messenger bag

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Bike Snob by BikeSnobNYC

book value, call centre, car-free, fixed-gear, gentrification, Kickstarter, messenger bag, safety bicycle, urban sprawl

Here are some current cycling fashions that Don’t Always Make Sense: The Messenger Bag Along with fixed gears, the messenger bag has become extremely popular. In fact, it’s become so closely associated with cycling that many people automatically think it’s the only type of bag you should even consider for riding. It’s rare these days that a new rider will purchase something else. Messenger bags for non-messenger use is nothing new, and they’ve been popular with non-cyclists for decades. They actually crossed over to the mainstream well before messenger-style bikes did. This makes sense, because messenger bags are durable and they hold a lot of stuff, and they’re a much better fit for the typical urban person than a leather briefcase.

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Actually, the messenger bag has become less a bag than another article of clothing. People often opt for the most capacious messenger bag they can find, but since they’re not delivering packages these bags just remain mostly empty. And empty bags don’t swing around; instead, they simply wrap around your body. Really, a better name for messenger bags might be “hipster capes.” The U-lock still resides in the back pocket, and the keys still hang from the waist. And the messenger bag is wrapped around the shoulders, and the shoulders are hunched over ridiculously narrow handlebars. The result is riders who look like James Brown at that point in the concert when he’d fall to his knees and they’d drape him with velvet.

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However, for on-the-bike use, messenger bags aren’t always the great choice everybody thinks they are. This is because they’re designed to swing around from rear to front quickly and without being removed. This is great when you’re stopping every two blocks to deliver a package; but it’s not such a great thing when you’re just going from one place to another and you keep having to push your bag back around every five minutes. If you’re not constantly going in and out of your bag, you very well may be much better off with a regular backpack. Still, urban cyclists will continue to choose the messenger bag. Actually, the messenger bag has become less a bag than another article of clothing.

The Satsuma Complex by Bob Mortimer

messenger bag, off grid, Right to Buy

I have never been tempted to use an online dating site since that evening. I clambered back onto the bar stool next to Brendan. The dark-haired lady was no longer at the bar and I briefly panicked until I saw that she had seated herself in one of the velveteen booths. I watched as she removed a book from her tan leather messenger bag and began to read. She seemed instantly engrossed by its content. Unlike some people, I’m not immediately intrigued by a lass sat on her own reading a book – it always seems a bit arch, even corny, to me. I mean, what’s the big deal about books anyway? It’s probably about futuristic military ducks or some such nonsense.

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These shoes were a good start. I looked away and took a sup from my pint. As she watched her drink being prepared, I got a better chance to assess her looks, and in doing so my chances of ever being by her side. She was petite, about five foot six inches, wearing light blue Levi jeans and a rolltop black jumper. Her messenger bag was still resting against her hip. Her hair was shoulder-length and thick with a clinically straight fringe lying across the middle of her forehead. I couldn’t see her eyes but was thinking brown. She could have been a teacher or a restaurant manager, maybe even something to do with pottery. She was even prettier than I had first thought.

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I didn’t make much progress and by the end of my attempts the whole room smelt of warm bananas and even hotter concrete. I arrived back at the bar just in time to see Emily enter the pub, thankfully on her own. She was wearing a light green zip-up running top and baggy black trousers. She had her tan messenger bag slung on her hip and a large rucksack on her back that had some small tartan details but wasn’t overly Scottish in its attitude. I ordered another pint, waited for fifteen minutes, then walked through to the lounge. She gave me a beaming smile and a childish wave. I fancied her so much I suspect it made me blush.

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy by Eric O'Neill

active measures, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, computer age, cryptocurrency, deep learning, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, fear of failure, full text search, index card, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, PalmPilot, ransomware, rent control, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, thinkpad, Timothy McVeigh, web application, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, young professional

I had cut a pinhole in the front pocket to hide a small concealment camera, and if you looked closely, you could see tiny marks on the shoulder straps that allowed me to hide radio wires. Juliana argued that the backpack wasn’t professional and had insisted I buy a shiny leather briefcase. We’d compromised on a black-and-gray Timberland messenger bag that now hung off my shoulder. While I didn’t wear a suit and tie as effortlessly as Gene, I felt confident that I at least wouldn’t embarrass myself in front of the assistant director. I had stuffed a few items into the messenger bag: a legal pad and pen to take notes, my FBI credentials that told others in law enforcement whom I worked for and the golden badge that proved it, and a letter that Gene had handed me at the field office to make my part in the Hanssen investigation official.

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“It might be an animal.” Before she could talk me out of it, I disentangled myself from her and padded from the room. I found my shoes and threw on a heavy coat. “This is a bad idea,” Juliana hissed from the bedroom doorway. I stuffed my FBI credentials and a heavy extendable baton from my messenger bag into my coat pockets and handed Juliana my cell phone. “If I shout, you call 911.” Before she could say another word, I was out the door. Our apartment was tucked into the back corner of our building. Our bedroom windows looked past two feet of moss to a massive wooden wall on one side and a parking lot strewn with gravel on the other.

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The last I’d heard from Kate, a team had him headed west on Massachusetts Avenue past Dupont Circle. I moved slowly with patient purpose past the spot where the search team had shifted Hanssen’s TV stand and bought me a face pressed into the thin carpet. My hands found each other behind my back in quiet agreement not to touch anything. Then I saw Hanssen’s messenger bag. Five minutes later I called Kate. “Remember when you told me never to search GD’s office?” Kate sounded harried. They had followed Hanssen to his old haunt at the Office of Foreign Missions and had no clue why he’d returned. “Yeah. Don’t tell me you—” “Guilty,” I said. “But before you get mad, hear me out.”

Please Report Your Bug Here: A Novel by Josh Riedel

Burning Man, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, financial independence, Golden Gate Park, invisible hand, Joan Didion, Mason jar, Menlo Park, messenger bag, off-the-grid, Port of Oakland, pre–internet, risk/return, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, tech bro, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Black-box image bug, I wrote, and attached Riley S.’s profile photo. I noticed that the photo wasn’t entirely black: the bottom half contained wavy lines. I zoomed in to analyze the image but was jolted out of my investigation by the ding of a new email: Warning: Content Review Queue Full. I printed out the photo and tucked it into my messenger bag to investigate later. DINNER AT THE FOUNDER’S The Founder skipped our one-on-one that week. I knew he was busy preparing for our Series A, but I insisted we meet. I needed to explain, outside of the stressed office environment, what happened to me. In Palo Alto, he texted. Back in the city tonight.

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If I could make it happen again, I could record the details, collect evidence for the Founder. But nothing worked. No matter how meticulous my tactics, I couldn’t reproduce the bug. “Fantastic statement, man,” the Founder announced as he arrived in the office, late from a meeting that he offered no details on. He slapped my back and tossed his messenger bag on his desk. I took my headphones off. “Thanks. Wasn’t too hard to write.” The Founder ignored me, hooking up his laptop to his monitor. “When’s she start?” I unwrapped my second Nature Valley of the morning. “Next week,” I said, taking a bite. Crumbs rained down on my keyboard. I’ll send her a contract today, the Founder messaged, transitioning our conversation to text.

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We blasted through the queue at record speed on Friday morning, nearly finishing before the Founder entered the office with the engineer. They were in a heated debate about what the error logs told us about users in Japan. I’d glanced at the logs earlier that day, in bed, but couldn’t translate them on my own. “What’s the issue?” I asked. “Don’t worry about it,” the Founder said. He tossed his messenger bag on a chair and rushed into our tiny conference room, where he took his morning calls. I tried not to obsess about the Founder brushing me off. I put on my Bose noise-canceling headphones—no music, only the steady, distant static of sound erased—and focused on the computer screen. Trusting Noma with the content review queue, I studied our long list of FAQs.

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

1960s counterculture, big-box store, blue-collar work, classic study, corporate social responsibility, crack epidemic, creative destruction, David Brooks, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, mass immigration, messenger bag, new economy, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

He cut the vinyl sheets into pieces, and then he and Funk sewed the pieces together into messenger bags that Avsar designed. Within a few years they had so many orders for their Crypto label that they needed a larger production space, leading them to rent an empty, one-story factory in Williamsburg. Avsar, Funk, and a few employees cut vinyl sheets into pieces on the roof, then took them indoors and sewed them together into messenger bags. Avsar drew the Brooklyn skyline of factory buildings and rooftop water tanks that they could see from their roof and used it as the company’s logo; whether or not this was meant as a challenge to Manhattan Portage, a messenger bag company that was founded in Manhattan several years earlier and used the city’s famous skyline as its logo, it turned Brooklyn into an aesthetic theme.

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When Aesop Rock, a white indie hip-hop artist who wore Brooklyn Industries T-shirts played clubs in Europe, he was introduced as “straight outta Brooklyn”; this helped to turn the Williamsburg operation—and Brooklyn as a whole—into a global brand.21 Williamsburg’s new entrepreneurs crystallized the neighborhood’s “authenticity” into a product with cultural buzz and shaped their own new beginnings into a powerful story of origin. Art galleries, performance spaces, a microbrewery, and messenger bags shared an urban imaginary that was one part abandoned factories and two parts artistic innovation, all leading to a creative mix that was “made in Brooklyn.” This story had no connection with Williamsburg’s real origins, with either the “scavengers, pimps, [and] gangsters” of the early 1900s or the Domino sugar workers and Puerto Rican mechanics of the area’s industrial prime time, or even with the Polish meat market and Mexican grocery store that are still doing business on Bedford Avenue, though less business now than before Williamsburg became so popular.

