parker higgins

While I was on vacation in Hawaii, my friends and I took a trip to Edward Snowden’s former house in the Waipahu area. Not much to see—it’s just a house in a residential neighborhood—but we were nearby and thought it’d be fun to make the trip. Here’s a picture of the five of us posed out in front (from left to right, that’s me, Sarah Jeong, Marcia Hofmann, Kashmir Hill, and Trevor Timm).

As I just announced on Twitter: it turns out the mugshot from Rick Perry’s recent indictment works just fine in the Warby Parker virtual glasses try-on tool.

I’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Ferguson, Missouri all this week. There is a movement growing as a lot of ugly forces in American life are becoming impossible for a certain mainstream to continue ignoring. At the same time, it’s been really remarkable from a media perspective: a lot of the story built on social media, and in a lot of ways that continues to be the most thorough and timely source of information.

A great way to encourage more ubiquitous email encryption is to let people you’re emailing know that you’re equipped to use it, and that they can be too.

For a few hours today, Uber users could view their passenger rating thanks to a how-to posted by Aaron Landy.¹ Uber gives both passengers and drivers ratings, probably by averaging the post-ride ratings each gets, and they affect whether riders can get picked up and whether drivers keep their jobs.

Maira Kalman is one of my favorite illustrators, so I was excited to see this short documentary about her made by a project called Portraits in Creativity. I got the link from Kottke, who ran it under the headline “Copying is my way of learning.” I actually missed that line on the first and second pass, but found it the third time through. Here’s video and a transcript of that short section:

Although the main point of my airship trip over the Utah Data Center was to announce the launch of Stand Against Spying, I did have a pretty great view of the facility. Inspired by Trevor Paglen’s efforts to supply a new “visual vocabulary” to the conversation about national intelligence, I got EFF to release one of the photos I took under a completely free CC0 waiver.

I tuned in to an older episode of the public radio show “Song Travels” on a drive the other featuring performances and a discussion with Valerie Simpson. Simpson is a musician and with her husband made up the legendary married Ashford & Simpson songwriting duo, behind “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and a million other tunes.

I flew in an airship over the NSA’s Utah data center yesterday, as part of a joint action organized by Greenpeace and EFF. It was really a remarkable experience, and we were lucky enough to get it covered by a pretty wide range of media. Here’s a small sample:

Here’s a quick ukulele version I recorded of the old tune “Come Take A Trip In My Airship,” originally written in 1904 by George “Honey Boy” Evans and Ren Shields.