May 2012
9 posts
Meet the mother theory →
itwonlast:
By MARIANNE FREIBERGER l +Plus April 19, 2012
There’s an old Indian story about six blind men who go to visit an elephant. One touches its leg and decides that elephants must be like trees. A second examines its trunk and declares they are like snakes. A third feels its side and concludes they are like walls. You can imagine the rest. Everyone is right yet they are all wrong and it...
China - a nation of cheaters →
No, it’s not my intention to besmirch 1.35 billion Chinese. Certainly, many do try to be honest - even if it puts them at a disadvantage. But the state holds so many selfish, deceitful people that they have given the entire country an ugly reputation.
For example, a Chinese social-networking site’s recent survey of college students found extensive cheating among those applying to...
youmightfindyourself:
Disruptions: With No Revenue, an Illusion of Value
By NICK BILTON | April 29, 2012, NY Times
The gears of Silicon Valley continue to mesh and turn because of money, not necessarily technological innovations. And there are certain things about that money machine that denizens of the Valley would rather keep quiet.
First, they’ll never acknowledge the possibility of a...
April 2012
24 posts
American Mozart →
BY DAVID SAMUELS
“I have a question I want to ask you, Mr. President,” I venture, once I catch his attention.
“Sure,” the president says.
“Kanye or Jay-Z?”
The president smiles. “Jay-Z,” he says, as if the answer should be obvious. When it comes to the most meaningful pop-cultural divide of the moment, the question of whether you prefer Kanye West or Jay-Z—the top two hip-hop artists in the...
1 tag
instellation:
ALEC Wants You to Pay 7.5x More For High-Speed Internet
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is the most powerful corporate front group you’ve never heard of. Drawing the vast majority of its financing from big corporations, the group allows these firms to help write bills that it then secretly passes off to state legislators to get turned into laws.
The organization...
gonna be real with yall
im bout to just lounge out in adidas soccer shorts/vans/muji tees all summer, and no fucks will be given. (also my dining hall charges 3 dollars for a bag of chips, which is such fucking nonsense.) pce b with u.
edit: reevaluate my finances and kop the shit out of that thing, but you can have it if you want.
instellation:
csebastian:
“Imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool. A few seconds later, you reach into the box and pull out a full-size footstool: The sand has assembled itself into a large-scale replica of the model.” — Self-sculpting sand - MIT News Office
So this kind of blows my mind, and I still don’t fully understand how one could translate...
Nice work
magicmolly:
I was listening to NPR in the car with Lily. During a dispatch, she pointed to the radio and said, “Oh, I know this reporter.” Then she smiled. “He told me that whenever he’s reading his radio script, he imagines that he’s reading it to a specific person.”
“Who?”
“Well, whomever he has a crush on at the moment,” she said. “You can hear it in his voice.”
We listened.
“A lot of...
austinvu:
so good
March 2012
19 posts
1 tag
can i just say
math is so cool
Lost in Transit →
I replayed the last few moments in my head. When I arrived at the City Hall station the place was buzzing with bodies: focused business suits seamlessly weaving through crowds of lollygagging tourists, who stopped to watch street performers dance for a large group of children wearing matching summer camp t-shirts. I was running late for dinner with a friend uptown, so upon hearing an idling 6...
Hold that thought
One night I walked down Sunset Boulevard to a Mel’s Diner. What attracted me was the idea of pancakes for dinner, on the one hand, and Mexican waiters on the other. I feel like a baby floating in amniotic fluid whenever someone calls me mija, especially if that person bears pancakes. Maybe it’s a California thing.
The Mel’s was empty except for three goths and a middle-aged man in a suit. For...
Give him an inch, he'll take an inch
magicmolly:
I was talking to an editor the other day when he mentioned that he met Mitt Romney while reporting a piece. “He’s a weird dude,” the editor said. “Not bad, just weird.” “On-the-spectrum weird?” I asked. “Yes. He made a speech the other week in Michigan and opened with a comment about how the trees in that state were exactly the right height.” I laughed. “And you know, that’s a...
Why I left Google →
youmightfindyourself:
The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.
Technically I suppose Google has always been an advertising company, but for the better part of the last three years, it didn’t feel like one. Google was an ad company only in the sense that a...