And a rhetorical flourish from Daring Fireball

18 Mar, 2026

From John Gruber of Daring Fireball on Tuesday: Squashing

And you have to believe that it’s a successful tactic for senior executives at Apple to get what they want from Tim Cook by threatening him with poaching offers from competing companies. And that Johny Srouji would either personally leak this to Mark Gurman, or loose-lippedly blab about it to someone who would leak it to Mark Gurman. And that Gurman reporting the already-very-difficult-to-believe story at Bloomberg, making private negotiations public and embarrassing both Cook personally and Apple as a company, would lead Tim Cook to cave in and do whatever it took to make Srouji happy..."

DF has long been a favorite of mine, always in my must read feed since Google Reader, because he's an excellent writer. It's "bad¹ writing" to start a sentence with a conjunction (and, but, or) but doing so repeatedly is a nice rhetorical flourish to the conclusion of the whole article.I wanted to quote the whole last three paragraphs because the way he builds to his point (and the link to his own post from 2009²) is just a delight.

Great craft.

But also, occasionally stuff like this:

"Is that report, and all that it implies, possible? Sure. It’s also possible that monkeys might fly out of my butt."

chef's kiss

• 31 Mar, 2026 You’re Still a Designer, You Magnificent Fool

  in which our hero warns you that speed just means you can fall harder further away from the right place

• 29 Mar, 2026 when everything breaks, do it yourself

  in which our hero will do it live

• 23 Mar, 2026 Felt arcane; might delete later

  in which our hero tests a new social graph and, surely, will delete this later

• 19 Mar, 2026 RE: My Friends Are Making Blogs, And I Don't Know How RSS Works

  in which our hero has more opinions AND free time today

Footnotes

#Apple #link