April 2013
1 post
“Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral.”
– A great Evgeny Morozov essay on meme-hustling and Tim O’Reilly.
March 2013
3 posts
“The idea of the Creative Person dropping his wisdom down like manna upon the...”
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Maria Bustillos, on point, as usual.
“Running may kill you; it may hurt you; it may bore you; it may make you boring....”
– Nicholas Thompson on the ageless Bernard Legat.
“But Mason fails to see why the market behaves the way it does. It is callous, to...”
– 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.
February 2013
9 posts
“There’s a freedom in being ignored. Away from the spotlight, Brooklyn...”
– 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...”
– 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...
“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...
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...
HOT JOB! →
soupsoup:
This is a fairly awesome job we’re hiring for. You’ll work with Felix Salmon, Ryan McCarthy, Ben Walsh, and on occasion, me and the rest of the Reuters Digital team.
“Writing is an obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
– T. Coraghessan Boyle (via theparisreview)
January 2013
22 posts
FT Alphaville: The Book of Bove →
“There’s something wrong with bank analysis. … This industry did come back,” he told a room full of journalists Wednesday. “We’re going to see fourteen years of higher earnings.”
The three-course lunch was hosted by his new employers, Rafferty Capital Markets, as a sort of comeback party for…
How Davos talks about unemployment
I wrote about the world’s elite pondering the couple hundred million people across the globe who can’t find work:
“People want a job because they have real lives,” Publics’s Levy said. “We, as a society, are guilty of not giving them that job.”
Who says the Davos crowd doesn’t care?
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pbump:
Student debt as the new feudalism. Via @wonkblog
“Come up with something that gives every borrower — maybe — a pittance and leaves...”
– Karen Petrou, quoted in Joe Nocera’s column on the logic behind the foreclosure review settlement. Here’s more from Nocera:
The money is being distributed with no regard to whether a borrower suffered harm.In some ways, this is the sorriest part of the whole episode. The foreclosure...
I don’t know what to say about this song...
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Steve Coll on why "Zero Dark Thirty" is not...
Steve Coll is on to something here. First off, I haven’t seen this movie, and don’t really have a desire to — among other things, watching a movie about America complete an international manhunt feels a bit like gloating. So take whatever I’m saying about ZDT with a gigantic grain of salt.
But I think Coll explains a really crucial point: we let politicians, world leaders...
“I’ve always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that...”
– george saunders (via meaghano)
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“Being really happy helps some: those reporting a “very happy” adolescence earned...”
– Being a happy adolescent means you make more money. Whoever met a “happy adolescent” though?
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“The Big Fear is that, after 20 years of schooling, they’ll put you on the day...”
– Hugo Lindgren, quoting a Mark Jacobson line, which was later referenced by the Beasties on “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win”.
I love this essay. Even the editor of the NYT Magazine has that nagging feeling that he’s forever missing out on writing The Big...
Goddamn, I love this song.
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“We try to have a surprise around every corner but inevitability as well. The...”
– Vince Gilligan on writing the end of Breaking Bad. There’s always some next-level story telling wisdom in his interviews — he mentions the inevitable and still satisfying ending of Casablanca in this. The guy’s reliably humble and informative.
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“The good news is that the predictability of rich white people in times of crisis...”
– Josh Brown’s hilarious takeaway from the fiscal cliff deal.
DCeiver: Rethinking pork (the Congressional kind) →
pbump:
Matt Yglesias renews a point that’s been made elsewhere: removing pork from federal politics has deteriorated the deal-making process. The argument in its simple form is that without pork — federal money allocated to district-specific projects — it’s harder for leaders to punish…
What he said...
December 2012
19 posts
You spend decades of your life fighting for an...
Bloomberg on how the heirs of China’s top communist leaders got ridiculously rich:
“Twenty-six of the heirs ran or held top positions in state- owned companies that dominate the economy, data compiled by Bloomberg News show. Three children alone — General Wang’s son, Wang Jun; Deng’s son-in-law, He Ping; and Chen Yuan, the son of Mao’s economic tsar — headed or still run...
Today in heartbreaking ledes
“CHENGDU, China — One day last summer, Pu Xiaolan was halfway through a shift inspecting iPad cases when she received a beige wooden chair with white stripes and a high, sturdy back.
At first, Ms. Pu wondered if someone had made a mistake. But when her bosses walked by, they just nodded curtly. So Ms. Pu gently sat down and leaned back. Her body relaxed.
The rumors were true.
When Ms....
“When I arrived in 1988, Financial, as it was called back then, was still...”
– Stephen Pearlstein signs off of weekly column (via cardiffgarcia)
dceiver:
“Fairytale of New York,” The Pogues,...
1 tag
“Q: If the Bengals get the wild card, it will be our second playoff appearance in...”
– Compared to this, it’s really not so bad to be a Mets fan. From Bill Simmons’ latest mailbag.
Andrew Solomon on interviewing the parents of a...
“In researching my book “Far From the Tree,” I interviewed the parents of Dylan Klebold, one of the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre in Littleton, Colo., in 1999. Over a period of eight years, I spent hundreds of hours with the Klebolds. I began convinced that if I dug deeply enough into their character, I would understand why Columbine happened — that I would recognize damage in their...
“Dothraki is now heard by more people each week than Yiddish, Navajo, Inuit,...”
– The language of Game of Thrones is rapidly approaching Esperanto-like popularity. Go read this terrific article by Joshua Foer about the self-taught “con-langer” who may have created the perfect human language. (There’s a bizzarre Russian cult, a language creation conference and...
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WatchRasheed Wallace yelling “Ball don’t lie” after free throws for some reason. For what it’s worth, I’d be more comfortable yelling something like “ball doesn’t often” lie (see the oeuvre of Morrison, Adam).
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“Zero Dark Thirty,” which opens across the country next month, is a...”
– Jane Mayer on “Zero Dark Thirty” and the balance between entertainment and truth in historical(ish) fiction. Whether your a filmaker, a journalist or trying for some sort of Platonic idea of non-judgmental reportage, giving context on a subject isn’t tantamount to “taking a... 