ReportWire

Tag: simplicity

  • Our favorite books we read in 2025

    [ad_1]

    This was the kind of year that felt 100 years long, so who could blame us for leaning into a bit of escapism? Some of us buried our noses in books in 2025, and thankfully, there were plenty of good reads to get lost in. Here are some of the Engadget team’s top picks from the year.

    Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

    Wild Dark Shore pulls off a magnificent balancing act of telling an intimate, personal story coupled with the backdrop of impending climate disaster. A father and three children are living on a remote island near Antarctica, taking care of a vast seed bank that was part of an abandoned research facility. They’re literally trying to stay above water for a few months until they get bailed out from the island along with as much of the seed bank as they can save before it goes under when a woman named Rowan washes up on shore. She survives, is nursed back to health, and starts forming bonds with her rescuers and their mission — but at the same time, she has some unexpected connections to the island and the former research team that lived there that she keeps to herself.

    The magic of this book is in the way Charlotte McConaghy builds tensions from many sources throughout the book; you feel a lingering sense of discomfort through, waiting for the other shoe to fall even as Rowan gets closer and closer to the family. It’s a small-scale story at its heart, but with the backdrop of disaster looming the stakes feel extremely high. And McConaghy is a master at putting these feelings on the page in gorgeous prose. As she showed in her previous work Migrations, she has a real talent for realistically describing near-future climate disasters, but Wild Dark Shore raises the personal stakes in a visceral way. — Nathan Ingraham, Deputy Editor

    Moonflow by Bitter Karella

    This book is a chaotic and deeply weird rollercoaster ride that repeatedly gave me whiplash, and I loved it. Fair warning, it’s not for the weak-stomached. It is horrifying, hilarious, nauseating and somehow a very good time and a very bad time simultaneously. Moonflow is told through dual narratives, one following Sarah, a trans woman and mushroom dealer who has found herself in a desperate situation, and the other following the henchwomen of a deranged cult that’s made its home in a cursed forest. After Sarah ventures into these woods in search of the King’s Breakfast, a rare mushroom said to grant divine understanding to those who consume it, all hell breaks loose.

    Karella’s writing is immersive, and this is the kind of book you can see, feel, hear and smell, for better and worse. Every person in this book is like a caricature of someone I’ve crossed paths with at some point in life, and the names of the cult members are just… chef’s kiss. Some of them had me howling. It is completely unpredictable — except in those few moments where it seems the author wants you to know exactly where things are going just to make you dread the inevitable. Reading Moonflow was a visceral, unforgettable experience. — Cheyenne MacDonald, Weekend Editor

    Simplicity by Mattie Lubchansky

    Another one about a cult, except this cult rules. I picked up Simplicity knowing nothing about it except that everyone cool on the internet seemed to be praising it, and was excited to discover that it’s set near where I live in New York’s Hudson Valley, in a future version of the Catskills. And here in the Hudson Valley, it often feels like I’m one or two innocuous decisions away from accidentally joining a cult, so there was an immediate connection. In Simplicity, it’s the year 2081 and New York City is a high-tech dystopia run by a billionaire. North of the city, though, various communities have settled off-grid, including a group called The Spiritual Association of Peers.

    Lucius Pasternak, a trans man, is sent on an anthropological assignment from the mayor to SAP’s compound, Simplicity, and it doesn’t take long for their uninhibited way of life to start growing on him. But Lucius soon begins to have strange dreams, and a series of violent attacks shakes up the community. Through his mission to understand the people of SAP and later to find and stop the entity that’s targeting them, a beautiful story about queerness and identity and belonging and fighting for what’s important unfolds. This feels like the kind of book that should be passed around between friends who just get it, and I imagine many readers will feel incredibly seen by it like I did. — C.M. 

    The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

    Or Stephen Graham Jones’ Interview with the Vampire. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter blends historical fiction and horror to give us one of the most impactful vampire novels of our time — one that serves as an uncomfortable but necessary reminder of the atrocities committed against indigenous people in the US by white settlers. It begins with the discovery of a crumbling journal that claims to contain the confession of a Blackfeet man-turned-vampire named Good Stab, as told to Lutheran pastor Arthur Beaucarne. What follows is a gutting chronicle of slaughter, heartbreak and revenge. It’s a classic in the making. — C.M.

