But Mason fails to see why the market behaves the way it does. It is callous, to be sure, but it isn’t stupid. The Street is not unaware of the fact that it has a regimented system that does not reward eccentric behavior. Mason’s lack of prior experience and personality quirks were at odds with Wall Street’s platonic ideal of a public company CEO: a numbers-driven operator who is experienced, polished, reliably predictable and predictably reliable. In other words, not the kind of guy who makes jokey yoga videos in his underwear or who nearly presents he mayor of New York with a pony (a GrouPony, to be exact) as a party favor for an office visit. Certainly not the kind of guy who creates an entire room in his corporate headquarters for an imaginary tenant named Michael whose belongings include an exercise bike that plays Sade when pedaled, Cheerio boxes as décor, and a toilet full of Almond Joy bars. All of which Mason had done.

The presentations that public company CEOs have to make to institutional investors are called “dog and pony shows” for a reason. Wall Street knows some of it is superficial and irrelevant. It recognizes that it’s inconvenient and annoying for the CEO have to trot the company out, brush its hair, decorate it with pretty ribbons and walk it around the stage. The CEO has better things to do, after all. Isn’t the CEO supposed to be building the company?

Elizabeth Spiers sat down with Groupon CEO Andrew Mason about a month before he was fired. And this is just a great passage in an awesome article. 
There’s a freedom in being ignored. Away from the spotlight, Brooklyn developed something that people want, and now they’re coming to take it away. Fortunately, Brooklyn is a large place, larger than “Brooklyn.” As long as there are still Trinidadian doubles shacks in Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights, outside the pickle belt, and Bensonhurst is still Sicilian enough to support Villabate, the greatest pasticceria outside of Sicily itself, I’ll keep hope alive that city life doesn’t have to be a theme park or a plastic desert.
Terrific essay by Esquire’s David Wondrich on living in Brooklyn — the place, the brand — for the last 26 years. 
Much is made of genius and talent, but the foundation of any life where you get to realize your ambitions is simply being able to out-last everyone through the tough, crappy times — whether through sheer determination, a strong support network, or simply a lack of options.
I usually avoid the self-helpy entrepreneurial advice blog posts. But this, on Ang Lee’s six-year drought and the uncertainty of success, is really good. I like the idea of success as endurance. 

Michael Chabon treats dreams like a Hollywood exec treats scripts

“Dreams are effluvia, bodily information, to be shared only with intimates and doctors. At the breakfast table, in my house, an inflexible law compels all recountings of dreams to be compressed into a sentence or, better still, half a sentence, like the paraphrasings of epic films listed in TV Guide: ‘Rogue Samurai saves peasant village.’”


He’s going to pass on anything involving dwarfs, just so you know. 

Pokemon as Dante’s Inferno

The life of a Pokemon is not a good one: they wander aimlessly in the grass, the desert, and the sea, attacking literally anything that comes by. Inevitably, they will be brutally beaten and captured by a trainer, who will keep them in a tiny ball or trapped in some PC (“Bill’s PC”, or “Whatever PC” in later vesions). Then, if they’re lucky enough to escape their Tron-esque digital nightmare world, they will occasionally be trotted out to battle other Pokemon – where they will be burnt, frozen, paralyzed, poisoned, and a million other horrible things – all so some loser trainer can win some badges

“The 10 Most Miserable Creatures in the Pokemon World” is really a reflection suffering, punishment and religion in a Godless, post-modern world. 

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