January 2012
24 posts
4 tags
WatchTerry Gross on Stephen Colbert (HT David Dark)
2 tags
There was one classical musician Jobs revered both as a person and as a performer: Yo-Yo Ma, the versatile virtuoso who is as sweet and profound as the tones he creates on his cello. They had met in 1981, when Jobs was at the Aspen Design Conference and Ma was at the Aspen Music Festival. Jobs tended to be deeply moved by artists who displayed purity, and he became a fan. He invited Ma to play...
2 tags
“The job of art is to chase ugliness away.”
– Bono, quoted in Steve Jobs
2 tags
3 tags
“Living is a meatloaf sandwich.”
– John Ashbery
3 tags
"Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up"
Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) “The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen,” Dunbar says. “But the results kept...
3 tags
2 tags
3 tags
"Vocation Takes Patience"
I read an interesting blog post by Oliver Segovia on the Harvard Business Review last week: “To Find Happiness, Forget About Passion.” Segovia recounts the story of a peer who was primed to pursue her passion (in this case, earning a Ph.D. in the liberal arts, which we all have been told ad nauseum is not a, shall we say, profit-making enterprise these days), but found when she got out of...
2 tags
5 tags
“Iceland never had any bookshops between the sixteenth century and the...”
– Robert Darnton, “‘What is the History of Books?’ Revisited” (2007) (via ayjay)
1 tag
"I'm starting to think Lego is evil " - Daniel...
Well, maybe not evil, but “highly problematic.”
First, let’s remove what we all *think* Lego is (i.e. our own nostalgic memories, our aspirational beliefs, or $250 robot sets), and instead concentrate on what Lego today is, for the most part: It’s movie-tie-in model sets marketed pretty much exclusively towards boys.
We’ve gotten my son a Lego advent calendar for the last few years. It’s...
“You owe it to all of us to get on with what you’re good at.”
– W.H. Auden
1 tag
3 tags
3 tags
3 tags
"Those visits home, the way the young"
Marianne Boruch
Those visits home, the way the young come back and still follow you around or find you on the bed reading or writing, to lie down at an angle or
sit cross-legged. No secret between you, not even trouble quite though it isn’t ordinary, the way the world unravels through them: what he said, what she
never, who traveled where, that things— how exactly—splinter and...
1 tag
2 tags
“67. Resolved, after afflictions, to inquire, what I am the better for them, what...”
– Jonathan Edwards
5 tags
5 tags
“The great modern enemy of friendship has turned out to be love. By love, I don’t...”
– Andrew Sullivan (via wesleyhill)
1 tag
“Dear Friend: You are right in saying that New Year’s Day is stupid.”
– Gustave Flaubert, letter to Earnest Chevalier (via garbandier)
1 tag
3 tags
2 tags
December 2011
29 posts
1 tag
2 tags
“Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”
– Wendell Berry, Citizen Papers (via)
Nurse Reveals Top 5 Regrets of the Dying
“For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality. I learnt never to underestimate someone’s capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of...
6 tags
4 tags
2 tags
“When Murakami sat down to write his first novel, he struggled until he came up...”
– Sam Anderson profiles Haruki Murakami (via Thessaly)
1 tag
5 tags
Descending Theology: The Nativity
By Mary Karr
She bore no more than other women bore, but in her belly’s globe that desert night the earth’s full burden swayed. Maybe she held it in her clasped hands as expecting women often do or monks in prayer. Maybe at the womb’s first clutch she briefly felt that star shine
as a blade point, but uttered no curses. Then in the stable she writhed and heard beasts stomp in their...
3 tags
4 tags
“I’ve recently thought a lot about how depression is really the opposite of...”
– T. Michael Martin
1 tag
“Comfort Me” - Feist
4 tags
Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvelous error!— that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures.
—from “Last Night As I Was Dreaming” by Antonio Machado
3 tags
WatchDM Stith (does Christmas) - “I Stay Still”
1 tag
4 tags
Louis CK's Shameful Dirty Comedy
It’s a pretty shallow insight to say that a comedian who has a special named Shameless creates his comedy about shame, but I never noticed. Louis CK has jokes because he is ashamed of his body, ashamed of his thoughts, his culture, his whiteness, whatever. Every joke seems to be about shame in some way. Ashamed of the things he doesn’t do that he knows he should. Ashamed of the things that he...
“The Gospel came to the Greeks and the Greeks turned it into a philosophy. The...”
– The Problem with Pastor as Rock Star (via ayjay)
"I'm never sure who deserves to be put on a... →
Banksy on his new work, “Cardinal Sin”
3 tags
4 tags
LITTLE GIDDING, Four Quartets - T.S. ELIOT
III
There are three conditions which often look alike Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference Which resembles the others as death resembles life, Being between two lives—unflowering, between The live and the dead nettle. This is the...
2 tags
“It is because a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever...”
– William Faulkner, Light in August (via mumblelard)
White Whine →
4 tags
“You know, in my own life, when I would talk to people about my childhood, when I...”
– Justin Torres, author of one of my favorite novels from this year. Reminds me of a quote from Updike: “Families teach us how love exists in a realm beyond liking or disliking, coexisting with indifference, rivalry, and even antipathy.” - wesleyhill