    Isola by Allegra Goodman

    Historical fiction is how I trick my brain into possibly learning something. And because the endings are set, the author has to hook you into the drama with more than just the peril of an unknown outcome. I fell deep into Wolf Hall even though I knew which heads Henry VIII chopped off. I thought Isola might be similarly gratifying.

    It tells the story of Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval, a young noblewoman from France who was intentionally marooned on an island off the coast of Canada in 1542. The story is based on historical records so you know the plot won’t adhere to safe formulas, but mon dieu, I was not prepared for how rough things would be for Marguerite.

    Her troubles began long before she found herself fighting for survival on a wild uninhabited island with brutal winters. From birth, nearly every happiness was undercut by more dominant forces, yet the woman never stopped moving forward. Thankfully, Goodman draws Marguerite’s character not as some tired brand of plucky heroine with grit and a wink, but as a perceptive, pragmatic being who also gives in to impulse and doesn’t have everything figured out.

    Isola is beautifully rendered, from the stone chateaus to creaking ships and rough abundance of the island. Despite being set over 400 years ago, nothing feels dated. Human versus universe is an unfair battle, but I rooted for Marguerite on every page — and those pages turned quickly. — Amy Skorheim, Senior Reporter, Buying Advice

    Old Soul by Susan Barker

    This was one of the first books I read this year, and it’s really stuck with me. Old Soul travels through time and all over the world, across multiple storylines to trace the devastating impact of one mysterious woman who seems to defy the rules of mortality and always leave tragedy in her wake. Barker’s writing in Old Soul pulls the reader in and doesn’t let go. It’s an unsettling slow burn that did a great job of getting under my skin.  — C.M.

    Meet Me at the Crossroads by Megan Giddings

    If a door appeared out of nowhere, would you go through it not knowing what lies beyond or if you’d be able to return? In Meet Me at the Crossroads, seven doors pop up one day around the world, and people are unsurprisingly captivated by them. Regular people tempt fate, the ultra-wealthy plan exclusive excursions through them, religions form around their mystique. Ayanna is a teenager who was brought up in one of these religions. She’s also a twin, with a sister named Olivia who she’s been separated from after their parents’ split. When it comes time for Ayanna to go through one of the doors as part of a ceremony, Olivia makes a last-second decision to go with her. What follows is the aftermath of that decision. Meet Me at the Crossroads is a haunting and emotional journey.  — C.M.

    Woodworking by Emily St. James

    I am a cisgender, white middle-aged man, so the experience of learning and accepting a different gender identity is something I will never fully understand. But Woodworking, the debut novel by Emily St. James, is a hilarious, tragic and ultimately hopeful look at two trans women navigating different moments of acceptance in their lives. Erica is a mid-30s high school teacher who is recently divorced and just figuring out that she’s trans, something no one else knows about her at the start. Her student, 17-year-old Abigail, is her opposite: proudly out about her identity in a way that’s uncommon and dangerous in her small, conversative town in South Dakota.

    Their paths intersect, and Abigail ends up in the uncomfortable and somewhat unethical role of helping Erica find herself. After all she’s confident and not afraid of who she is — but she’s also still a teenager, one dealing with massive trauma of her own. The dual look into these two protagonists, each with sections of the book narrated from their own points of view, gave me a vivid picture of the different challenges, emotions and dangers trans people face. But the unexpected community that develops around both characters plainly shows the value of living as your true self in a way that (hopefully) anyone should be able to relate to. — N.I.

    [ad_2]

    Engadget

    Source link

  • I called it a piece of junk. It turned out to be a Frank Gehry L.A. masterpiece

    [ad_1]

    The early 1980s Los Angeles of my childhood always felt like a place where you could brush against greatness and not even recognize it.

    Take the strange, faceless building at Melrose and Sycamore avenues, just up from the house where I grew up. It stood apart from the Melrose Avenue hodgepodge, which included an auto body shop, an old bookstore famous for selling movie scripts, and a trendy boutique that sold vintage fedoras and marked the beginning of Melrose’s turn as a fashion mecca.

