Category Archives: Personal

Help Amit Gupta

If you’re like me you’re probably still pretty beat up over Steve Jobs passing away. Sadly that’s a loss that we can’t do anything about.

But a friend of mine is facing a similar, life-threatening dilemma, and there’s still an opportunity to do something about it. Amit Gupta, founder of Photojojo, is battling leukemia. He’s looking for a bone marrow donor of South Asian descent. You can learn more about the situation and about how you can help on this blog post.

Amit is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, and what he’s built with Photojojo is just awesome: a scrappy, incredibly fun and utterly new kind of consumer experience that takes any enthusiasm you might already have for photography and multiplies it exponentially. Anyone who knows him will agree: he’s going to keep giving the world amazing things if he gets the chance.

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Suddenly, One Year Later

Tomorrow is July 16th and it’ll be a year to the day since I left my job at The New York Times. (More about why I left in this blog post.) I can hardly believe it.

Lots of people ask what I’ve been up to in that time. I admit I’ve been rather cagey about the specifics, but the outlines are more or less public knowledge. I spent the first several months finishing my book, “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design.” I also picked up a few freelance and part-time design consulting gigs, generating some transitional income while also spending a lot of time with my family.

What’s less well known is that I cleared away most of that freelance activity at the end of January, when I hunkered down to focus solely on a brand new venture that I started thinking about almost immediately after my tenure ended at The Times.

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What It’s Like As a Dad

This morning I was putting my shoes on to run outdoors for a quick five-minute errand. From across the apartment my daughter Thuy saw me preparing to leave and started waving and wishing me an energetic “G’bye! G’bye!” She’s just a few days shy of twenty-two months old now, and so her mother and I still find this relatively new level of articulateness and situational acuity impressive and adorable.

I assured her I’d be back quickly, then opened the front door and started stepping out of the apartment, but just then she ran over to me with a sudden urgency and said “Kiss!” She tugged on my hand to get me to kneel down, and then gave me a tiny peck on the cheek before saying “G’bye!” again.

It was a wonderful little Father’s Day moment, but more than that it helped crystallize for me what this feeling of having this little girl in my life is like. Before parenthood I was preoccupied with escaping mundanity; in my relationships, in my work, in my ambitions of all kinds, I labored to free myself of daily trivialities and strive for bigger and better things. Now the world looks very different. When a quotidian non-event like walking out the front door can become something to cherish for a lifetime, it makes me realize that there is grand import hidden in every little detail of every day, and that in fact the mundane can be unspeakably amazing. Being a parent does this to you.

Happy Father’s Day, everybody.

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iPhones for the Under-Two Set

My fourteen month-old daughter Thuy (who is completely adorable, by the way) adores few material objects in this world more than she does my iPhone. Among all of the toys that we’ve given her, and even among all of the things that she’s turned into toys, the iPhone is the one that consistently grabs her attention in almost any situation.

She’s at an age though where she doesn’t really use the phone so much as she just randomly handles it, pushing buttons on the screen here and there, turning it around, even holding it up to her ear (often backwards or upside down) to babble a conversation to some imaginary friend on the other end of the line. Mostly she’s just imitating what she sees her mother and me do when we use our iPhones, but it doesn’t change the fact that it can command her attention for ten or twenty minutes at a time — and for a parent of a young child, that’s gold.

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