February 2012
15 posts
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Zappos is a classic customer service company, and their customer is the person who buys the shoes.
Nike, on the other hand, doesn’t care very much at all about the people who buy the shoes, or even the retailers. They care about the athletes (often famous) that wear the shoes, sometimes for money. They name buildings after these athletes, court them, erect statues…
Columbia Records...
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“Pop songs are deeply monological. That feature only asserts itself, however,...”
– Enrique Lima
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"One's a Crowd"
MORE people live alone than at any other time in history. In prosperous American cities — Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Minneapolis — 40 percent or more of all households contain a single occupant. In Manhattan and in Washington, nearly one in two households are occupied by a single person. By international standards, these numbers are surprising — surprisingly low. In Paris, the...
“Browsing is the opposite of “search.” Search is precise, browsing is imprecise....”
– Leon Wieseltier (via wesleyhill)
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“I’m writing about Lagos now, but I don’t think of writing an explicitly...”
– Teju Cole
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Questlove on Don Cornelius
Soul Train had double duty, to not only produce a show, but they also had to provide ALL of the production for the Johnson beauty products commercials that was funding the show. often using the set and the soul train gang (they became soul train dancers in 1976) as lead actors.
the genius of it all was THIS was the first time that black people were proud to be called AFRICAN.
psssh before...
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“The most surprising and fascinating thing I learned is that there are...”
– Susan Cain
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January 2012
27 posts
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“It’s not my place to judge anyone, but it’s frustrating as hell that there...”
– Newt’s sister, Candace Gingrich-Jones
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WatchTerry Gross on Stephen Colbert (HT David Dark)
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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...
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“The job of art is to chase ugliness away.”
– Bono, quoted in Steve Jobs
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“Living is a meatloaf sandwich.”
– John Ashbery
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"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...
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"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...
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“Iceland never had any bookshops between the sixteenth century and the...”
– Robert Darnton, “‘What is the History of Books?’ Revisited” (2007) (via ayjay)
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"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
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"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...
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“67. Resolved, after afflictions, to inquire, what I am the better for them, what...”
– Jonathan Edwards
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“The great modern enemy of friendship has turned out to be love. By love, I don’t...”
– Andrew Sullivan (via wesleyhill)
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“Dear Friend: You are right in saying that New Year’s Day is stupid.”
– Gustave Flaubert, letter to Earnest Chevalier (via garbandier)
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December 2011
29 posts
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“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...
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“When Murakami sat down to write his first novel, he struggled until he came up...”
– Sam Anderson profiles Haruki Murakami (via Thessaly)