    In a street filled with signage screaming for your attention (“THOUSANDS OF BOOKS,” yelled the bookseller), that corner lot had nothing. Just two concrete-plastered boxes seemingly closed off to the world. The only hint of life was a tree growing from what appeared to be some kind of courtyard hidden from view. I passed by all the time — sneaking a Chunky bar at the corner liquor store, grabbing an ice cream cone from Baskin-Robbins.

    I didn’t give the building a second thought until my best friend and I started a little weekly newspaper we photocopied for 3½ cents a copy from a shop a few doors away. Jack and I hit up Melrose merchants to buy ads (usually just their business card), and a few agreed to help these teenage publishing tycoons. Because of this, cracking the code of that strange little building became a brief obsession. One day, I found a door around the side and knocked. No answer. So I left a copy of our paper and returned a few days later. No luck. So I gave up. Why was I wasting my time with this piece of junk?

    It took another 15 years to learn that the concrete box I so easily dismissed is one of L.A. architectural treasures. It is called the Danziger Studio and was one of architect Frank Gehry’s first L.A. commissions.

    Even back in the 1960s, it was hailed as something special. Architecture critic Reyner Banham called it a brilliant elevation of the “stucco box” so ubiquitous around the city. As it turned out, the surface was not concrete but “a gray rough stucco of the type sprayed onto freeway overpasses. Gehry had to learn the decidedly unconventional technique himself,” according to the Los Angeles Conservancy.

    A vintage postcard from the collection of L.A. Times staff writer Patt Morrison shows a May Co. department store and its clean lines.

    In his obituary for Gehry, Christopher Hawthorne described the studio as a “spare, even self-effacing stucco box, plain outside and filled with light and surprising spatial complexity inside.” The building “looked Modern but also suggested sympathy for the postwar visual chaos of L.A. evident in the work of artists such as Ed Ruscha and David Hockney.”

    I discovered the provenance of the hidden gem in the 1990s, when Gehry had reached “starchitect” status with his shape-shifting museum in Bilbao, Spain, and just before he gained legend status for L.A.’s Disney Hall. The Danzinger Studio shared none of those over-the-top designs. But that made me more impressed. I started driving by whenever I was in the neighborhood, slowing down in hopes of understanding what made it great. One day, I even gave it a walk-around, assuming it must look a lot better inside. (It turns out it does.)

    I came to appreciate its beauty and grace — as well as something much larger about L.A. design. Suddenly, my idea of great architecture broadened beyond the ornate church, grand mansion, distinctive Spanish Colonial or gleaming glass skyscrapers like the Westin Bonaventure hotel. I gained a respect for the simplicity of design and function over style, like a cute working-class courtyard apartment, the streamlined simplicity of a May Co. department store and even the crazed efficiency of a mini-mall.

    Plaza Cienega is in the Beverly Grove area of Los Angeles.

    Plaza Cienega is in the Beverly Grove area of Los Angeles.

    (Google street view)

    I have wondered whether I would have valued the Danziger Studio had it not been designed by Gehry. But it didn’t matter, because this discovery gave me the confidence to have my own, sometimes unpopular, L.A. opinions. I am in the minority, for example, in loving the much-derided 1960s brown-box addition to the old Times Mirror Square complex just as much as the landmark Art Deco original. And sorry, the mini-mall at 3rd Street and La Cienega Boulevard is one of my favorite L.A. buildings, period.

    Trust me. I know.

    [ad_2]

    Shelby Grad

    Source link

  • How Keeping Things Simple Helps Your Company Innovate and Grow | Entrepreneur

    How Keeping Things Simple Helps Your Company Innovate and Grow | Entrepreneur

    [ad_1]

    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    According to Steve Jobs, “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.” It seems obvious that keeping things simple will help your business succeed. And yet, it’s surprisingly difficult to do it.

    If simplicity is this challenging, you need to be intentional to make it happen. That’s why many successful companies actively prioritize it as a value. Ikea’s focus on simplicity comes across in its designs, catalog, store experience and more. One of Nike’s 11 management maxims is “simplify and go,” focusing teams on moving fast to adapt to new technologies and fashions.

