Saving for a Daughter But Not a Son
A father’s attempt to combat the wage gap.
"How do we give Ivy the same opportunities as Abe? Do we praise her 21.7 percent more? Hug her 21.7 percent harder?"
Paul Ford
What Is Code?
A 38,000-word answer.
The American Room
Behind the nation’s closed doors, with YouTube.
The Great Works of Software
In appreciation of meaningful, ubiquitous, enduring applications.
Previously: Paul Ford on the Longform Podcast.
Determining the Fate of Frozen Embryos: Do You Know Where Your Children Are?
On a parent’s relationship with unused embryos.
Rotary Dial
An essay about phone dials and a response to the end of blogging.
10 Timeframes
On the shifting nature of time.
The Age of Mechanical Reproduction
An essay on a pregnancy attempted:
When I tell people what we are doing, they want to hear about the room where you produce. I tell them that there is a lot of paperwork. That they take your picture and look at your license. Then they walk you back to the room. You are handed a list of instructions and some stickers and a plastic cup. The cup has a forest-green lid. In the room is a VCR. I like to write down the names of the videos so I can share them with my wife and friends: Ass Angels #4, Original Black Queens of Porn (Afro-Centrix #113), and Chock Full of Asians. The latter features a woman with enlarged breasts so swollen they look luminous, like the sense apparatus of a recently discovered deep-sea fish.
The Web Is a Customer Service Medium
But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other. That question is: Why wasn't I consulted?