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There are also five shops selling design objects and home accessories, four furniture stores selling “semi-antique” tables and chairs, two furniture repair shops, two shops offering personal services and products for body care, an eyewear store that provides unusual eyeglasses for films and Broadway shows, an art gallery, and stores selling handmade purses, jewelry, children’s toys, messenger bags, candles, and supplies for Wiccans who practice modern witchcraft (“Come in for a spell,” says the sign in their window). Unlike the broad avenues that border the block, which bristle with little restaurants and bars, this street has no bars, and its three restaurants serve only beer and wine: the tiny, dark Ninth Street Market, Mud Truck’s indoor café, and Veselka, a diner for “Ukrainian soul food” that opened around 1960.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo

complexity theory, messenger bag, placebo effect

By starting with the easy things first and leaving the hardest for last, you can gradually hone your decision-making skills, so that by the end, it seems simple. For the first category, clothing, I recommend dividing further into the following subcategories to increase efficiency: Tops (shirts, sweaters, etc.) Bottoms (pants, skirts, etc.) Clothes that should be hung (jackets, coats, suits, etc.) Socks Underwear Bags (handbags, messenger bags, etc.) Accessories (scarves, belts, hats, etc.) Clothes for specific events (swimsuits, kimonos, uniforms, etc.) Shoes And, yes, I include handbags and shoes as clothing. Why is this the optimal order? I am actually not sure why, but based on the experience I’ve gained devoting half my life to tidying, I can tell you for certain that it works!

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Empty your bag every day There are some things you need on a daily basis, such as your wallet, your bus or train pass, and your date book. Many people see no point in taking these things out when they come home because they will use them again the next day, but this is a mistake. The purpose of a purse or messenger bag is to carry your things for you when you’re away from home. You fill your bag with the things you need, such as documents, your cell phone, and your wallet, and it carries them all without complaint, even if it is filled to bursting. When you put it down and it scrapes its bottom on the floor, it utters no word of criticism, only doing its best to support you.

The Money Tree: A Story About Finding the Fortune in Your Own Backyard by Chris Guillebeau

Bernie Madoff, drop ship, Ethereum, fail fast, financial independence, global village, hiring and firing, housing crisis, independent contractor, messenger bag, passive income, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, Steve Jobs, telemarketer

When he heard a chime that signaled a text message from her, he looked down. “Hey, Jake, this place is cute! I got here a few minutes early and snagged a table by the window. See you soon!” Soon was a highly optimistic prediction, but Maya didn’t know that. “On my way!” he texted, grabbing his messenger bag and running for the door. In his mind he calculated the traffic: at least fifteen minutes, more like twenty at this time of day. Damn. No big deal. It’s only our six-month anniversary. Just like it was only $50,000 he owed, with less than $3,000 in his savings account. Just like all he needed to do was find a way to start paying that off, at the same time he was finding a new place to live.

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He was impressed with how orderly everything was, with each item in its place and a clear process for assembling the bags. “How did this start?” he asked. She explained that through her dad’s tour guide business, she’d noticed that most visitors carried bags of some kind wherever they went. Backpacks, messenger bags, laptop bags, purses of various types—almost everyone had at least one, and many people had several that they used for different purposes. But even though there was no shortage of bags, most of them fit into one of two categories. Most of the backpacks were cheap and poorly made. There wasn’t anything distinctive about them, and they often fell apart after a few trips to the village.

The Awoken: A Novel by Katelyn Monroe Howes

Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, clean water, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, life extension, lock screen, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Silicon Valley, stem cell

I tore through the sliding doors, swept up in a whirlwind of adrenaline and emotions. Then, as if I slammed against an invisible barrier, I stopped in my tracks with a gasp. Damien was there, and he was packing. Actually, he was almost done packing, tucking some final things into a small leather messenger bag that he then slung over his shoulder. Damien didn’t even turn around to see who’d come in. He knew it was me. And he knew why I was there. Even without seeing his face, I felt a coldness in him that seemed so foreign to the man I’d come to know. There were a million things I wanted to say, wanted to shout, but I couldn’t decide what to start with.

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“Thank you,” I muttered to him, still dazed. He nodded. There was so much that needed to be said between us. So much I needed to say. But another thought quickly pushed into my mind: Damien. Expecting to see him just behind me, I quickly whipped around, but he was already gone. Through the crowd, I could see only the leather messenger bag slung around his back as he walked away. I turned back to Avon just soon enough to see him too disappear into the crowd. In an instant, they both were gone. Eliza and Diana stood guard on either side of me. “Come on, Alabine.” Eliza thumped a white parcel into my chest. Then she slid a gun into my belt.

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“Two men on the road shouldn’t cause many questions. And Damien has clear papers. They’ll be fine.” Eliza turned to Damien. “There’s an extra van outside. Take Highway 91. It’s a direct shot.” Diana grabbed keys out of the desk drawer and tossed them to Samson. In one scoop, Damien collected his things, slung the messenger bag over his back, and left without a glance. Samson was still fumbling to shove everything into his pack, so I darted out after Damien. I wasn’t going to let him go with so much unsaid. “Damien!” I sprinted through the sliding doors back onto the platform, now eerily empty. He slowly turned back to me.

The Future Won't Be Long by Jarett Kobek

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Donald Trump, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, quantum entanglement, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, wage slave, War on Poverty, working poor, young professional

Don’t ask me, darlings. I’ve read Guy Debord and I still don’t understand late-period capitalism. “One good thing, though,” said Jeremy, “is that they’re having Spider-Man’s reception at Tunnel. Have you gone?” “I’ve yet to attend,” said I. “Why don’t you come?” Jeremy opened his canvas messenger bag and removed a thick piece of pink paper. An invitation to the reception, with this awful little drawing of Spider-Man in a top hat, right hand swinging on his webbing, left hand clutching Mary Jane around her waist. The important words: “This invitation admits two guests.” “I stole a few from work,” said Jeremy.

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We helped the Captain get his bearings and then listened to L7’s Bricks Are Heavy. We bullshitted about the whereabouts of former Parsons students. “Do you remember Janine?” asked Jeremy. “Nooooooo,” I said. “Whatever did this Janine look like?” “She had black long hair, which I think she dyed, and glasses, and she always carried an unwashed grotty pink messenger bag.” “Oh, her,” I sniffed. “We called her the Pink Princess of Nassau County.” “That’d be the one,” said Jeremy. “Do you want to guess what she’s doing?” “I detest guessing. I’m always wrong.” “Pink Princess is dog catcher?” asked Минерва. “She stayed in New York for a year or two,” said Jeremy.

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She flipped through the pages of WANT-AD WANTONS. —What a silly book, she said. —Adeline, have you seen today’s Voice? —I attempt to avoid that rag, she said. I become ever so depressed by the constant stream of new films that I’m missing. If I’m lucky, I can manage one flicker a week, and rarely am I lucky. I opened my messenger bag and took out the Voice. —What in the name of Jesus Cristo? she asked. —Read the story, I said. She pored over the pages. —Baby, she said, what are you going to do? —This has nothing to do with me, I said. I haven’t seen Michael in over a year. I have a new book coming out. SEPTEMBER 1996 Baby and Adeline See Freaks Summer disappeared, bleeding into September, into the month of publication.

Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson

COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, messenger bag, printed gun

When Lydia lived at home, if Mum asked where she was going and she didn’t want to say—for instance, if she was on her way to go driving with Gil—she’d just pretend to be wearing her buds and walk out of the door. But Logi know when you’ve heard them. It’s like a pingback, they feel the thought as it lands in your mind. Lydia pauses, adjusts her messenger bag so it’s more or less hidden behind her body and moves back into the doorway. I was about to go out, she replies. Where? Madison says, looking up from a folder of Fitz’s paperwork. She’s sitting in the exact spot where he died. Lydia wonders whether or not to point this out. To get something to eat.

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She’s momentarily distracted so Lydia chooses to assume that’s all, and she quietly moves away and out of the front door. A cop is stationed on the porch along with a police drone: Arthur and Martha have been requisitioned as evidence, and in any case need to be given a full overhaul before they can be trusted in service again. The porch cop nods and makes no move to stop Lydia or check her messenger bag. Even if he did, would he think there was anything odd about her carrying a couple of dusty old books? He surely wouldn’t realize that, being a first edition of Thackeray’s two-volume novel The Newcomes liberated from the shelves in the dining room, they were actually worth stealing. But then that’s the kind of assumption Lydia hates when other people make it about her

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

Sadly, it was this faux pas rather than the corporation’s abominable record of human rights abuses—li Qiang, director of China labor Watch, states that “puma is the worst company in the industry” with respect to social responsibility—that seemed to cause the most consternation among participants, observers, and, eventually, online commentators.88 Consequently, while puma has backed events like the Bicycle Film Festival and lent financial support to messengers who, in turn, used the money for the benefit of the entire messenger community, it is one of a growing number of companies that are eager to cash in on the cultural cachet associated with urban bicycling. yet unlike patagonia’s Critical Mass messenger bag, pedro’s Critical Mass Mini Tool, the vans Fixed Gear authentic shoe, or iron Heart’s $360 Cyclist Jeans (bicycle not included), the product puma is most interested in producing and marketing is not a tangible commodity, but rather, bike culture itself: it wants nothing less than to infuse its own brand name and iconography into the media and cultural practices that co-constitute bike culture, thereby creating a bizarre feedback loop in which it can sponge the very authenticity it is attempting to manufacture.89 Fixed-Gear Bikes and Messenger Aesthetics, or “Give Hipsters a Brake”90 Of all the phenomena in american bike culture to prompt questions about cultural authenticity, media representation, and especially the uses of technology, the popularity of fixed-gear bikes has to be the most polarizing. as noted earlier, the recent visibility of single-speed bicycles is indicative of a growing interest in technological conviviality, utilitarian design, and a stripped-down aesthetic. yet, the less-is-more impulse buttressing the single-speed trend hardly explains the current fascination with fixed-gear track bikes that, while beautifully refined, are designed in such a way that riding—and more important, stopping—is an unnecessarily complicated endeavor that requires a rider to apply resistance with his or her legs in lieu of handbrakes, since the pedals and rear wheel turn continuously in one fixed direction (like bicycles used in the 1890s).91 Originally designed for high-speed track racing (hence “track” bike) and subsequently appropriated by urban bike messengers who praise them for their lightness, speed, and style, fixed-gear bikes—also called “fixies” or, in the United Kingdom, “fixed-wheel” bikes—are in some ways the antithesis of utilitarian transportation, save the minimal parts one must buy or replace on the machine itself.92 What the bicycles lack in their ease-ofuse is made up for with their mechanical elegance, their durability, and the way they reconfigure the act of cycling and the relationship between bicyclist and machine—an experience devotees habitually describe in quasi-spiritual language peppered by illusions to the “purity and simplicity” of the machine, the “almost mystical connection” between rider and bicycle, and the feeling that one’s bicycle is an “extension of [one’s] limbs,” allowing one to achieve “Zen,” or a “Zen-like state” comparable to “being in the ‘The Zone’ all the time.”93 at the risk of minimizing the joy of riding fixed-gear bikes, let alone the corporeal and spiritual apexes their fans apparently reach through this practice, their desirability also seems tied to something much more basic, which is the cultural cachet one gleans by owning, riding, and/or displaying one: the fixed-gear bike has become a trendy icon of urban coolness, a “hipster gold card,” as one magazine article puts it.94 in this sense, riding fixed-gear bikes seem to offer a form of mediated or indirect utility to their users, inasmuch as the difficulty of riding them allows bicyclists to demonstrate their level of cycling skill, fitness, or mastery over their machine.95 One can draw this inference from the slew of films, Web sites, and blogs devoted to fixed-gear bikes that focus much less on transportation and advocacy issues than on stunt riding, tricks, and aggressive maneuvering through dense urban spaces.96 On the internet, one also finds that showing off one’s riding skill is seemingly of equal or lesser importance than simply showing off one’s bike.