    I believe that simplicity is a driver for genius innovation. In fact, my journey as an entrepreneur began with an idea to simplify a complex and bureaucratic process. Today, the success of that idea has created new challenges. We serve millions of customers across over 100 countries, with many different needs — to meet them all, we’d need a ton of different features. So, we have to find the simplest ideas that will improve the experience for the largest number of users.

    Related: Here’s Why You Should Embrace Simplicity as a Strategy (and 3 Ways to Do It)

    Simplifying innovation is a recipe for success

    Some people think that to be an entrepreneur, you have to bring groundbreaking technological innovation to the world. But actually, there’s a lot of room to innovate on top of new technologies, simplifying them and packaging them for specific use cases.

    If you think of two of the technology giants of our times, Google and Apple, neither of them invented their core technologies. Apple wasn’t the first company to create a home computer or cellphone, Google wasn’t the first company to develop a search engine. They made existing innovations simpler and more user-friendly, and it was a recipe for success.

    This is particularly relevant right now in the middle of a revolution fueled by generative AI. There are definitely huge opportunities in creating new AI-driven technologies, but there are even more opportunities in finding ways to package these technologies into user-friendly software for specific use cases.

    To do this, first master the tech, and then put yourself in the shoes of your potential user. Try to understand what is really useful about the innovation and what barriers people might face when trying to use it.

    The key is to find a way to simplify the technology, making it easier for your target users to understand and adopt it. Do this, and you’re onto a winner.

    Work smarter by simplifying communication

    Another part of any business where simplification is super important is communications and processes. As companies grow, it becomes harder to get people on the same page or ensure continuity between departments. Poor communication creates misunderstandings, which can lead to mistakes. The more people involved in a project, the more likely it is that workflows will become complicated. This all slows things down, wastes time and restricts your ability to make an impact on the business.

    Let’s start with communication. Using a single, simple language across the company is crucial for people to be able to understand each other. For example, try to use less jargon and fewer three-letter acronyms, or make sure to explain them if you do. By creating organized archives of historical documents and plans, you help onboard new people and anyone can find important information fast when they need it.

    Create a culture of transparency where different departments share their plans with each other. Create frameworks to facilitate this, like quarterly reviews or roadmap deployments. It’s not possible for employees to be actively involved in everything going on in the company, but by helping everyone take part passively, you’re making sure they’re on the same page and can facilitate ideas and collaborations across teams.

    When you do have to communicate, encourage your teams to do it in the most straightforward way possible. By simplifying communication and making it easy to understand, discussions are more focused and decisions are made faster.

    Related: The Key to Effectively Communicating Important Messages Is All About Simplicity

    Put simplicity at the heart of your product

    A simplification mindset can also be applied to product development. By making small incremental changes, sometimes with test groups of users, you can use the inspect and adapt methodology to understand their adoption, as well as any issues, and innovate further accordingly. Every so often, you can combine all these small changes into a large product update that you roll out for everyone.

    For example: A company added a lot of extra value to its product with new features and releases. In theory, this was great for the users, but some found the UI overwhelming and new pricing options confusing. To use a metaphor, some people are happy to be given ingredients to make their own meal, but most would prefer the chef do the cooking so they can enjoy the final result.

    Having understood this through their feedback, the company introduced a change to its UI that helped users get the end result they wanted, without having to work hard to achieve it themselves. By simplifying, the company maximized the impact of the value of all the new additions to the product.

    Related: Keep It Simple: Why Simplicity Is Key To Making Your Brand Win

    Richard Branson once said: “Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to keep things simple.” Simplicity won’t come about by accident — you need to be intentional. You have to call it out and make it a focus for the whole company. You need to put it at the heart of everything. And when you succeed, the impact will be huge.

    [ad_2]

    Itzik Elbaz

    Source link

  • Want to Keep Your Customers? Keep It Simple — Here’s Why. | Entrepreneur

    Want to Keep Your Customers? Keep It Simple — Here’s Why. | Entrepreneur

    [ad_1]

    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    It’s a common issue among businesses of all sizes, startups and franchises. It plagues the customer experience, strains sales teams, and overcomplicates or creates unnecessary billing. What may have started with simplicity in mind after staying on the core of your messaging has turned into expanded service offerings, sometimes without clear reasoning or need. An overcomplication of products or services, typically by adding too many, depleting servicing of the core offerings, and other complications arise, removing the ease of access and simplicity the core customer base has enjoyed. All can lead to a drop in sales, dissatisfaction, and, if prolonged, continued loss of market share.

