2020, before there was widespread social distancing in place, under the assumption that no such distancing would happen at scale. I'm keeping it here for posterity.

Every day, millions of people rely on independent websites that are mostly created by regular people, weren't designed as mobile apps, connect deeply to culture, and aren't run by the giant tech companies. These are a vision of not just what the web once was, but what it can be

Congratulations to Function with Anil Dash for being named podcast of the year! In a media landscape absolutely littered with sound-alike tech podcasts rehashing the same tedious iPhone rumors or parroting Facebook's latest defense of abusing your data, Function has stood out as the rare tech podcast that demonstrates a

I often talk about South Asian people, or how I identify as being an American of South Asian descent. Many folks outside of our communities don’t always know the details of how to understand our identities, so I wanted to share some generally useful info, in hopes that it

Even though I watched the medium of podcasting being created since its inception, I'd always resisted a little bit participating myself. I think I just felt more at home in this format, blogging, as that's where I'd found my voice. Well, that might be a bit hard to believe now