May 2013
5 posts
Really, when I’m reading, all I want is to stand amazed in front of an unknown object at odds with the world.
— David Winters
April 2013
10 posts
I cannot remember ever before feeling the visceral contempt I have for this gang of posh sociopaths. As a rough guide, I would say any government that sets the welfare of the comfortably off above the welfare of the old, the young, the sick, the poor, the oppressed, the disabled … well, call me old-fashioned but any government like that wants hosing down the drain. … those 10,726,614 people who...
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.
—...
Watch
March 2013
18 posts
“If everybody starts to think their money is unsafe, we’ll get a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the banks will go under,” said Thomas Schuster from the Cologne Institute for Economic Research. “So trust is paramount.”
Architects of the deal have been quick to point out that the Cyprus bailout – or bail-in, as many are calling it – will not and cannot become the...
2 tags
Bruce Sterling’s closing remarks at SXSW...
Can you code?
I think the craziest idea I have heard in the last few years is that everyone should learn to code. That is the most bizarre and regressive idea. There are good reasons why we don’t want everyone to learn nuclear physics, medicine or how financial markets work. Our entire modern project has been about delegating power over us to skilled people who want to do the work and be...
London
We gather together in these urban nightmares, all these people gather, and the warmth it generates, the ideas, the entertainment, the culture – I’ve benefited from that. And I feel hugely positive about it.
— Danny Boyle, Guardian
When Galileo’s old pupil feels let down near the end of the play and exclaims angrily “Unhappy the land that has no heroes”. Galileo replies humbly “No. Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes”. Our scientist is an anti-hero not just for dramatic reasons or historical accuracy, but because Brecht wants to argue for collective rather than individual agency when it comes...
… people go quiet in the underground. It’s the only time we experience a combination of 21st-century technology (the trains), 19th-century technology and vision (the tunnels, the network) and our paleolithic deep self. A person on the underground is experiencing the rare chance to be a 21st-century Victorian caveman. She is doing something we don’t value enough, in the contemporary...
While this story is not short of remarkable details – being rich in Edwardian tropes of mesmerism and exotica, patriotism and fate – perhaps its most remarkable turn is that, despite the burlesque nature of the event, anecdotal reports of the fire form the evidence base of a number of our contemporary building standards. The fire was the subject of a dedicated report by the British Fire...
February 2013
11 posts
I like *other people’s* cities. I like cities where I’m not an eager, engaged, canny urban participant, where I’m not “smart” and certainly not a “citizen,” and where the infrastructures and the policies are mysterious to me. Preferably, even the explanations should be in a language I can’t read.
*So I’m maximizing my “inefficiency.” I do it because it’s so enlivening and stimulating, and I...
This then is possibility’s despair. … the self becomes an abstract possibility; it exhausts itself floundering about in possibility … more and more becomes possible because nothing becomes actual. In the end it seems as though everything were possible, but that is the very moment that the self is swallowed up in the abyss. Even a small possibility needs some time to become actual.
— Søren...
Plagiarism
Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism when she was only twelve. Though deaf and blind from an early age, and indeed languageless before she met Annie Sullivan at the age of six, she became a prolific writer once she learned finger spelling and Braille. As a girl, she had written, among other things, a story called “The Frost King,” which she gave to a friend as a birthday gift. When the story...
January 2013
11 posts