    Related: Why Simplicity Matters in Product Development

    Why do businesses stray from simplifying their services?

    Too many startups and businesses get stuck in this ongoing trap of trying to match competitors or thinking that more products or services increase sales. Competing franchises commonly do this with benefits and even product or service naming. The constant pull to innovate, offer and announce something new, and be more top of mind to intended audiences can pull businesses into continuous change and unique offerings that distract from the excellent, existing services already offered. Additionally, efforts towards brand realignment or placing the entire brand into new messaging that aligns differently from the core audience regarding values, market segment, or need can cause significant disruption or even PR nightmares.

    What can be done to maintain a balanced service offering and customer experience?

    There will always be a need to innovate, better serve an existing customer base, and maintain market share in an ever-increasingly volatile market. Constant change will remain consistent. However, that does not mean that every brand’s reaction to change is a change of its own. Depending on the market segment, consistency may be the best, most profitable strategy to stand out in the loud noise of change from competitors.

    In business, and frankly, in life, there is sometimes nothing easier than reacting to change with more change. Change occurs for no reason, an impulse to change for the sake of change (without strategy), or change because someone (likely a competitor) is changing or revamping their offerings to the market. Just because someone else is embarking on change for the sake of change does not mean your business should also change. Best steps first — map or remap your customer experience strategy.

    Start with breaking down barriers for your current customer base. If a startup, a vital part of any customer experience strategy right after mapping how customers find you is how easy it is for those potential customers to purchase first, purchase well (best fit for their needs), and purchase again. Start to build key messaging around how your startup fills a need better than what is currently available and how your services are more accessible to utilize than anyone else. Part of that key messaging should include a commitment to consistency and reliability with systems that continuously offer simplistic processes. As a startup, you are taking market share from others for a reason. When growth happens, remember what first propelled that growth.

    For an existing business through the startup phase, the magic happens when simplicity can be maintained. New employees must be hired through launch and scale, and additional layers and systems are established. It is so easy to build layers that have added complications. With each layer, a founder or CEO must understand that it represents another wall between the customer base and revenue. While it is true that only some employees are customer-facing and even revenue-generating, their importance in keeping the business streamlined, simplistic, and consistent matters as much as hitting sales goals or keeping accounting up to date.

    Related: Here’s Why You Should Embrace Simplicity as a Strategy (and 3 Ways to Do It)

    Use simplicity as a sales strategy

    Stop trying to be everything to everybody. It is a phrase used often and commonly overlooked. If your startup or existing business is winning with clear key messaging, has a core audience that remains loyal and advocates for your brand, and scale looks like your brand continues to be a market leader for the solutions offered, do not let up on that core. Use it as a selling point in the sales strategy your brand incorporates. Too often, sales techniques and selling points sound more like an encyclopedia than bullet points of solutions. Or worse, service offerings are just repackaged solutions already offered that only add complexity and do not differentiate your brand from competitors.

    A simplified sales strategy — including the sales funnel, offerings, and ease of customer access and journey through the sales process and service after the sale — is rare. Think about the last time you needed assistance from a massive Fortune 500 call center or online support. If the customer journey experience your brand has developed is a better experience over rivals, use it in sales! Most have been dissatisfied with service from others in the past, and it is overlooked by many in sales as a selling point.

    [ad_2]

    Adam Horlock

    Source link

  • Optimize For What’s Necessary – Dragos Roua

    [ad_1]

    Technology optimizes for performance.

    Business optimizes for profit.

    Biological evolution optimizes for survival.

    Spirituality optimizes for compassion (non-aggression).

    How does this work out in real life?

    To be successful, any technology must optimize for performance.

    That means running the same process with less energy, in less time, or with greater accuracy.

    Take computers, for instance. They were optimized primarily for performance (measured in speed of CPU and data storage). If you compare the evolution in size of computers from, let’s say, the last two decades, with their evolution in performance, you would get incredible numbers. In terms of size, they probably shrunk 10-20x. A desktop from around 20 years ago is roughly 20x bigger than a laptop. But in terms of processing power and storage, the increase was 100-200x, at least. An order of magnitude higher.