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Consequently, it is one of the salient reasons why they are often denounced as a trendy, faddish, or indicative of a cooler-than-thou, urban chic—a material artifact on par with the now passé icons of “trucker hats and pabst Blue ribbon beer.”101 Bike messengers are some of the more jaded critics of the fixed-gear bicycle craze, seeing as how the trend is part of a broader co-optation of messenger culture in which track bikes (once ridden almost exclusively by bike couriers) as well as messenger bags, walkie-talkies, cycling caps, and even the most minute details of messenger garb (such as elastic key chains worn at the elbow joint) are donned by messenger look-alikes who are variously denounced as “missingers,” “fakengers,” “posengers,” “dressengers,” or, as one person bluntly puts it, “fake ass messengers.”102 indeed, some of bike messengers’ very own grassroots cultural practices, such as “alleycat” races—urban races organized by and for messengers since the 1980s—are also widely copied in recent years by cyclists with little or no connection to messenger work, save their look.103 Corporations and designers similarly glean the “street creed” of messengers when it suits their financial interests: [in 2006] lincoln wanted some well-known nyC messengers to appear in a print ad for their cars.

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The north american Handmade Bicycle Show is one of the barometers for this trend: it began in 2005 with 23 exhibitors and now features as many as 150 custom bike builders who take part in the event and display their creations to thousands of visitors.118 in portland, Oregon, alone, one can find more than two-dozen independent bike builders, many of whom either apprenticed with other local builders or learned their craft at the United Bicycle institute in ashland, Oregon.119 Custom builders, who range from single individuals to family-run businesses, not only exert “an influence on trends and styles that is disproportionate to their market share”; they also constitute part of a broader movement of artisans, tinkerers, and skilled workers who are at once reconfiguring the role of independent, small-scale businesses in the north american bike industry and also demonstrating a sense of pride that famed messenger bag maker Eric Zo associates with Diy production: “i’m in the society of people who actually make their own shit.”120 This bloc includes messenger-owned bag manufacturers, utilitarian vehicle builders (namely, cargo bicycles and tricycles), specialized welders, artists who use scrap bike materials to make everything from jewelry to furniture, and bicyclists who are running successful bike shops and pedal-powered delivery services based on cooperative, worker-owned business models.121 in addition to newer businesses, long-established independent companies are also getting a second look from cyclists who are (re)discovering the importance of durability, craftsmanship, and more localized modes of production embodied by companies like Wald, the Kentucky group responsible for producing most of the bicycle baskets seen in the United States since 1905.122 Worksman Cycles, the oldest U.S. bike maker still in business, is another company that perseveres despite radical transformations in the bike industry since the company was founded in 1898.

Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi

Columbine, hiring and firing, messenger bag, price stability, profit maximization, VTOL

And they would both go back inside and stand in the bathroom's doorway, studying Jonathan's floating lily and the clerk would nod his snowy head thoughtfully and suggest that she'd probably prefer to be buried in the back yard, in her garden. After all, that was what his own wife had wanted, and she'd been a gardener, too. On Monday, Jonathan emptied his bank accounts and IRAs and changed everything into cash: fifty and hundred dollar bills, fat wads of them that he stuffed into a messenger bag so that he walked out of the bank carrying $112,398. His life savings. The wages of sin. The profits of dutiful financial planning. The clerk had asked if he was getting a divorce, and he blushed and nodded and said it was something like that, but she didn't stop him from clearing out the account, and mostly seemed to think it was funny that he was beating his wife to the punch.

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But Pia had held together all right, even after a couple days. She was gone, but still recognizable. He, on the other hand, was still around—and yet utterly changed. A sporty RAV4 hit the on-ramp. It whipped past him in a flash of white, then slowed suddenly and pulled onto the margin. Jonathan jogged after it, his messenger bag of cash jouncing against his hip. He yanked open the little SUV's door. A kid with a crushed cowboy hat studied him through mirrored Ray-Bans. "Where you headed?" "San Diego?" "You pay gas?" Jonathan couldn't help grinning. "Yeah. I think I can help with that." The kid motioned him in, gunned the little engine and accelerated onto the highway.

Simple Matters: A Scandinavian’s Approach to Work, Home, and Style by Jenny Mustard

messenger bag, place-making, sensible shoes, Skype

Plus, they give any outfit a relaxed tone, as if you’re not trying too hard. And they’re comfortable as can be. You don’t want your adventurous spirit held back by something as mundane as blistered feet. The backpack. Invest in one and thank yourself later. Again, it’s all about traveling comfortably, and not getting stuck with a shoulder-killing tote or messenger bag. (Or something as inappropriate as a clutch for that matter, a.k.a. the only bag ever invented even less practical than no bag at all.) When exploring, you probably like to pack quite a lot of stuff: the security blankets and necessities—the cameras, tampons, water bottles, extra sweaters, and sunscreen.

Fuller Memorandum by Stross, Charles

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Beeching cuts, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon credits, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, dumpster diving, escalation ladder, false flag, finite state, Firefox, Herman Kahn, HyperCard, invisible hand, land reform, linear programming, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, operational security, peak oil, Plato's cave, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantum entanglement, reality distortion field, security theater, sensible shoes, side project, Sloane Ranger, telemarketer, Turing machine

Probably a new game of bureaucratic pass-the-parcel, seeing if some poor schmuck--I was already in charge of departmental IT services, for my sins--could be mugged into taking on responsibility for exorcising hovercraft or something. Back to the here-and-now. The carriage is slowing. A minute later I realize it's pulling into a main line station--Wolverhampton, where I get to change trains. I shove my reading matter back into my messenger bag (it's a novel about a private magician for hire in Chicago--your taxpayer pounds at work) and go to stand in the doorway. The air in the station hits me like a hot flannel, damp and clingy and smelling slightly of diesel fumes. I take a breath, step down onto the concrete, and try to minimize my movements as I go looking for the Cosford service.

…

(External Liaison will raise hell about it tomorrow, but tomorrow can fend for itself.) The middle-aged man in the loose-cut Italian suit is already there and waiting for her, sitting in the middle of a silent ring of empty tables while his dead-eyed bodyguards track the access routes. "Mrs. O'Brien," says Panin. "Welcome." She pulls out a chair and releases her bulky messenger bag, dropping it between her feet as she sits. She has her violin case slung across her chest, like a soldier's rifle. "Dobryi viechier, kak ty?" Panin's lips quirk. "Quite well, thank you. If you would prefer to continue in English ..." "My Russian is very limited," Mo admits. "My employers are more interested in Arabic--not to mention Enochian--these days."

The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri

airport security, fake news, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, messenger bag, rolodex, white picket fence

I came from test-taking stock. We did such good work, Baba and I. He emptied his pockets of pistachio and chocolate and sour cherry and we sat together on the floor, cross-legged and knee-to-knee, whispering secrets and jokes as we drew bold, stouthearted Ks and Gs. I clicked our finished pages into my rawhide messenger bag and, the next day, I took them to show my teacher, a woman whom we called only by the honorific Khanom. Khanom scanned my pages as I straightened up in my chair, my hands tucked beneath my haunches. She frowned and exhaled heavily through her nose. Then she glanced at the girls watching us from the edges of their scarves, tapped the pages straight against my desktop and tore them in half.

…

‘I’ll do the work over. I do love you.’ She gave me a strange look. I had said the wrong thing. You don’t tell teachers you love them. Why had I said it? For a moment, we both stood our ground, Khanom determined to ignore me, as I remained planted in her line of vision. I shifted onto my other foot, moved my messenger bag to my back. She glanced up again, smiling kindly now. ‘It’s OK, Miss Nayeri,’ she said. ‘I’m OK. I’m stronger than you think.’ She made muscle arms under her chador and we both laughed. ‘How would you like to do a very special job that only the top students can do?’ My fingertips went cold – I knew my school’s rituals and rewards and yet I wanted so much to please her.

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent by Douglas Coupland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, Downton Abbey, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, hiring and firing, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marshall McLuhan, messenger bag, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, oil shale / tar sands, pre–internet, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, Turing machine, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban planning, UUNET, Wall-E

Everything is changing, and far too quickly to be absorbed, especially by people who lived in the 1970s, when the single biggest tech improvement over a decade was the addition of an FM dial to car radios, or people who lived in the 1980s when the single biggest tech upgrade was the ability to create a mixed-tape cassette for your girlfriend. Acceleration is accelerating. I think of this while watching Bell Labs workers bustle into the building. They’re mainly flowing up from the lower parking lot where they parked a fleet of silver, white and black sedans. Many are carrying briefcases and messenger bags containing laptops: these days you bring your own computer to work. I enter through gold-tinted glass doors on the west side of the building, and the early-1980s fantasia continues. The high-ceilinged concrete space is filled with display cases filled with artifacts filled with astonishing significance: the world’s first transistor (1947); the world’s first laser (1957); a replica of the world’s first satellite (1961).

