If you’re interested in typography, odds are you’ve already read The Elements of Typographic Style.

If you’re not interested in typography, design, fonts, or any related area, skip the book. However, you may still find the turn of phrase in the following quote to be interesting.

… setting type is a collaborative exercise, like acting from a script or playing from a score. The editing of type, like the editing of music, and the tuning of fonts, like the tuning of instruments, never ends.

There are those who dream of a perfect world in which copyrighted text is translated into copyrighted glyphs through copyrighted rules with no more human intervention than it takes to feed a tape to a machine, while money flows in perpetuity to everyone involved. There are also those that think that putting chairs and air-conditioners in hell will make it just as good as heaven. Actually, working with type is an earthly task, much less like sitting down and turning on TV than like walking on your hands across an ever-varied, never-ending landscape that is otherwise too far away to see.

Written by an author who is clearly passionate about his subject.

From the Economist:

“THEY hate our freedoms.” So said George Bush in a speech to the American Congress shortly after the attacks on America in September 2001. But how well, at home, have America and the other Western democracies defended those precious freedoms during the “war on terror”?

…

Governments argue that desperate times demand such remedies. They face a murderous new enemy who lurks in the shadows, will stop at nothing and seeks chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. This renders the old rules and freedoms out of date. Besides, does not international humanitarian law provide for the suspension of certain liberties “in times of a public emergency that threatens the life of the nation”?

There is great force in this argument. There is, alas, always force in such arguments. This is how governments through the ages have justified grabbing repressive new powers.

…

When liberals put the case for civil liberties, they sometimes claim that obnoxious measures do not help the fight against terrorism anyway. The Economist is liberal but disagrees. We accept that letting secret policemen spy on citizens, detain them without trial and use torture to extract information makes it easier to foil terrorist plots. To eschew such tools is to fight terrorism with one hand tied behind your back. But that—with one hand tied behind their back—is precisely how democracies ought to fight terrorism.

…

Human rights are part of what it means to be civilised. Locking up suspected terrorists—and why not potential murderers, rapists and paedophiles, too?—before they commit crimes would probably make society safer. Dozens of plots may have been foiled and thousands of lives saved as a result of some of the unsavoury practices now being employed in the name of fighting terrorism. Dropping such practices in order to preserve freedom may cost many lives. So be it.

There is more in the article, “Is torture ever justified”.

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MarsEdit is my long standing blogging client of choice. I loathe trying to write blog posts in a web browser. Version 1 of MarsEdit was a god send.

Version 2 brings some newness, such as Flickr integration and a slicker user interface. The best thing is the new features not detracting from the existing tool. Just how a new release ought be.

If you are stuck on the Windows platform, as I often am, Windows Live Writer is another good tool. Similar feature set to MarsEdit, somehow not as much fun.

If only I could sync drafts between the two …