    In technology, all resources are concentrated on performance, and cost is less important.

    A business is measured by the profit it creates. What’s left after you take out investment and operational cost, that’s the core of the business.

    That means a business is running the same process with increasing financial returns.

    Look how business is only slightly overlapping with technology here.

    You don’t always pay the same for the same amount of performance. All smartphones have roughly the same technical characteristics. And yet, some of them are selling for a lot more than others. Optimization done in areas like branding, communication, marketing influences heavily the returns.

    An organism is said to adjust when it functions in such a way that its current structures will be predictably supported.

    That means evolution runs the same process (life) over and over, with increased adaptation to the context.

    We already know that survival is not a feature of the strongest, but of the fittest. And by fittest it means “the one most adapted to the circumstances”.

    It gets interesting now if you combine the previous two optimizations. Sometimes, as a living organism, you need to generate profit (or fat, like bears do to adjust to the winter), and that’s a business type of optimization. Whereas other times you need generate more accuracy (if you’re hunting, for instance), or higher speed (if you run by someone who’s hunting you), which are both technology types of optimization.

    These two optimizations are used differently, based on the context, because that’s what evolution does: it adjusts to the context.

    A spiritual person does no harm (very, very basic description, I know, but bare with me).

    That means spirituality runs the same process (living consciously) by avoiding violence and aiming for unconditional cohesion with other human beings, on the basis that we’re all the same, and we all want the same thing: to be happy.

    Optimizing for spirituality means avoiding contexts in which violence is required, or even accepting loss or wounds, in order to remain in the non-violent space.

    Optimizing for spirituality is also the most complex optimization of all.

    You need to remain alive to be spiritual (dead people are dead, they’re not spiritual in any way), so that means optimizing for evolution.

    You need to become better at your practice (whichever that is) so you need to optimize for better, more accurate processes (just like technology does).

    And, once you understand that your well being is completely interconnected with the well being of all beings, then you also need to optimize for getting more returns, just to be able to give back to the others. Sometimes these returns are financial (the Church is one of the oldest, most profitable institutions in the recent human history), sometimes they’re just reputation (which is more fragile than cash, but also more flexible).

    Optimizing too much on some parts will get you beyond the goal.

    If we talk about spirituality, for instance, optimizing too much on accuracy, like in doing empty prayers and rituals, without understanding the end goal (cohesion) will make you a parrot, at best, and a human bomb, at worst. Optimizing too much on the financial profits, will make you a short lived sect, by triggering greed in your adepts. Optimizing too much on evolution, like adjusting to the context, will probably make you give in to temporary politics, just to remain alive.

    I find it difficult to stick to a definitive answer.

    I think most of the time we are driven to optimize for profit. This is very visible in crypto, with all the apeing and endless hunt for chunky APYs. This is rooted in a legitimate fear that we ain’t gonna make it if we stick to the current context.

    And with that we’re segueing into evolution, as crypto looks like a better bet in terms of adjusting to context. Even if it’s just a hedge, it’s an evolutionary advantage against actors who are using only one basket (government-backed fiat) for their energy storage.

    Sometimes we also need to optimize for technology, which was the dominant trend in crypto for the last 2-3 years, when the main goal was speed and vertical scaling. At some point we will hit a certain wall, in which aiming for too much performance will simply become unnecessary, nobody will use that. 1,000,000 TPS looks sexy now, but who’s going to need that? What’s the use case? Is it worth it?

    What I find extremely interesting, though, is that, somehow, crypto is better positioned for spiritual optimization, as in not doing harm. Hackers and exploiters aside, I think the entire blockchain architecture makes it way easier to just not do harm, it leaves less of an attack surface to greed. It’s as collective as a process can be (the blockchain cannot run without validators). It’s almost frictionless, once you learn how it works (every action produces effects almost immediately). It’s transparent, everybody shares the same ledger.

    It isn’t perfect, far from that, but it’s better than the middle-man in traditional banks, or government created, violence-backed money.

    Photo by JJ Ying on Unsplash

    [ad_2]

    dragos@dragosroua.com (Dragos Roua)

    Source link