ALI ALMOSSAWI

I wrote An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments, An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language, Bad Choices, and The Point of Pointless Work. My books have reached 3.5 million readers, have been translated into 23 languages, and have sold over 370,000 copies in print. I'm an alumnus of MIT and Carnegie Mellon. Previous stints have included working on developer tools at Apple, with a focus on product design and engineering, and most recently as a Siri pillar lead for Vision Pro. On Firefox's original metrics team at Mozilla. As a research associate at Harvard. And as a collaborator with the MIT Media Lab.

My product design and engineering work from 7.5 years at Apple is all proprietary. For a discussion or demo of parts of that work that I'm able to share, please reach out over email (ali@almossawi.com). My biographical statement is at the bottom of this page.

For inquiries about Bad Choices, please contact Seth Fishman at The Gernert Company.

For inquiries about the print editions of Bad Arguments or Loaded Language, please contact Karen Giangreco at Experiment Books.

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An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language

Learn to hear what's left unsaid in the subtle ways news headlines and various other forms of language influence our thinking. Out in print in November 2021. Order the print edition.

An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments

A book on critical thinking that explains a set of common errors in reasoning, described by Hope Jahren as “a book every scientist should have.” Read it online or in print!

Bad Choices

An illustrated introduction to computational thinking, described by Vint Cerf as “one of the more clever ways of introducing computational thinking to the general public.” Take a look.

Hans in the Land of Bards

The opening part of a novella about an absentminded tailor and his quick-witted accomplice struggle to escape a land where things aren't always what they seem. Take a look.

The Point of Pointless Work

A reflection on five years in publishing, and the transformative power of hobbies. A book I wrote for my mailing list, published by Cormorant Press. Take a look.

Amaranta

A picture book for grown-ups that explores separation anxiety and empathy. Still a work in progress. Take a look.

Firefox Hardware Report

The first ever public report of the hardware used by Firefox users. The report's data can be used by developers to improve the experience of Web users. Take a look.

MetricsGraphics.js

A D3-based library that's optimized for visualizing and laying out time-series data in a principled way—600,000 hits, 7,100 GitHub stars, top 1% of most-starred projects. Take a look.

The Web We Want: Firefox 29

A real-time visualization of the global community that powers Mozilla, visited by 10 million visitors. My contributions were designing and coding the map and stats page. Take a look.

Pantheon

A project by the Macro Connections group at the Media Lab that I had the good fortune of co-developing. Pantheon visualizes global culture using cultural icons of note. Take a look.

How Maintainable is Firefox?

By appealing to the explanatory powers of five practical measures of architectural complexity, this work explores the quality of the Firefox codebase. Take a look.

Technical Debt in Firefox and Chromium

A quantitative comparison of two complex software systems, using prose and a visual inspired by a story from Greek mythology. Take a look.

How Educated are World Leaders?

A descriptive visualization of the education levels of world leaders, from 1950 or thereabouts to the present day. Take a look.

Evolution of the Firefox Codebase

A visualization that presents a set of metrics for all releases of Firefox that are indicative of quality and allows one to inspect them through one of several views. Take a look.

The Observatory of Economic Complexity

A tool by Alex Simoes and the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab that I had the good fortune of designing the first version of. Take a look.

Smaller works and experiments

Publications

An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language (North America), published by Experiment Books
The Point of Pointless Work, published by Cormorant Press
Bad Choices (North America), published by Viking
Bad Choices (UK and Commonwealth), published by John Murray
Don’t Just Teach Kids How to Code, Teach Them Algorithms, Too; Bright
How Algorithmic Thinking Can Help You Think Smarter, Change This
Logic: In the Direction of Truth, Imagine Magazine—The Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth
An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments (North America), published by The Experiment, distributed by Workman
An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments (UK and Commonwealth), published by Scribe Publications, distributed by Penguin Books and Macmillan
Book chapter: Visualizing ambiguity in an era of data abundance and very large engineering systems, New Challenges for Data Design, edited by David Bihanic, published by Springer-Verlag (London)
The Data Visualization Revolution, co-authored with Cesar Hidalgo, Scientific American
Going Beyond the One-Bit Democracy, co-authored with Cesar Hidalgo, Wired (UK)
Analysis Tool Evaluation: Coverity Prevent, co-authored with Kelvin Lim and Tanmay Sinha, Carnegie Mellon
MetricsGraphics.js - a lightweight graphics library built on D3, Mozilla Hacks

Interviews and talks

An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments in the press

Bad Choices in the press

An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language in the press

Mentions and various other things

Personal writings

Brief biographical statement Ali Almossawi is the bestselling author of An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments, An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language, Bad Choices, and The Point of Pointless Work. His books have reached 3.5 million readers, translated into 23 languages, and have sold over 370,000 copies in print. He is an alumnus of MIT and Carnegie Mellon. He led engineering and product design teams at Apple for 7.5 years, including work on developer tools for Vision Pro.

Download headshot 1, or headshot 2 (no copyright, public domain).