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
1 tag
“When people talk of gift economies, often they talk about them as a replacement...”
– Sep Kamvar, The Farmer & Farmer
2 tags
1 tag
April 2012
5 posts
3 tags
“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...
Eli “Paperboy” Reed - Come and Get...
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
“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
1 tag
“Daylight pours through the elaborate window ironwork onto natural woods and...”
– Betsy Andrews, Rucola - Dining Briefs - NY Times
2 tags
“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.
2 tags
Chris Cornell - I Will Always Love You (Whitney...
February 2012
5 posts
2 tags
“Once you begin using Dropbox, you become more and more indifferent to the...”
– Bill Gurley, Why Dropbox is Major Disruption
2 tags
3 tags
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...
3 tags
“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
2 tags
“She claimed to like the way starlight smelled on sand. Once Cornelius asked her...”
– Annie Dillard, The Maytrees
1 tag
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
2 tags
1 tag
November 2011
11 posts
2 tags
“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.
2 tags
“Willem de Kooning, a penniless, 22-year-old commercial artist from the...”
– ~Willem de Kooning, Smithsonian Magazine
1 tag
1 tag
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?
3 tags
“Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the...”
– T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
3 tags
“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...