San Francisco Like a Local by DK Eyewitness

back-to-the-land, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bottomless brunch, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, Kickstarter, Lyft, messenger bag, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, tech bro, tech worker, uber lyft, young professional

Expect jumpsuits galore: possibly bright-pink and covered in bananas, or purple and dotted with dalmatian-like snakes The store partners with a rotating cast of female artists, so you’ll need to go back to see the latest stock. » Don’t leave without pondering a potential buy while sipping an artisanal tea at the excellent Samovar Tea Bar, located just next door. g US Design g Contents Google Map TIMBUK2 FACTORY STORE Map 4; 587 Shotwell Street, The Mission; ///mirror.vets.beams; www.timbuk2.com Techies and utilitarians looking for durable accessories love Timbuk2 for its fashionable, long-lasting backpacks and messenger bags in various muted shades. They also carry a pretty good range of beanies and panel caps, if you’re after some new headgear. g Shop g Contents Record Stores Put Spotify and iTunes aside for a minute. To keep it real, join San Francisco’s punks and mods, jazzheads and club kids between aisles of vinyl, swapping stories as you leaf through records.

Zero History by William Gibson

augmented reality, business intelligence, dark matter, edge city, hive mind, invisible hand, messenger bag, new economy, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, RFID, too big to fail

Later she’d be unable to say exactly what had been so ugly about it, except that it was somehow beyond punk, beyond art, and fundamentally, somehow, an affront. Diagonals at the edges continued around the sides, and across the short, loose sleeves. Pep leered at her, or perhaps only looked at her, and pulled the strap of a dark green messenger bag over his head, tucking what she recognized as Garreth’s other party favor into it. “Don’t forget to take that bag off,” Garreth said. He was seated in a black workstation chair that appeared to have been taped to the shiny aubergine floor. “Queer the visuals, otherwise.” Pep leered, or perhaps smiled, in reply, then stepped past her, through the open zip in the second scrim of black canvas.

…

The car had been empty, and Fiona, aloft again, had found them easily, still moving, but the one Garreth thought was Gracie was gone, missing, and still was, his package with him. Fiona had been unable to look for him then, because Garreth had needed her back at the car, so that he could vet Pep’s arrival and subsequent burglary, which had taken all of forty-six seconds, passenger-side door, complete with lockup. Pep, following instructions, hadn’t been wearing the messenger bag, and Hollis assumed he’d deposited the other party favor, whatever it might be, in the car, that being evidently the plan. And then he was gone, his dual-engined electric bicycle, utterly silent, capable of an easy sixty miles per hour, never having intersected with the focal cones of any of the cameras showing on the screen of Garreth’s laptop.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

“What I couldn’t find, I’d design, using original fabrics if I could find them, and if not I would find natural fabrics that were as good as the originals.” It was an extraordinary elision: a promise of authentic merchandise, with a codicil permitting the seller to substitute something inauthentic and even scrambled up. It was impossible to tell from the early Banana Republic catalog description whether the “Israeli paratroopers messenger bags” had been bought in bulk from some newly demobilized sabra quartermaster in Haifa or whether it was just some Bay Area executive’s idea of a comely tote bag, contracted out to a factory in Thailand. As for whether the company’s cotton backpack had really been “slightly used by British soldiers serving in the tropics,” you would have to give it a sniff to find out.

…

“the specter of technology”: Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: Harper, 2005 [1974]), 246. the adjective “compelling”: Google Ngram Viewer. “Authentic bush garments”: Banana Republic, Winter 1979 catalog (San Francisco, 1978). Quoted in Robyn Adams, “A Rare Look,” Abandoned Republic, June 2, 2011. Online at secretfanbase.com/banana. “Israeli paratroopers messenger bags”: Robert Klara, “Before Banana Republic Was Mainstream Fashion, It Was a Weirdly Wonderful Safari Brand,” Adweek, March 16, 2016. In 1980, the Häagen-Dazs ice cream company: Häagen-Dazs, Inc., v. Frusen Glädjé Ltd., United States District Court, S.D., New York, June 9, 1980. [493 F.Supp. 73 (1980)].

Lonely Planet Pocket Berlin by Lonely Planet, Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, messenger bag, Peter Eisenman, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

(Click here) Boxhagener Platz Treasure-hunting grounds with plenty of entertainment, cafes and people-watching. (Click here) Best Made in Berlin Ausberlin Great for scene-savvy label hunters. (Click here) Bonbonmacherei Find a new favourite in this old-fashioned candy kitchen. (Click here) Frau Tonis Parfum Get a customised scent. (Click here) Ta(u)sche Ingenious messenger bags with changeable flaps to lug your Berlin purchases. (Click here) Ampelmann Galerie Berlin’s iconic traffic-light man on T-shirts, towels and more. (Click here) Best Food & Drink KaDeWe Luxe department store’s 6th floor is foodie heaven with massive selections of first-rate anything. (Click here) Fassbender & Rausch The finest pralines and truffles, plus Berlin landmarks built of chocolate.

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

Days later, the Washington Post revealed federal investigators had also seized personal email and phone records for Fox News Washington correspondent James Rosen, in connection with another leak probe. In one affidavit, an FBI agent referred to the journalist as “an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator” — words that still give me the chills. I called Dale to let him know the elk antlers had arrived, then tucked the box into a messenger bag and headed into Manhattan. When I arrived at Dale’s apartment, I thrust the box into his hand. “Check this out!” I gestured at the return address. “Your friend sure has a puckish sense of humor.” Dale looked it over. He was perplexed. I wondered what he knew — and what he didn’t — about the package, but I’d promised not to ask questions.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

The meetings began in the early evening with demos and discussions about new wireless gadgets. They ended, as often as not, well past midnight over beers at a downtown bar. Around tables strewn with empty glasses and bottles, a dozen or more geeks would stay up late making plans to spread free networks throughout the city. Bike messenger bags stuffed with wireless routers, antennas, and patch cables lay underfoot. One of those nights, I actually ended up in a bar fight wielding nothing but a surplus military laptop. My partner in this crusade to light up Manhattan with public Internet service was Terry Schmidt, an engineer who was fascinated by wireless networks and mobile computing.

…

Now you would have to settle for the posh Bowery Hotel just fifty feet to the south, where a suite will run you $600 a night. It was 10:00 a.m. on a Friday in early May 2011, and a small flock of disheveled twentysomethings trickled into Foursquare’s offices with their MacBooks tucked into their bike messenger bags. Tweets and check-in alerts percolated through the air like cricket chirps as the staff slowly recovered from the Foursquare-fueled night before. Being your own lead user is always hard work, but when your product gives you an easy way to find a place to drink and meet new people, it takes its toll.

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Through splitting, lumping, and labeling, we reveal choices and invite questions. Hardsides protect, spinners roll, carry-ons fit, and backpacks are hands-free. Which features matter most? Which bag is best for you? Figure 2-7. Categories reveal choices. Of course, all taxonomies are imperfect, as is the language they’re built upon. Let’s say you want a messenger bag. Is that under backpacks or duffels? Or how about a lightweight, hardside carry-on with two wheels? Does that even exist? Like maps and myths, taxonomies hide more than they reveal. They bury complexity to tell a story, and they always miss someone out. Some things, like luggage, get lost by accident, while others – people, places, and ideas – are buried by design.

Lonely Planet Pocket San Francisco by Lonely Planet, Alison Bing

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, edge city, G4S, game design, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Larry Ellison, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, off-the-grid, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, Zipcar

This scrappy zine/craft/how-to/art gallery delivers the inspiration to create your own magazines, rehabbed T-shirts or album covers. Nab an issue of Crap Hound , or find lucky symbols intended for collages; check out Nigel Peake’s pen-and-ink aerial views of patch-worked farmland, and buy alphabet buttons to pin your own credo onto a handmade messenger bag. (www.needles-pens.com; 3253 16th St; noon-7pm; 16th St Mission) 40 Bi-Rite Market Food & Drink $ Offline map Google map The Tiffany’s of groceries, with spotlights trained on dazzling local artisan cheeses, chocolates, organic fruit, sustainable meats and the city’s best-curated wine selection.

Avogadro Corp by William Hertling

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, invisible hand, messenger bag, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, off-the-grid, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, standardized shipping container, tech worker, technological singularity, Turing test, web application, WikiLeaks

Email finished, Gary sat and gloated for a minute. Then he heaved himself back up, and headed out to find a coffee shop and a newspaper. Naturally, it was too early to do any real work. He’d read the paper and come back in a couple of hours. Gary sauntered down the hallway whistling. * * * John Anderson gratefully let his heavy messenger bag slide to the floor. He shrugged out of his wet raincoat, hanging it behind his desk. Dropping heavily into his chair, the pneumatic shock absorber took his weight without complaint. He sighed at the thought of another day in the Procurement department processing purchasing requests. Tentatively peeking at his inbox, he saw more than a hundred new email messages.

Pocket New York City Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Cornelius Vanderbilt, East Village, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, ghettoisation, machine readable, messenger bag, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, starchitect, the High Line, urban renewal, walking around money

The store goes to great lengths to tie fashion to rock and roll, with records, ’70s audio equipment and even electric guitars for sale alongside JV’s wares. ( 212-358-0315; 315 Bowery btwn 1st & 2nd Sts; noon-9pm Mon-Sat, to 7pm Sun; F/V to Lower East Side-2nd Ave, 6 to Bleecker St) 58 Moo Shoes Shoes Offline map Google map Socially and environmentally responsible fashion usually tends to entail certain sacrifices in the good-looks department. Bucking the trend is Moo Shoes, a vegan boutique where style is no small consideration in the design of inexpensive microfiber (faux leather) shoes, bags and motorcycle jackets. Look for smart-looking Novacas, Crystalyn Kae purses, Queenbee Creations messenger bags and sleek Matt & Nat wallets. ( 212-254-6512; www.mooshoes.com; 78 Orchard St btwn Broome & Grand Sts; 11:30am-7:30pm Mon-Sat, noon-6pm Sun; F, J/M/Z to Delancey-Essex Sts) GAVIN HELLIER/JAI/CORBIS © Greenwich Village, Chelsea & the Meatpacking District There’s a very good reason why this area is known as the Village: it kinda looks like one!

