Sara Haider: Hey Silicon Valley, We’re all Uber. “I want to be proud to work in tech, and this week I’m not.” I’m proud to have helped Sara edit this piece. —nov 20

The 15 best galleries in the Bay Area, from SFist and Art Practical. My wife’s Traywick Contemporary is on the list.

Housed in a former Masonic Temple in Berkeley, there are no signs of secret sects at work in Traywick Contemporary. But one does get the insider view of something many think is just as mysterious, which is how one lives with contemporary art. The gallery is also the home of Traywick and her family; there is seamless division between the two. One steps into this space and immediately understands how integrated life and art can be.

Current exhibition: Ken Fandell’s A Desert that Faces an Ocean. Come see it, it’s great.—nov 20

This isn’t a secret video, as much as Vulture would like you to believe. Instead, it’s footage of people visiting Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (her massive sugar sphinx installed in Brooklyn this past summer). Visiting, and looking, and enjoying, and laughing, and taking selfies. I love going to museums, I love going to galleries, I love looking at art. And part of that love is watching people engage with what’s in front of them—and this video captures the experience of a massive, overwhelming art installation perfectly. Bravo.

Two of my favorite Vines I shot in the Louvre: this stop motion of a patient Venus and her admirers, and this crazy scene of the Denon wing in summer. Different context, for sure. But still. —nov 19

Material Design in print, via Khoi Vinh, who says: “These are nicely done, but I’m not sure they would attract much notice apart from the Material Design connection, just as I’m not sure Material Design would attract much notice apart from the Google connection.” —nov 19

Gruber on the Google app aesthetic. I’ve been catching up on some Fireball, and realized I missed this piece from a couple weeks ago. This bit stuck with me:

The lament I hear most frequently about mobile development is that if you want to reach the widest possible audience, you have to write at least two apps, iOS and Android. … My take has always been: Tough luck. The point of making apps shouldn’t be about making life easier for developers, it’s about making the best possible apps for users.

Yes. And speaking of the Google app aesthetic, I need to write up my two week experiment with Inbox. It’s an interesting product, for sure, but it wasn’t for me: mixing to-dos and messages in one stream didn’t stick, and the material design implementation felt awkward on my iPhone. (There, now I don’t need to write it up.) —nov 18

I love that every Tweet is now in the search index. Makes for fun egosearches, like this one. Whoa. —nov 18

Really interesting take on the Travis tweetstorm from Gideon Lichfield at Quartz. “Pumped out as a stream, Kalanick’s tweets have a certain breast-beating, apologetic rhythm, but when compressed into a block of text they acquire a different flavor … it’s an internal memo to Uber’s staff.” —nov 18

Berkeley city councilperson shows remarkable display of logical thinking. If you at all follow California politics, this is a pretty rare thing. Reacting to a proposal to put global warning stickers on gas pumps in our fair city, Gordon Wozniak said “When you have to get somewhere and you need gas, what are you going to do? Leave the car there?” —nov 18

My Uber take wishlist. There will be lots of justifiable outrage about what Emil Michael said at dinner, especially the threats against Sarah Lacy. Expect a glut of takes. In addition to those, here’s the story I’d love to read: Interviews with Uber drivers in different cities around the world. Do they know what happened yesterday? Do they have an opinion or stories about how the company operates? Uber operates a two-sided market: they need the continued support of both riders and drivers to grow. What’s happening on the driver side? —nov 18

Imagine the meeting: Uber + Spotify. I know there’s some big thinking happening about Who Will Control Customization Of The Physical World, and in a perfectly seamless digital world our personal music preferences would follow us around like a movie soundtrack. But having your custom Spotify playlist start automatically playing in your personal black car had me imagining the brainstorming meeting…

• “Because every ride in an Uber should be like an epic road trip with your best buds, and it deserves a great soundtrack.”
• “Because digging in your bag for your earbuds is a pain in the ass, and wow are they uncomfortable.”
• “Because data coverage is now so good that I’m sure we won’t have any problems streaming music into the cars.”
• “Because sometimes Uber drivers are…different from me, and they play music that makes me uncomfortable.”
• “Because in v2 we can autosuggest playlists for you based on your destination! Pumping you up for your meeting, getting you in a chill headspace before yoga, getting you in the mood after your date… Imagine a ‘popular songs for this route’ feature!”

Also, these two tweets from @reyner, because what’s a Spotify story without a Swiftian angle. —nov 17

Evernote Context isn’t quite the Remembrance Agent. There’s a long history of research and prototyping around real time information retrieval systems that key off of content you’re creating. Check out this 1996 paper from The MIT Media Lab on the Remembrance Agent.

The Remembrance Agent (RA) is a program which augments human memory by displaying a list of documents which might be relevant to the user’s current context. Unlike most information retrieval systems, the RA runs continuously without user intervention. Its unobtrusive interface allows a user to pursue or ignore the RA’s suggestions as desired.

Great idea, never really well implemented, despite us having the perfect platform on which to build it—the web. So when Evernote announced “Context,” promising that…

As you write or collect information in Evernote, we begin looking for useful, relevant content that will inform your work. This may come from notes in your own account, notes shared by a coworker, and now from trusted news sources, including The Wall Street Journal.

…I’ll admit that I was intrigued. Right up until (a) they turned it into a pitch for a discounted WSJ subscription, and (b) they shared who else is providing context: FastCo, Pando Daily and TechCrunch. Really? That’s it? Nothing against those publications, which are all fine, but this feels more like a Zemanta plugin for your notes. Because you know, alt-tabbing to Google and doing some searching is just too hard. —nov 17