May 2012
4 posts
We freak out about the Trillions of dollars in debt our country faces. What...
– Mark Cuban, The Coming Meltdown in College Education
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When people talk of gift economies, often they talk about them as a replacement...
– Sep Kamvar, The Farmer & Farmer
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April 2012
5 posts
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Alan had a culturally rich perspective just waiting to be harvested,” Mr....
– Alan Feuer, The Secret Life of a Society Man
People have always gone about reinventing themselves in the mode that they think is true to them—and sometimes that brings up a lot of questions about their authenticity as people. This is a great story of that, but my real interest in reading this kind...
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There are two kinds of creation myths: those where life arises out of the mud,...
– George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral
via kevin slavin
March 2012
7 posts
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Daylight pours through the elaborate window ironwork onto natural woods and...
– Betsy Andrews, Rucola - Dining Briefs - NY Times
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Mr. Bloomberg spoke about the difficulties of leading a city into the future...
– Mayor Michael Bloomberg Warns of the Pitfalls of Social Media
Having good ideas is most of writing well. If you know what you’re talking...
– Paul Graham, Writing and Speaking
Apropos: TED 2012 remixed and auto-tuned—satirical.
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February 2012
5 posts
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Once you begin using Dropbox, you become more and more indifferent to the...
– Bill Gurley, Why Dropbox is Major Disruption
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The Mullet Theory of Social Software Design
For several years, I’ve been using the phrase mullet theory of software design to talk about a very special kind of software: the kind where it’s all business up front, but the real party is in the back. Tumblr has always been the perfect example of this: to any random person on the web, a tumblelog looks more or less like any other blog that’s short form or otherwise (though...
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A particular problem is that he [Mitt Romney] betrays little indignation at any...
– Peggy Noonan on Mitt Romney, WSJ
There’s probably a phrasing of this that is equally damning of a certain kind of entrepreneur—the one that is pursuing a project not out of passion but out of a kind of megalomania to be the top dog in their own pony show.
January 2012
12 posts
There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine...
– M.F.K. Fisher
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She claimed to like the way starlight smelled on sand. Once Cornelius asked her...
– Annie Dillard, The Maytrees
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You have to love people that elevate your level of articulation—not so much by their speech, but more as a magic osmosis. And we’re not talking about diction that tends to words like adumbrate, we’re leaning more towards prurient.
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I believe that in our culture of simulation, the notion of authenticity is for...
– Sherry Turkle, Alone Together
via caitlinwinner
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Men who ache allover for tidiness and compactness in their lives often find...
– E.B. White, The Sea and the Wind that Blows
via jacecooke
December 2011
4 posts
To put this as crisply as I can, the study of the classics is the study of what...
– Mary Beard, “Do the Classics Have a Future?”, in the New York Review of Books. (via thebronzemedal)
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American schools in which fewer than 10% of the students were poor outperformed...
– Diane Ravitch, quoted in Time’s Why Are the Rich so Interested in Education Reform
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November 2011
11 posts
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Kahneman never grapples philosophically with the nature of rationality. He does,...
– Jim Holt
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The legal “puzzle” raised by modern blackmail is that although it is...
– R.H. Helmholz, The Roman Law of Blackmail, Journal of Legal Studies XXX(1)
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It appears that Tumblr built in a day or two what no D.C.-based technology...
– The statement above is false. I’m one of the co-founders of Mobile Commons, though I no longer work there. The Mobile Commons technology that Tumblr used to build a very nice graphical interface has been available to any organization for going on five years. In fact, it’s been used by...
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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. The military alphabet.
Is that military for just saying WTF!? Mind blown.
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Willem de Kooning, a penniless, 22-year-old commercial artist from the...
– ~Willem de Kooning, Smithsonian Magazine
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Charlie Kaufman, Why I Wrote Being John Malkovich
“Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It’s not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters...
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The potential miracle of the cookbook was immediately apparent: you start with a...
– Adam Gopnik, New Yorker: What’s the Recipe?
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Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the...
– T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
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The click’s idiosyncratic, personal. The only stuff a writer can get from...
– David Foster Wallace, Interview with Larry McCaffery
Note: See T.S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent
October 2011
10 posts
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People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and...
– Clay Shirky, A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
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What we think of as coaching was, sports historians say, a distinctly American...
– Atul Gawande, Coaching a Surgeon - New Yorker
I usually love Atul Gawande, but I think he’s off-point about the real ethos of amateurism—which really just denotes a kind of love. Conflating amateurism with a specific anthropological tidbit is a disservice to people that pursue things for...