My Year of Rest and Relaxation: A Novel by Ottessa Moshfegh

East Village, illegal immigration, index card, messenger bag, off-the-grid, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, rent control, white picket fence

Have you seen any Tarkovsky? Haven’t you read Rousseau?” “I was born into privilege,” I told Ping Xi. “I am not going to squander that. I’m not a moron.” “I might have to, like, downgrade to Super 8 then. Can I take down the blinds in the bedroom?” He pulled a handwritten document from his messenger bag. “Put the contract away,” I said. “I won’t sue you. Just don’t fuck this up for me.” Ping Xi shrugged. I gave him the key to the new lock. “If I need anything, I’ll stick a Post-it note here,” I said, pointing to the dining table. “You see this red pen?” Each time Ping Xi came over, he was to mark off the days on a calendar hanging on the door to my bedroom.

Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber by Susan Fowler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Burning Man, cloud computing, data science, deep learning, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, microservices, Mitch Kapor, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, work culture

At night, long after dinner had been cleared away, he would sit at the kitchen table with his notebooks and books in front of him, his head down, a pen in his hand, studying and learning. On his way to and from sales calls, he listened to foreign language tapes, and he never left home without his “book bag,” a little black messenger bag that held his notebooks, pens, books, and Pimsleur cassettes. More than anything, he wanted to be a writer; he wrote several books and sent them to Christian publishers, but none of them were ever published. He also dreamed of someday preaching at a large church, and of never having to sell vacuums, pay phones, or insurance ever again.

The Bend of the World: A Novel by Jacob Bacharach

Burning Man, disinformation, haute couture, helicopter parent, Isaac Newton, medical residency, messenger bag, phenotype, quantitative easing, too big to fail, trade route, young professional

Bye-bye. 7 I was not a libertarian. I wasn’t anything, and I didn’t vote or much care, but the other thing was easier to explain to my mother. 8 The museum party started at seven, so I’d told Lauren Sara six, and she clicked into the apartment in her bicycle shoes at twenty to eight. I think she was on to me. She tossed her messenger bag onto the floor with a metallic thud. Careful, I said. Jesus, what’s in there? Engine parts, she said. I need a shower. We’re so late already. She shrugged. That’s cool. I can go like this. She was in a pair of dungarees cuffed to just below the knee and a sleeveless T-shirt that read EAST END ORGANIC URBAN FARMSTEAD with a cartoon lion and a cartoon lamb both giving the peace sign.

So Close to Being the Sh*t, Y'all Don't Even Know by Retta

centre right, Downton Abbey, lock screen, McMansion, messenger bag, pink-collar, retail therapy, Skype, Snapchat

I was earning my own money and was going to enjoy it, with some limits. But first I was about to learn those limits. I was one of those suckers in college who signed up for a “starter” credit card with a crazy-high interest rate at the campus bookstore and then immediately bought shit I couldn’t afford. Duke sweatshirts. Duke sweatpants. Duke messenger bag. Duke pajamas. Did I mention I went to Duke? Go Devils! I’d get a bill and think nothing of it. Seriously, I thought N O T H I N G of it. When you get a bill you normally think, At some point, I’m going to have to pay this bill. Not me. That minimum payment and due date were merely suggestions that I could or could not adhere to.

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline

big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, clean water, East Village, export processing zone, feminist movement, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megacity, messenger bag, Multi Fibre Arrangement, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Skype, special economic zone, trade liberalization, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, Veblen good

Still imagining Communist-era austerity ruling the Chinese fashion winds, I didn’t want anyone to be overwhelmed by my New York fashion sensibility. But as I walked down the palm-tree-lined pedestrian plazas of Shenzhen in a pair of khakis, canvas slip-ons, and a plain black blouse, I was decidedly outdressed by sharply dressed twentysomethings in knee-high boots and chic leather messenger bags. Lily and Katy were both better dressed than I, in the latest styles for China’s college-educated up-and-comers. A decade ago China’s fashion industry was almost nonexistent. Today, it’s on the verge of exploding and the country has the world’s fastest-growing fashion and luxury markets.17 China has had its own edition of Vogue since 2005, and the Shenzhen Garment Industry Association has organized a collective runway show for the city’s designers at London Fashion Week since 2010.

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau

Airbnb, big-box store, clean water, digital nomad, do what you love, fixed income, follow your passion, if you build it, they will come, index card, informal economy, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, late fees, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, price anchoring, Ralph Waldo Emerson, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, web application

To my surprise, the name of the Amtrak train from Chicago to Portland was the Empire Builder. Hmmm. I began to get an idea, but initially thought it was too crazy to implement. That same evening, the doorbell rang and the UPS guy dropped off a package. When I opened the box, I discovered a free messenger bag sent by some new friends at Tom Bihn’s company (profiled in Chapter 13). The name of the bag was … Empire Builder. I’m not sure if God, the universe, or Tom Bihn’s company was sending me the message, but I decided to follow the idea where it led. I made plans to go to West Africa then fly home via Chicago and launch the Empire Building Kit on a single day, live from the Empire Builder train.

Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir by Wednesday Martin Ph.d.

Anthropocene, delayed gratification, haute couture, McMansion, messenger bag, stem cell

It was an insouciant, self-confidently uncommon brick-red, the lipstick color you have been looking for for years and never found, the platonic ideal that drove you to buy tube after tube of not-right reds in pursuit of The One. The shape, too, was just right—just off the visual map of things you were used to, provocative in its subtle difference from a purse or a messenger bag. There were file folders in there, barely peeking out, suggesting a life of work and beauty. I actually followed the woman a few blocks through the Eighth (of course it was the Eighth, the arrondissement of all things starchily, sexily French), stalking her handbag, trying to figure out what it was.

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fear of failure, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, impulse control, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, zero-sum game

Seventy-five percent of the time it was a Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon missionaries. The rest of the time, it was somebody wanting me to sign a petition. When I opened the door, the only thing that registered was that the woman standing there, with her shock of curly blond hair and dark-rimmed glasses, was someone I didn’t know. Her khakis, button-down shirt, and messenger bag placed her out of Rockville Centre. “Hi. My name is Susanne Craig. I’m a reporter for the New York Times.” Journalists had stopped contacting me a long time before. With the exception of David Corn from Mother Jones and somebody from Frontline, the only other person to leave a message before the election had been from Inside Edition.

Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior by Jonah Berger

Apollo 11, assortative mating, barriers to entry, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, double helix, driverless car, fixed-gear, flying shuttle, Google Glasses, job satisfaction, messenger bag, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, PalmPilot, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, spinning jenny, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies, white flight, Yogi Berra

Then, at each corner, I would stop and try to guess which direction had the best chance of success. Dentist’s office to the left? Dentists tend to drive nice cars, so why not do a quick loop of the parking lot. High-end grocery store to the right? Worth a shot. Every time I found a BMW, I reached into my messenger bag, pulled out a piece of paper, and gingerly tucked it under one of the windshield wipers. These weren’t coupons for body shops or advertisements for auto detailing. We weren’t selling anything at all. Instead, Princeton professor Emily Pronin and I were interested in how different factors influenced car buying.

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

But even five years ago, this scene—people walking downtown, shopping, buying hundred-dollar bike saddles—would strike many Detroiters as ridiculous. Inside the shop, Detroit Bikes founder Zak Pashak served up locally made tamales as potential customers milled about the store and surveyed the company’s offerings: two models of bikes, each priced at $700; $100 leather Brooks bike seats; $65 Bern helmets; some high-end messenger bags; other standard bike gear. “I love downtowns, and this is the middle of a historic city,” Pashak told me after we took a seat on a bench in Capitol Park. “You just have to be aware of what you’re moving into and be as good a guest as possible.” Not long ago, Capitol Park was crumbling. But in 2009, the city undertook a renovation of the park and sold several city-owned buildings surrounding it to private developers.

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

3D printing, augmented reality, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, fake news, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, gentrification, global supply chain, hydroponic farming, Internet of things, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, ransomware, RFID, rolling blackouts, security theater, self-driving car, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, surveillance capitalism, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning

Scott has a jacket on, faded blue denim. He’s wrapping a gray cotton scarf loosely around his neck. “How d’I look?” “Great. As always. I—” “Thanks, boo. I’ll catch you later.” “Okay. We … we can talk while you’re on the way?” “How? My fucking spex are dead. And I’m going to be out all day.” Scott grabs a messenger bag off a chair, slings it over his shoulder. “I mean, maybe if I can get some charge somewhere. But otherwise it’ll be tonight.” “Okay. Hopefully I’ll be up, I guess. It’s just—” “What?” “It’s just I wanted to … tell you about something—” “What? Can’t it wait?” “I … sure. It can wait.” “Okay.

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, land bank, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, megaproject, messenger bag, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

Judging from the profusion of strollers in the late afternoon, and the seemingly ubiquitous presence of children’s clothing stores on Armitage and Halsted, you begin to suspect that census data on household size in Sheffield—a median of roughly two people per household in the two main census tracts—is somehow in error. By five thirty most of the strollers and children are gone, and the scene has begun to change significantly. There are middle-aged men with white shirts and briefcases now, younger men carrying messenger bags, women lugging big round papasan wicker chairs from a neighboring furniture store, and quite a few people carrying clothes on hangers from the dry cleaner that sits next to the station. The Starbucks on the corner of Armitage and Sheffield is busy at this time of day, as it was early in the morning, but the scene is much more social.

The Zero-Waste Lifestyle: Live Well by Throwing Away Less by Amy Korst

airport security, Boeing 747, business climate, carbon footprint, delayed gratification, if you build it, they will come, Mason jar, messenger bag, microplastics / micro fibres, Parkinson's law

Two layers at a time are sandwiched between layers of freezer paper and ironed at a low setting until they are melted together. Additional layers are added the same way until a thick, tarp-like plastic fabric has been formed. Lou uses this plastic fabric in all kinds of marvelous creations, including baby bibs, coin purses, messenger bags, checkbook covers, and zippered pouches. She sells these at craft fairs in her area and online through Etsy.com. Although Lou has turned trash into a booming business, she has a real concern: “I am afraid Lou’s Upcycles has become a place where plastic can be delivered so consumers do not have to feel guilty about buying hundred-packs of chips, cases of water bottles wrapped in plastic, tiny candy bars, and other scary overpackaging.… I think we may have forgotten that what I make should be unnecessary and unfortunate, in a way.

