The WELL: Topics in the inkwell.vue Conference

inkwell.vue.465: Darya Pino Rose, "Foodist," May 2-16

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:50:00 PDT

This week we welcome Darya Pino Rose to Inkwell.vue.

Darya is the author of Foodist and creator of Summer Tomato, one of TIME's 50 Best Websites of 2011. She received her Ph.D in neuroscience from UCSF and her bachelor*s degree in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley.

Darya spends most of her time thinking and writing about food, health and science. She eats amazing things daily and hasn't even considered going on a diet since 2007.

Interviewing Darya will be our own <debunix>:

Debunix is a pediatric specialist in Southern California, who left her heart in San Francisco, where she occasionally gets to go visit it. She was a foodie long before arriving in San Francisco for a decade at UCSF, but enjoyed experimenting with food and cooking techniques long before she became a graduate student, and she still cooks obsessively.

She can still remember her excitement when she finally took a course in nutrition in medical school--the hope that finally she was going to get the real skinny on diet and health, and her utter disappointment when the class focus was on the metabolic needs of the hospitalized patient.

Recovered from that disillusionment, and more skeptical than ever after seeing a lot of dietary fads come and go, she still reads a lot about nutrition, but when her patients' families ask her, as they always do, 'what's the best diet for a person with [problem x]', she likes to keep it simple, starting with Michael Pollan's 'Eat food, not too much, mostly plants', and to hand out Darya's "How to find real food in the supermarket" diagram.

Welcome to Inkwell.vue, Darya and <debunix>! [Read entire topic]

inkwell.vue.464: Joel Selvin and John Johnson: Peppermint Twist

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:50:00 PDT

Inkwell is proud to welcome Joel Selvin and John Johnson to talk about their wacky history of the Mob, the music business, and the place where an obscure black dance craze hit the pop mainstream for the first time. So get ready to do the pep-pep-pep-peppermint twist, ladies and gentlemen!

San Francisco Chronicle pop music critic Joel Selvin started covering rock shows for the paper shortly after the end of the Civil War. His writing has appeared in a surprising number of other publications that you would think should have known better. People all over the world are still pissed off about pieces he wrote while he still had his job. Since leaving his staff post at The Chronicle in 2009, Selvin has sat still for as-told-to autobiographies by Sammy Hagar and tattoo artist Ed Hardy. His epic biography of songwriter Bert Berns, "Here Comes the Night" -- 16 years in the making -- will be published Spring 2014 by Counterpoint Press. [Read entire topic]

inkwell.vue.463: Clay Spinuzzi - Topsight: A Guide to Studying, Diagnosing, and Fixing Information Flow in Organizations

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:50:00 PDT

Inkwell welcomes Clay Spinuzzi, a professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies how people organize, communicate, collaborate, and innovate at work. Spinuzzi has conducted multiple workplace studies, resulting in several articles and three books: Tracing Genres through Organizations (MIT Press, 2003); Network (Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Topsight (Amazon CreateSpace, 2013). He blogs at spinuzzi.blogspot.com.

We'll be talking about his latest book, _Topsight: A Guide to Studying, Diagnosing, and Fixing Information Flow in Organizations_ (http://clayspinuzzi.com/book/topsight/). From the website for the book: "Topsight*the*overall*understanding*of the*big*picture*is hard to achieve in organizations. There*s too much going on, too many moving pieces. But without*topsight, we have a hard time figuring out how information circulates, where it gets stuck, and how we can get it unstuck."

Clay, how does a professor of rhetoric get into studying how people organize and work together? What experiences or forces led you on the path to "topsight"? [Read entire topic]

inkwell.vue.462: John Schwartz: Oddly Normal

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:50:00 PDT

[Read entire topic]

inkwell.vue.461: Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:50:00 PDT

Inkwell.vue is psyched to welcome Warren Ellis (http://www.warrenellis.com/), preeminent author, graphic novelist, columnist and speaker. His new novel, _Gun Machine_, was released by Mulholland Books in January 2013, and is being developed for television by Chernin Entertainment.

_Crooked Little Vein_, his last novel, was described by Joss Whedon as "Funny, inventive and blithely appalling... Dante on paint fumes."

His graphic novel _Red_ was made into a successful film starring Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren, and its sequel film is released in August 2013. His other graphic novels, including _Transmetropolitan_, _Planetary_, _Global Frequency_ and _FreakAngels_, have won multiple awards, including a Lifetime Achievement prize from the Eagle Awards and the NUIG Lit & Deb's President's Medal in recognition of support for free speech. _Ministry of Space_ became the first graphic novel to win the Sidewise Award for alternate history fiction. His _Gravel_ sequence of graphic novels has been optioned by Legendary Pictures, with Tim Miller attached to direct.

