July 2010
2 posts
“Anything that removes complexity or cycles from your day is really valuable. I...”
– NYT explores a trend in minimal dressing, which also helps to explain why my sartorial life is so frequently monochromatic.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness,...”
– Oyl Miller reprises Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ as a self-aware commentary on our impending intellectual death by Internets. A must read: ‘Tweet.’
June 2010
3 posts
May 2010
5 posts
“I’d encourage anyone starting a startup to become one of its users,...”
– Paul Graham in a minor footnote to his much larger point that startups should solve real (not imagined) problems. It all goes back to building off of what you know.
April 2010
10 posts
“Location-awareness leads to vector-awareness.”
– Dave Winer opining on the future of location services as not merely descriptive but also predictive.
March 2010
1 post
“You can’t tell a book by its cover if it doesn’t have one.”
– NYT warns against potential loss of that graphical marvel — the book cover — as e-readers threaten to disrupt the physical distribution model for books. Reminds me of some of the lovely ways that books have been a part of my life.
February 2010
4 posts
“Don’t take any money, don’t owe anything to anyone, build [your business] how...”
– Matt Haughey of MetaFilter reveals the secret to entrepreneurship.
“For example, the query “Do you have any good babysitter recommendations in Palo...”
– The minds behind Aardvark explain why mining the social graph can really augment the information retrieval performed by standard search engines. [pdf]
“The Internet has its own shadow culture, a tech-savvy nation separated from...”
– A swift treatment of the tech subculture from Paul Boutin’s guide to Twitter. His piece also touches on one of my favorite aspects of the service: we’re all equals when it comes to tweeting.
November 2009
2 posts
October 2009
3 posts
“Dividing content along these lines is like classifying brownies based on whether...”
– Zachary M. Seward for Nieman Journalism Lab, explaining the ridiculousness of classifying content according to the platform on which it is produced (in response to Google News’s addition of the modifier ‘blog’ for some news sources).
Content quality is determined by the...
September 2009
1 post
“Since most trains are still devoid of Internet access and cellphone reception,...”
– The New York Times examines subterranean reading habits and discovers what publications are most popular.
August 2009
1 post
Why Not Live a Big Life?
I’m a sucker for a good turn of phrase. The best are aphorisms, blending brevity and cogency with the captivating mysticism of future seers. A good line is deliciously catchy, sticking because of the way it sounds and the way it feels — both seductive. These lines are also rare and not often invented, given the limitations of our relatively overwrought language. Once a good phrase is...
July 2009
2 posts
“[A modern economist] is used to measuring the ’standard of living’ by the amount...”
– E.F. Schumacher, an underappreciated economist (via SiftStar). Of note: the consumptive black hole toward which we’re trending turbulently. Currently doing some reading on alternatives to the ideal of constant, logarithmic growth. Anyone have suggestions?
“How do you make things?
You could lay out the process as a line… start...”
– As in iterating constantly rather than releasing perfected final products. From Snarkmarket’s collection of essays New Liberal Arts (a laundry list of topics for contemporary study inspired by Kottke’s term ‘liberal arts 2.0’).
June 2009
3 posts
“The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially...”
– Matt Taibbi says it like it was in this month’s Rolling Stone.
“A new report published this week by researchers at Stanford University suggests...”
– The Onion reports a mindboggling new trend (via Dave Morin).
“The net has gone from people being actively participatory to being vicarious.”
– Agree and disagree. Society in general has a greater population of passive consumers than it does active producers — the people who actually make things. We’re just seeing this equilibrium replicate itself on the web as the digital world becomes better representative of the physical...
May 2009
1 post
“Tech magazines, no matter how well executed, are nothing more than a cute...”
– Joel Johnson on Wired’s paradoxical favoritism of its print efforts over its online opportunities.
April 2009
3 posts
“I would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured...”
– No amount of context can explain this quote from Maureen Dowd in NYT today, but at least have a look at it: her interview with the particularly pithy Biz Stone and Evan Williams.
“The Internet’s like this new human experience. At first, everybody’s...”
– Josh Harris in Ondi Timoner’s Sundance winning documentary We Live in Public.
My mouth hung agape for the entirety of this screening.
Of course the surface level storytelling — extreme oversharing and isolation leading to aggressive hedonism and finally imploding in chaos — was...
March 2009
10 posts
Re: Feminism
Many have asked if my online alias ‘superfem’ means that I am a ‘super feminist.’ Not exactly.
In today’s clime where most of women’s struggles are for social equality (rather than, say, suffrage), feminism is a tricky movement. It is sensitive and defensive, frequently at odds with itself — an exclusive and pejorative struggle for inclusion.
...
“The family of Gawker sites has become at once a publishing success and part of...”
– The Financial Times, kicking some old school cred our way.
“Writers, I learned, are one of nature’s most unconfident species, in...”
– William Zinsser, professional matter-of-fact mincer of prose, in an unusually poetic moment. (via YAM)
“I wanted to be a woman with a man’s life in a woman’s body.”
– Diane von Furstenberg: real life ballbuster. (via WSJ Magazine)
“That’s why the MP3s are free. Because they’re a shadow of the overall...”
– Bob Lefsetz on the end of fixed recordings as the flagship products of the music industry.
“There has been an increase in the number of people expressing no religious...”
– Well thank God for that. More from WashPo and CNN.