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

air freight, cable laying ship, call centre, digital divide, Donald Davies, global village, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, inflight wifi, invisible hand, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, messenger bag, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, packet switching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, undersea cable, urban planning, UUNET, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

On his website, Jon Auer listed among his favorite books Router Security Strategies and How to Win Friends & Influence People. His Flickr page consisted mostly of photos of telecommunications equipment. In person, he had pink cheeks and metal-rimmed glasses, and on that frigid Wisconsin winter day he wore a hooded sweatshirt with no coat, and he carried a camouflage-patterned messenger bag. He fit the stereotype of a geek, but whatever social liability that might once have been, it had transformed into unadorned passion—and yielded a good job, running the network of a company that provides Internet access to towns across southeastern Wisconsin, mostly places too distant or too sleepy to attract the interest of the big telephone and cable operators.

Bully Market: My Story of Money and Misogyny at Goldman Sachs by Jamie Fiore Higgins

Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, glass ceiling, messenger bag, money market fund, short selling, zero-sum game

“The answer is, ‘I don’t know, sir, but I’ll find out.’ ” I looked at Tom’s face on the projection screen and noticed the edges of his mouth were lined with white foam. “I don’t know, sir, but I’ll find out,” John corrected himself. I could hear him push cries down his throat. “Good,” Tom said. “Now leave, and report back to us tomorrow at 7 a.m.” John stumbled over the people sitting in his row as he rushed out, running once he hit the aisle, his messenger bag flopping against his shoulder. “Welcome to Goldman,” Tom declared. “Home to the most paranoid and insecure people in the world. That’s what it takes to put up with this environment.” What the hell did I sign up for? My body shook as I wrapped my arms around my waist to try to stop the trembling.

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

4chan, Airbus A320, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, friendly fire, index card, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, messenger bag, PalmPilot, pets.com, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technology bubble, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks

On weekends his computer time was interrupted by his mother, Marcia, who would drag Jack and his brothers through the streets of St. Louis in search of the ultimate purse, “the one true bag,” as she called it. Jack would sit quietly in the aisles of women’s clothing stores while Marcia shopped. There he also started to develop a fascination with bags himself. Rather than opting for purses, though, Jack found comfort in messenger bags. In San Francisco years later, he wore one daily. A light-colored Filson bag that contrasted with his dark clothing: black T-shirts, zip-up sweaters and jeans, bulky sneakers to match. His shoulders, which sloped down steeply, made his jackets hang on his skinny and lanky frame. He sometimes played with a silver nose ring that hugged his nostril.

Upgrade by Blake Crouch

bioinformatics, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, dark matter, deepfake, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hyperloop, independent contractor, job automation, low earth orbit, messenger bag, mirror neurons, off grid, pattern recognition, phenotype, ride hailing / ride sharing, supervolcano, time dilation

With a sigh, he polished off his glass of champagne and lifted his satchel from the floor. We drove back into the city, with Nadine Nettmann behind the wheel of the modified company Edison and I-70 virtually empty at this hour of the night. Soren had been installed behind the passenger seat with his wrists zip-tied behind his back. I’d searched his carry-on—a Gucci messenger bag—but the only item of interest was a laptop, which we’d need a federal warrant to break into. “You’re Logan Ramsay, right?” Soren asked, his first words spoken since we’d escorted him out of the airport. “That’s right.” “Son of Miriam Ramsay?” “Yes.” I tried to keep my tone neutral. It wasn’t the first time a suspect had made that connection.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Likewise, real-world grups are hip, indie fortysomethings who, according to Sternbergh, “look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old. It’s not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent.”12 Grups wear the vintage sneakers of their own childhoods, put their babies in indie rock T-shirts, and use messenger bags instead of briefcases. Eventually, the time compression takes its toll, requiring some pretty intense mental gymnastics: “If you’re 35 and wearing the same Converse All-Stars to work that you wore to junior high, are you an old guy sadly aping the Strokes? Or are the young guys simply copying you?

The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, it's over 9,000, Kuiper Belt, Kwajalein Atoll, lolcat, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, the scientific method

That was intense, but I guess I’m just overreacting. I tried to calm myself down and return to the task of choosing a pair of lucky observing socks. I mean, the cable still works, so maybe I’ll just…huh, the local news station is out. That’s…probably normal. I unplugged my fully charged laptop and tucked it calmly into my messenger bag as the lights started to darken and the power went out. Totally normal. Noises from outside my window told me that people were, in fact, starting to congregate in the street. I’d just added my wallet and folder of observing notes to my bag when the floor starting bouncing again as an aftershock arrived.

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

air freight, airport security, autism spectrum disorder, book value, crowdsourcing, digital map, drone strike, Google Earth, industrial robot, informal economy, Jones Act, large denomination, megacity, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, ransomware, restrictive zoning, scientific management, side project, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, South China Sea, SQL injection, the built environment, the scientific method, young professional

This was based entirely on appearance: his size, build, and extremely close-cropped copper-blond hair, his coat—dark green canvas, hanging to midthigh, with a vaguely military cut about it, looking like it could conceal just about anything short of a bazooka—and his scuffed black steel-toed boots. As he reached the top of the steps he swung a large shoulder bag down to the deck. It was a somewhat hip bike messenger bag with a broad padded strap meant to go diagonally across the body. The first thing he wanted to look at was the cockpit, and so all they could see for a few moments was the back of his head, supported by an unusually thick neck. After he’d gotten his fill of looking at the plane’s control panel, which took a while, he turned to inspect the door of the lavatory.

…

“Hello,” they responded. “I am Csongor.” “Csongor the hacker?” Peter inquired. “Yes,” Csongor answered, amused, or at least bemused, that Peter had been able to identify him in this way. He stepped into the passenger cabin. He and his luggage were too wide to move abreast down the seat-row, so he held the messenger bag out at arm’s length and allowed it to precede him. “I’m Peter. You’ve apparently heard of me,” said Peter in a tone that was sour, verging on openly hostile. Csongor, seeming to take the matter very seriously, stepped forward and extended his hand. Peter, incredulous, shook it. Csongor then turned toward Zula and waited for his cue.

…

And so the email pipeline now worked like this: down in Douglas, which was the primary city of the Isle of Man, the girlfriend of one of the medievalists, who dwelled in a flat there (“I happen to rather like tampons”), would read D-squared’s email as it came in, filter out the obvious junk, and print out a hard copy of anything that seemed important, and zip it up in a waterproof messenger bag. When it came time to walk her dog, she would stroll up the waterfront promenade until she reached the wee elven train station at its northern end, where she would hand the bag to the station agent, who would later hand it over to the conductor of the narrow-gauge electrical train that wound its way from there up into the interior of the island.

The Driver: My Dangerous Pursuit of Speed and Truth in the Outlaw Racing World by Alexander Roy

Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Google Earth, messenger bag, post-work, urban planning, urban sprawl

He believed in basic tenets of goodness common to all religions, and, he hoped, other atheists—honesty, hard work, and loyalty. What he saw when his U.S. Army unit liberated Buchenwald turned out the light upon whatever faith he had remaining. “Please,” he said, pursing his lips. The rumble grew closer. I fell into a fetal position and pulled my messenger bag over my head. It was time to pull out whatever prayers I knew, except that I didn’t know any. “Here it comes!” someone yelled. I prayed that whatever God was listening would grant me this one reprieve and forgive my minor sins. I couldn’t remember any major ones, and I wondered how many minor ones equaled…but by then it was too late to equivocate or lie to the creator(s).

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

The company had only nine million dollars in revenue in the prior year. But Facebook had huge potential—that was already obvious—and I leapt at the opportunity to meet its founder. Zuck showed up at my Elevation Partners office on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, dressed casually, with a messenger bag over his shoulder. U2 singer Bono and I had formed Elevation in 2004, along with former Apple CFO Fred Anderson, former Electronic Arts president John Riccitiello, and two career investors, Bret Pearlman and Marc Bodnick. We had configured one of our conference rooms as a living room, complete with a large arcade video game system, and that is where Zuck and I met.

Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women's Pain by Abby Norman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, double helix, Downton Abbey, feminist movement, financial independence, Kickstarter, messenger bag, period drama, phenotype, quantum entanglement, Saturday Night Live, the scientific method, women in the workforce

In fact, several more years would elapse, during which time my efforts to prevent it were motivated by a secret fear that I did not share with anyone, because I found it humiliating. Then, my first year at Sarah Lawrence, it happened again. I don’t remember exactly what preceded it. I’d probably been up too late having too much coffee. I think I’d eaten a strange concoction of crispy, undercooked Ramen and fuzzy candy I’d dug out from the bottom of my messenger bag. I tried, earnestly, not to vomit. Soon, though, I realized that I was wasting time—precious time that I needed to work and, God willing, to sleep. It was over in half a second, and there wasn’t even much to show for it. But immediately I was flooded by that feeling that couldn’t be matched, that I hadn’t forgotten but had been too afraid to chase.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deliberate practice, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, functional fixedness, game design, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, knowledge economy, language acquisition, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, messenger bag, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, multi-armed bandit, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, precision agriculture, prediction markets, premature optimization, pre–internet, random walk, randomized controlled trial, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, young professional

Something is not functioning as expected, so anything outside that temperature range is unknown territory. He knows his recommendation comes off as extremely arbitrary. The group moves to a final tally. With Mei’s conversion, it’s four to three, they’re racing. The students continue to chat as they stuff the case study papers into their backpacks and messenger bags. Martina quickly reads aloud a part of the case study where team owner BJ Carter asked his chief mechanic, Robin, for his opinion. “The drivers have their lives on the line, I have a career that hangs on every race, and you have every dime tied up in the business,” Robin told him. Nobody ever won a race sitting in the pits, he reminded his boss.

The new village green: living light, living local, living large by Stephen Morris

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, computer age, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, discovery of penicillin, distributed generation, Easter island, energy security, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Firefox, Hacker Conference 1984, index card, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, Kevin Kelly, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Negawatt, off grid, off-the-grid, peak oil, precautionary principle, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

This is one of the most professional and interesting Web sites that you could possibly bookmark on your browser; almost every day they describe a new technology or technique for environmentalists. Their book, a compilation of their work over the last few years, is nothing less than The Whole Earth Catalog, that hippie bible, retooled for the iPod generation. There are short features on a thousand cool ideas: slow food, urban farming, hydrogen cars, messenger bags made from recycled truck tarps, pop-apart cell phones, and plyboo (i.e., plywood made from fast-growing bamboo). There are many hundreds of howto guides (how to etch your own circuit board, how to break in your hybrid car so as to maximize mileage, how to organize a “smart mob,” a brief gathering of strangers in a public place).