Previously a commentator for Reuters and WIRED UK magazine, he is currently writing a weekly column for VICE.

His first non-fiction book, from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is due in 2014. He lives mostly in Britain.

Leading the discussion is Patrick Di Justo, who writes the monthly What's Inside column for Wired magazine, and is the author of _The Science of Battlestar Galactica_ (Wiley, October 2010). His work appears regularly in Dwell, Scientific American, Popular Science, Gizmodo, and more. His touchstone for most journalistic dilemmas is "What would Spider Robinson do?"

Let's get on with the conversation! If you're reading this, and you're not a member of the WELL, you can send questions or comments to inkwell at well.com. [Read entire topic]

inkwell.vue.460: Jamais Cascio - Open the Future

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:50:00 PDT

In a followup to our State of the World discussion for 2013, we've invited Jamais Cascio to join us for a couple of weeks for more of a "future of the world" conversation. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as one of their Top 100 Global Thinkers, Jamais writes about the intersection of emerging technologies, environmental dilemmas, and cultural transformation, specializing in the design and creation of plausible scenarios of the future. His work focuses on the importance of long-term, systemic thinking, emphasizing the power of openness, transparency and flexibility as catalysts for building a more resilient society. Among other things, Jamais is a master of scenario development.

Jamais, I'll start with a simple question that probably invites a complex answer: are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future? [Read entire topic]

inkwell.vue.459: State of the World 2013: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:50:00 PDT

Welcome to the 2013 edition of the Bruce Sterling/Jon Lebkowsky State of the World conversation/rantfest. Bruce and Jon, old friends and rambunctious digerati, have made this annual mess every year of the 21st century; this year's model should be particularly interesting, given the current hyperactive state of the world and the abundance of available conceptual lenses.

Bruce Sterling is a science fiction author, journalist, design theorist and critic, public speaker, and world traveler. Currently based in Serbia, he spends much of his time on the road, and has a truly global perspective which you see in his novels, nonfiction pieces, and his blog, "Beyond the Beyond." In addition to his novels, Bruce has focused on the cutting edges of digital/hacker culture, climate change, global politics, and contemporary design. He founded the Viridian Design movement, the Dead Media project, and is currently fired up about the new aesthetic, augmented reality, and design fiction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_sterling.

Jon Lebkowsky has been an Internet evangelist and expert, web consultant/developer, social commentator, gonzo futurist, media analyst and critic, and sometimes activist. He was a cofounder of FringeWare, Inc., an early digital culture company/community, and has worked with and written for bOING bOING, Mondo 2000, Whole Earth, Plutopia Productions, Digital Convergence Initiative, Wireless Future, the Society for Participatory Medicine, EFF and EFF-Austin, the WELL, WorldChanging, SXSW, Social Web Strategies, et al. Lately he's part of a web development cooperative, Polycot Associates, and cofounder (with Amber Case, Tyger AC, and Patrick Lichty) of Reality Augmented Blog (http://realityaugmentedblog.com). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Lebkowsky [Read entire topic]

inkwell.vue.458: The 2012 Election, Hopes, Fears, Predictions

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:50:00 PDT

For the next couple of weeks we will be discussing the election, local and national races. <evan> will be leading/moderating/guiding our discussion. [Read entire topic]

inkwell.vue.457: Susan Sachs Lipman: Fed Up With Frenzy

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:50:00 PDT

The Well is happy to welcome our own Susan Sachs Lipman, known to us as <sooz>, to discuss her new book on "slow parenting," Fed Up With Frenzy: Slow Parenting in a Fast-Moving World.

Interviewing her is Jessica Mann Gutteridge, also a Well member, <jessica>

Now tell us a bit about yourselves, and get talking! [Read entire topic]

inkwell.vue.456: Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross - The Rapture of the Nerds

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:50:00 PDT

We are delighted to have Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross here to discuss their new book The Rapture of the Nerds: A tale of the singularity, posthumanity, and awkward social situations. Jon Lebkowsky will be attempting to harness these two extraordinarily creative minds.

From Amazon's recap of the book:

"Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.

Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun.

The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander*and when that happens, it casually spams Earth's networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there's always someone who'll take a bite from the forbidden apple.

So until the overminds bore of stirring Earth's anthill, there's Tech Jury Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful moments on bathroom floors."

The book is a romp, with a wicked sense of humor and a serious undertone of the fractal futures we face at the "dawn" of the Twenty-First century. [Read entire topic]