This book blew my mind. I read it based on the recommendations of both George Saunders and Bill Clinton. Saunders’ recommendation pretty much sums it up:

“It deals with the way our brains process political information, and particularly with the need for people on the left to become more honest and direct in the way they talk about things – to stop trying to appease the growing right-wing movement and really say, flat-out, what they believe and why they believe it, directly and fiercely. Westen includes an incredible “here’s-what-he-should-have-said” speech that Al Gore should have made when Bush questioned his character during one of the debates. Really a mind-expanding book…”

If you want more details, these two NyTimes articles should suffice:

• Counseling Democrats to Go for the Gut
• Push Buttons; Pull Lever

Highly recommended.

My car is sitting in a tow yard in south Austin. The side of the driver’s window is messed up from the break-in, the ignition has been torn out, and the windshield looks like somebody threw a bottle at it. The thieves ate our Chex-Mix, took our Ipod adapter, but left our cowboy hats, umbrellas, and flip-flops. They took it for a 100-mile joyride (I know, because I had just got gas, and flipped the odometer) and dumped it in a parking lot.

Tommy-the-Tow-Guy and I, we put in the clutch, stuck a screwdriver in the ignition, and she fired up like nothing happened. It’s totally drivable, but we have to get the insurance company out to assess the damage before we can drive off with it and get it repaired.

So add this to the news that as of tomorrow, I will probably be employed, Meg and I are very happy. Here’s what I doodled last night, thinking I’d never see her again:

Even taking into account the car theft, we’re having a really fabulous time in Austin. Here’s the sunset over Lake Travis that we got to see last night:

Can’t beat that.

This is a mindmap I did of Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information.

Not quite as fun for me as the one I did for Beautiful Evidence.

I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that this was my second time reading Envisioning Information? Taking notes on a book you’ve already read isn’t quite as fresh — you’re not as excited about the material, the new things you choose to single out.

One thing I did right, though, was make the map on both pages of my sketchbook, instead of just one. The bigger the paper, the more room you have for mapping.

A few days ago, I got finished with a grad school Statement of Intent that basically outlined a plan to study the relationship between comics and (information) design. Since there are no coincidences in life, two days later, somebody on Drawn! made a post, “Comics and Information Design.” That post was a brief mention of how Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics is widely used in the information and interaction design communities. (Proof: it’s on Edward Tufte’s Analytical Design reading list.)

What interests me is not the one-way relationship of comics informing information design, but the two-way relationship of comics informating info design, and info design informing comics. In other words, the way comics and information design can inform each other.

Essentially, I see comics and information design attempting the same feat: one brain showing something to another brain.

I’m not quite ready to get into the nitty-gritty just yet, but here’s a mind-map I did on the subject:

done with sumi-e brush and markers. way bigger than my scanner, so i experimented with cleaning up the digital photo in photoshop (check out peter durand’s great post about this)

“Science and art have in common intense seeing…” - Edward Tufte

This is a mind map I did while reading Edward Tufte’s new one, Beautiful Evidence. I’ve been interested in this kind of “radial” note-taking ever since I read about “clustering” in one of Janet Burroway’s books on fiction. Graphic facilitators (like the cartoonist Drew Dernavich) do glorified doodling like this for a living.

Beautiful Evidence is, like all of Tufte’s previous books, fantastic. I enjoyed the chapters on picture/word integration and PowerPoint the best. The great thing about Tufte is the primary sources he uses, and in this book, he quoted everything from Galileo’s Starry Messenger, to a guide to spotting a concealed handgun, to Martin Amis’s The War Against Cliche.

Tufte’s sources come from all disciplines: his books are the most inherently integrated and interdisciplinary I’ve ever read. He also draws from great literature. In his Envisioning Information, he quoted from Italo Calvino’s Six Memos For The Next Millenium, which I’ve been hot for all year:

My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language….Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world — qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.

In other news, I had my first wedding anxiety nightmare last night, so you know it’s getting close. (Meghan’s been having them for weeks now.)

My new hobby is drawing while watching TV. I drew these pages while watching Ken Burns’ documentary on Mark Twain.

Did you know that Mark Twain kept scrapbooks wherever he went? He even patented his own “self-pasting” scrapbook. It was the only invention of his that ever made any money.

After Mark Twain got married, he said, “I’m so happy I could scalp somebody.”