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business intelligence, Citizen Lab, crowdsourcing, David Strachan, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, forensic accounting, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Live Aid, messenger bag, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype

I’d suggested we meet at the Brazilian restaurant where I got the recording from Gutierrez. I arrived on time, asked for a table for two, sat down. The phone rang with an encrypted Signal call. “Axiom” appeared on the screen again. “Don’t order,” said a man’s voice. I looked around again. No one I could see. “You are wearing the messenger bag, light blue shirt, and slightly darker jeans,” he continued. He told me to leave and walk slowly. “Walk against traffic, please.” I craned my neck around. “Don’t look around,” he continued, a little annoyed. “I’ll be about a half a block away, so please stop for 1–1.5 minutes at the intersections.

How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir by Cat Marnell

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, East Village, Frank Gehry, impulse control, Joan Didion, messenger bag, Norman Mailer, period drama, pez dispenser, Rosa Parks, Russell Brand, urban decay, walkable city, Wall-E, Zipcar

“I just . . . don’t . . . know . . . what is wrong . . .” I met Jean’s eyes. “With me.” We both sat there. “What else can we do to help you?” For the thousandth time. “I’m just going through a rough patch,” I said. I returned to my cubicle and sat down. Jean resumed editing with her blue pens. I started opening messenger bags with my numb hands. Then I stopped. It was silent in the beauty department. Cristina wasn’t there; neither was Simone. It was just my boss and me. I stared at the gray carpet for a long time. “I can’t do this anymore,” I blurted out. What are you doing? someone screamed inside of me.

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson

Ada Lovelace, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, bitcoin, blockchain, cloud computing, coherent worldview, computer vision, crisis actor, crossover SUV, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, demographic transition, distributed ledger, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, fake news, false flag, game design, gamification, index fund, Jaron Lanier, life extension, messenger bag, microaggression, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, no-fly zone, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, short selling, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, tech bro, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, The Hackers Conference, Turing test, Works Progress Administration

Corvallis inferred all of this from sounds; he could see nothing through his tears but the fake wood grain of the conference room table. When he sat back up again, he could see her standing outside wringing her hands. He blotted his eyes with tissues and then used them to wipe tears that had spilled onto the tabletop. He threw the damp tissues into a convenient receptacle, then slung Dodge’s messenger bag over his shoulder and tucked the canvas tote under his arm. The office manager opened the door for him. He nodded to her and walked out of the medical practice without looking back. On the sidewalk outside, someone had, during the last few minutes, placed a bouquet of grocery store flowers on the picture of Egdod.

…

ELSH is second to none in this field. And I intend to be very active in stating our case. Making sure that there are no misunderstandings. Protecting our brand.” “I wish you all the best of luck with your brand,” Corvallis said, sliding out of the booth, reaching out, almost as an afterthought, to throw an arm over Dodge’s messenger bag and the sack full of his effects. He turned without shaking El Shepherd’s hand and stalked away. His exit route took him right along the line of bar stools. Four of these were supporting humans. For midday drinkers, they seemed curiously fit. Maybe it was because they were all drinking water. They raised their heads and tracked him in their peripheral vision.

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

When you think style over speed, cycling is going to be safe.”* In the United States, Colville-Andersen said, cycling is perceived either as a leisure activity or the transportation choice of marginalized subcultures. “We have to re-democratize the bicycle. Forget the hipsters on fixies with their messenger bags, forget the spandex-clad men riding around in packs, forget the vehicular cyclists.† In Paris, they had no existing subculture of messengers or urban cycle gear, so, when Vélib’ came to town, there was no stigma attached to cycling. The people you see riding Vélib’, in their suits and skirts, are the same people you see riding the métro.”

Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs by Lauren A. Rivera

affirmative action, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, classic study, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, meritocracy, messenger bag, meta-analysis, new economy, performance metric, profit maximization, profit motive, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, young professional

“Yes,” I replied with a smile, the Californian in me trying to coax a grin out of him. “Great,” he said, with no trace of a smile. Adam then shut down his laptop—without modifying any of his online candidate scoring sheets to reflect the decisions that he and Stefan had just agreed on—and stuffed it in his black Tumi messenger bag. Turning to Stefan, he said, “Great meeting you.” Stefan replied in kind. Adam then fumbled with his BlackBerry, put it up to his cheek for a call, and darted out of the room. “Thanks!” I said to Stefan. He nodded, “Thank you.” I kept these interviewers’ rankings with my own notes for our hiring committee callback meeting, which was scheduled for Tuesday, the night after the second and final day of first-round interviews.

Jennifer Morgue by Stross, Charles

Boeing 747, call centre, Carl Icahn, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, disintermediation, dumpster diving, Dutch auction, Etonian, haute couture, interchangeable parts, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, operational security, PalmPilot, planetary scale, RFID, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, stem cell, telepresence, traveling salesman, Turing machine

One of them is paused and zoomed to fill the middle of the screen. It's an airport terminal and it looks vaguely familiar, if a little distorted by the funny lens. Several people are crossing the camera viewpoint but only one of them is centered — a woman in a sundress and big floppy hat, large shades concealing her eyes. She's got a messenger bag slung carelessly over one shoulder, and she's carrying a battered violin case. Very carefully, I say, "I haven't a clue." Hopefully the noise of my heart pounding away won't be audible over the ship's engines. "Why do you think I ought to know her? What is this, anyway?" I force myself to look away from Mo and find I'm staring at the console instead, tier upon tier of nineteeninch rackmount boxes stacked halfway to the ceiling.

Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh

clean water, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, low earth orbit, messenger bag, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, space junk, urban sprawl

she yelled, pushing him away. But more people were bounding towards her. ‘Can I get a picture with you?’ asked a woman, grabbing at her sleeve. Everywhere she looked there were people, their voices slipping into a white-noise of urgent clamour. Sweaty fingers tugged at her blazer and the strap of her messenger bag. She pictured her own face, petrified in black and white on the cover of a newspaper. In a moment of panic, she kicked over a large plastic bin, which crashed to the ground with a heavy thud, the contents flying out. The crowd dilated, giving Poppy enough time to scramble over the fence into the darkness of someone’s garden.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

If I held out for a few more minutes, he’d be out of the office, and I could ignore the boys on email and have a night to think about it. British Trader and I kept on going, and sure as shit, Argyris got a phone call from the better half, and took off with a wave and a concerned look. With considerable relief, I hung up with British Trader, gathered my startup kit of messenger bag and laptop, and cleared out in case Argyris came back. Here’s some capital-H History for you: Right around 1961, when the Cuban government was televising political executions like they were the Super Bowl, with death warrants signed by that Argentine mama’s boy Che, whose face graces more than one misguided hippie’s T-shirt, my parents fled Cuba.

The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School by Alexandra Robbins

airport security, Albert Einstein, Columbine, game design, hive mind, it's over 9,000, Larry Ellison, messenger bag, out of africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics

But no one explains to them why. Enter quirk theory. Chapter 1 MEET THE CAFETERIA FRINGE DANIELLE, ILLINOIS | THE LONER When the bell rang, Danielle slowly gathered her books as the rest of her class scrambled out of the room. She reluctantly made her way into the hall, slinging her green messenger bag—backpacks were too commonplace—over her shoulder. The hallway was already beginning to empty as people disappeared into classrooms. Students didn’t acknowledge Danielle and she didn’t acknowledge them. She walked with her head down, slouching her five foot ten frame, her dark, shoulder-length hair shielding her face.

San Francisco by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar

Needles & Pens Gifts, Books Offline map Google map (www.needles-pens.com; 3253 16th St; noon-7pm; & 16th St Mission) Do it yourself or DIY trying: this scrappy zine/craft/how-to/art gallery delivers the inspiration to create your own magazines, rehabbed T-shirts or album covers. Nab Jay Howell’s Punks Git Cut comic illustrating failed fighting words, Nigel Peake’s pen-and-ink aerial views of patchworked farmland, and alphabet buttons to pin your own credo onto a handmade messenger bag. SCRAP (Scroungers’ Center for Re-Usable Art Parts) DIY Offline map Google map (www.scrap-sf.org; 801 Toland St; 9am-5pm Mon-Sat; Totland St) Renew, recycle and rediscover your creativity with postindustrial salvage arts and crafts from SCRAP – you’d be shocked what perfectly good raw materials San Francisco throws out.

Bleeding Edge: A Novel by Thomas Pynchon

addicted to oil, AltaVista, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Burning Man, carried interest, deal flow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, eternal september, false flag, fixed-gear, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, index card, invisible hand, jitney, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, margin call, messenger bag, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, Y2K

Just as she’s about to head out with the boys to school, the doorbell rings its usual Big Ben theme which somebody a hundred years ago figured would be appropriate to the grandiosity of the building. Maxine squints through the peephole and here’s Marvin the kozmonaut, dreads pushed up under his bike helmet, orange jacket and blue cargo pants, and over his shoulder an orange messenger bag with the running-man logo of the recently failed kozmo.com. “Marvin. You’re up early. What’s with the outfit, you guys folded weeks ago.” “Don’t mean I have to stop ridin. My legs are still pumpin, no mechanical issues with the bike, I can ride forever, I’m the Flyin Dutchmahn.” “Strange, I’m not expecting anything, you must have me mixed up with some other lowlife again.”

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Cooper aired a brief interview with Tracy by a reporter from Florida TV station WPEC, who found Tracy on the university campus. “You had twenty families that were mourning, that buried children. Are you concerned about that at all?” the reporter asked. Tracy, in jeans and a white button-down, a battered cloth messenger bag slung over his shoulder, struck the classic conspiracist’s pose: arch, secure in his superior knowledge. “Once again, the investigation that journalistic institutions should have actually carried out never took place, as far as I’m concerned.” He scratched a graying temple. “We need to, as a society, look at things more carefully.

