February 2012
1 post
January 2012
12 posts
“There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine...”
– M.F.K. Fisher
“She claimed to like the way starlight smelled on sand. Once Cornelius asked her...”
– Annie Dillard, The Maytrees
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.
Sly and the Family Stone - Que Sera Sera
2 tags
“I believe that in our culture of simulation, the notion of authenticity is for...”
– Sherry Turkle, Alone Together
via caitlinwinner
1 tag
“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)
2 tags
“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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1 tag
November 2011
11 posts
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“Kahneman never grapples philosophically with the nature of rationality. He does,...”
– Jim Holt
3 tags
“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)
5 tags
“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...
3 tags
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...
1 tag
“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
2 tags
“People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and...”
– Clay Shirky, A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
4 tags
“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...
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In our small restaurant in Boerum Hill we have served media moguls, deranged artists, and various celebrities—and absolutely none of them have ever thrown down to party like the Supreme Court justice that visited us last night.
The world is a strange and wonderful place.
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Be Good Tanyas - For the Turnstiles (Neil Young...
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Bob Dylan - Dink’s Song (Home Recording)
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“Literature is an active process: the communication between writer—who wishes to...”
– James Bridle, The New Value of Text
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“He had always told me that a man is at the peak of his powers from his late...”
– Tom Junod, My Father’s Fashion Tips - GQ
Junod won a 1996 National Magazine award for this story; it reminded me of my grandfather.
September 2011
9 posts
3 tags
“Because of the first-sale doctrine, any DVD reseller, including Netflix, can...”
– Bill Gurley, Understanding Why Netflix Changed Pricing
It’s always extremely instructive to know the forces at play in a marketplace. Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark Capital, often does a phenomenal job of writing about market forces that show a little of his past as a former financial...
4 tags
Best search in a while: “bicycle flying machine” as an image search.
I’m working on some marginally practical interior design concepts for my new apartment.
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The woman at the small island grocer gave me a funny look when I purchased all the limes she had. I told her they were to prevent scurvy, I don’t think she realized I was being serious.
3 tags
“Bitcoin, rather than fixing the value of the virtual currency in terms of those...”
– Paul Krugman, NY Times
2 tags
August 2011
9 posts
3 tags
“One of the most fascinating effects I’ve seen in quite awhile is that we can...”
– The Secret Language Code: Scientific American
1 tag