San Francisco by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar

Needles & Pens Gifts, Books Offline map Google map (www.needles-pens.com; 3253 16th St; noon-7pm; & 16th St Mission) Do it yourself or DIY trying: this scrappy zine/craft/how-to/art gallery delivers the inspiration to create your own magazines, rehabbed T-shirts or album covers. Nab Jay Howell’s Punks Git Cut comic illustrating failed fighting words, Nigel Peake’s pen-and-ink aerial views of patchworked farmland, and alphabet buttons to pin your own credo onto a handmade messenger bag. SCRAP (Scroungers’ Center for Re-Usable Art Parts) DIY Offline map Google map (www.scrap-sf.org; 801 Toland St; 9am-5pm Mon-Sat; Totland St) Renew, recycle and rediscover your creativity with postindustrial salvage arts and crafts from SCRAP – you’d be shocked what perfectly good raw materials San Francisco throws out.

Fodor's Oregon by Fodor's Travel Guides

Airbnb, bike sharing, BIPOC, car-free, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, off-the-grid, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, tech bro, tech worker, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

b Shopping CLOTHING HKeen Garage SPORTING GOODS | Known for its wildly popular and often playfully colorful hiking sandals, boots, and water shoes, this spacious showroom occupies a splendidly restored 1907 steamship factory that also houses this eco-conscious company’s headquarters. In addition to just about any kind of footwear you could need to tackle Pacific Northwest’s great outdoors, you’ll also find backpacks and messenger bags along with socks, pants, shirts, and other rugged outerwear. E 505 N.W. 13th Ave., Pearl District P 971/200–4040 w keenfootwear.com. Nau MIXED CLOTHING | Specializing in men’s and women’s sustainable clothing, from rugged hoodies and urbane down jackets to dressier threads made with cotton, Tencel, and other breathable fabrics, Portland-based Nau ships all over the world, but you can try on products and ask questions at this sleek flagship retail store in the Pearl District.

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

Important note: There is also some evidence that select antibiotics may also make contraceptive pills less effective because of their negative impact on gut flora and absorption of estrogens. To prevent unplanned pregnancy, consult with your doctor if taking antibiotics while on birth control. THE MEATLESS MACHINE I Reasons to Try a Plant-Based Diet for Two Weeks Bacon: the gateway meat. —Pin on messenger bag in San Francisco The Power of Positive Constraints Limiting options is usually thought of as a bad thing. But how would your speaking improve if you couldn’t use the adjective “interesting” and had to be more precise? How would your planning skills improve if you had to go without a cell phone for two weeks?

Bernie Madoff, the Wizard of Lies: Inside the Infamous $65 Billion Swindle by Diana B. Henriques

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, British Empire, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial thriller, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, index fund, locking in a profit, low interest rates, mail merge, merger arbitrage, messenger bag, money market fund, payment for order flow, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, proprietary trading, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, Small Order Execution System, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, transaction costs, traveling salesman

He then went into private practice and, in 1984, was hired to handle his first SIPC liquidation. Over the years, this became one of his specialties. The other half of this odd couple was David J. Sheehan—small and shaggy, a mercurial, combative litigator with a biting wit, a grizzled beard, a messenger bag to throw over his parka, and impishly chic black-framed glasses. Sheehan was the son of a janitor in the urban New Jersey town of Kearny. He worked his way through university and law school. In the face of the Vietnam draft, he enlisted as a lieutenant in the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps and spent his tour of duty handling legal matters at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Fodor's Rome: With the Best City Walks and Scenic Day Trips by Fodor's Travel Publications Inc.

call centre, Donald Trump, flag carrier, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, low cost airline, Mason jar, mega-rich, messenger bag, Murano, Venice glass, retail therapy, starchitect, urban planning, young professional

His shoes have adorned the art-in-motion feet of Fred Astaire and proved that lightweight shoes could be comfortable and luxurious and still make heads turn. Today the Testoni brand includes an extraordinary women’s collection and a sports line that is relaxed without losing its artistic heritage. The soft, calfskin sneakers are a dream, as are the matching messenger bags. | Via Condotti 80 | 00187 | 06/6788944 | www.testoni.com. Bruno Magli. Bruno Magli has high-end, well-crafted, classically styled shoes for both men and women. Magli and his siblings Marino and Maria learned the art of shoemaking from their father and grandfather. From its humble family origins to the corporate design powerhouse it has become today, Bruno Magli footwear always has kept the focus on craftsmanship: it’s not uncommon for 30 people to touch each shoe during the course of its manufacture. | Via Condotti 6 | 00187 | 06/69292121 | www.brunomagli.it.

Lonely Planet Switzerland by Lonely Planet

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Eyjafjallajökull, Frank Gehry, G4S, Guggenheim Bilbao, Higgs boson, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, smart cities, starchitect, trade route

Elsewhere, funky boutiques abound in places like Niederdorf and Züri-West, Popular street markets include the Bürkliplatz flea market ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; www.buerkli-flohmarkt.ch; Bürkliplatz; h7am-5pm Sat May-Oct; j2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15 to Bürkliplatz), Flohmarkt Kanzlei ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; www.flohmarktkanzlei.ch; Kanzleistrasse 56; h8am-4pm Sat; j8 to Helvetiaplatz) and Rosenhof crafts market ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; Rosenhof; h10am-8pm Thu, to 5pm Sat Mar-Dec; j4, 15 to Rathaus). oFreitagFASHION & ACCESSORIES ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %043 366 95 20; www.freitag.ch; Geroldstrasse 17; h10.30am-7pm Mon-Fri, 10am-6pm Sat; j3, 4, 6 to Schiffbau) The Freitag brothers recycle colourful truck tarps into water-resistant messenger bags in their factory. Every item, from purses to laptop bags, is original. Their outlet is pure whimsy – a pile of shipping containers that's been dubbed Kreis 5’s first skyscraper. Shoppers can climb to the rooftop terrace for spectacular city views. Max ChocolatierCHOCOLATE ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; www.maxchocolatier.com; Schlüsselgasse 12; h10.30am-7pm Tue-Fri, 10am-5.30pm Sat; j4, 10, 11, 14, 15 to Paradeplatz) Of all Zürich's tempting chocolatiers, Max has the edge.

Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area by Nick Edwards, Mark Ellwood

1960s counterculture, airport security, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, Day of the Dead, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, period drama, pez dispenser, Port of Oakland, rent control, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, transcontinental railway, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

True 1415 Haight St at Ashbury, Haight-Ashbury t 415/626-2882. Urban clothing from Enyce sits alongside a strong selection of classic sneakers like Nike Dunks, plus watches by Dixon at this store owned by Michael Brown, son of ex-mayor Willie; the womenswear branch nearby (no. 1427) has a wall filled with vinyl and messenger bags as well as clothing by New York skate label Triple 5 Soul and others. Urban Outfitters 80 Powell St at Ellis, Union Square t415/989-1515. Slackerwear for the college-aged or -minded: great for ironic, irreverent T-shirts and offbeat accessories. Noted, too, for its cheap and kitschy homewares.

Central Europe Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Defenestration of Prague, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, Gregor Mendel, Guggenheim Bilbao, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Prenzlauer Berg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, trade route, urban renewal, white picket fence, young professional

August’s Street Parade (www.street-parade.ch) is Europe’s largest street party in any given year, attracting well over half a million ravers. ONCE A TRUCK TARPAULIN, NOW A BAG Freitag ( 043-3669520; Geroldstrasse 17; 11am-7.30pm Mon-Fri, 11am-5pm Sat) , run by two ambitious Swiss dudes, proves everything can have a second life. Choose an industrial-looking messenger bag, travelling tote or women’s purse made from 100% recycled materials (truck tarps, seat belts etc) in this flagship store housed in a 26m-high stack of retired shipping containers in Züri-West. Even if you can’t afford the pricey bags, hike up to the alfresco viewing platform in the top container.

Fodor's California 2014 by Fodor's

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, Blue Bottle Coffee, California gold rush, car-free, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Donner party, Downton Abbey, East Village, El Camino Real, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Downtown As Downtown revitalizes, a handful of edgy and avant-garde shops have moved in; but you’ll also find ethnic pockets, with their own trinket shops and markets, that testify to L.A.’s diversity. Clare Vivier. Clare Vivier’s chic handbags are classic French glamour by way of laid-back California, and her eponymous Silver Lake boutique, designed by Barbara Bestor, follows the same aesthetic. Inside, find her full line of messenger bags, foldover clutches, and iPad cases, all of them made locally in Los Angeles. | 3339 Sunset Blvd., Downtown | 90026 | 323/665–2476 | www.clarevivier.com. Heath Ceramics. This loft-like outpost of the beloved Sausalito-based ceramics company stocks everything from Coupe dishes, a line created by founder Edith Heath herself in the 1940s, to glass tumblers handblown in West Virginia.

Germany Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sensible shoes, Skype, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

For outdoor shopping, there’s a bustling flower market Offline map Google map (Schillerplatz; 7am-1pm Tue, Thu & Sat) and a flea market Offline map Google map (Karlsplatz; 8am-4pm Sat). Tausche ACCESSORIES Offline map Google map (Eberhardstrasse 51; 11am-7pm Mon-Fri, to 6pm Sat) Berlin’s snazziest messenger bags have winged their way south. Tausche’s walls are a technicolour mosaic of exchangeable flaps: from die blöde Kuh (the silly cow) to Stuttgart’s iconic Fernsehturm (TV Tower). Pick one to match your outfit and mood. Brunnenhannes FASHION Offline map Google map (Geissstrasse 15; 11am-7pm Tue-Fri, to 4pm Sat) Nothing to wear to Oktoberfest?

Germany by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, computer age, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, place-making, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Stilwerk ( 253 6713; www.stilwerk.de; Königsbau-passagen; 10am-8pm Mon-Sat) Some of Germany’s top design stores cluster under an elliptical glass roof at Stilwerk, specialising in everything from space-age bathrooms to stylish rattan creations. Tausche ( 414 8490; Eberhardstrasse 51; 11am-7pm Mon-Fri, to 6pm Sat) Berlin’s snazziest messenger bags have winged their way south. Tausche’s walls are a technicolour mosaic of exchangeable flaps: from die blöde Kuh (the silly cow) to Stuttgart’s iconic Fernsehturm (TV Tower). Pick one to match your outfit and mood. For outdoor action, there’s a bustling flower market (Schillerplatz; 7.30am-1pm Tue, Thu & Sat) and a flea market (Karlsplatz; to 4pm Sat).