July 2010
12 posts
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“It is now the capitalist who says, ‘Workers of the world, unite!,’...”
– Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft
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“Let us assume that people will be allowed to read [my work] in about the year...”
– Nietzsche, in a private letter
Who's interested in startups in the humanities?
On any given day, a quick glance at Techcrunch will be proof enough that a large number of entrepreneurs are eager to replicate the success of sites like Twitter, Foursquare, and Groupon by copying their business models and making slight alterations. Not that there is anything wrong with that. The concepts that these sites have made popular (microblogging, check-ins, group buying) have become...
“Never did I trust Fortune, even when she seemed to be offering peace. All those...”
– Seneca
Philip Larkin responds to Epicurus
There is nothing dreadful in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living.
— Epicurus
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing
that this is what we...
“Designer’s block may only occur if a designer deliberately aims to create...”
– Artemy Lebedev, Designer’s block
2 tags
“The performance connected me deeply to past memories, evoking kindred forms of...”
– Matthew Walker, William Basinski’s Vivian and Ondine
June 2010
4 posts
“If you train people to do one thing (recognize shapes, solve math puzzles, find...”
– Steven Pinker, Mind Over Mass Media
“In truth, our belief that the market could fund new music was always as...”
– Marc Ribot, The Care and Feeding of a Musical Margin
May 2010
15 posts
“As it now functions, [Wikileaks] is primarily hosted on a Swedish Internet...”
– The New Yorker, No Secrets
“Whatsoever of it has flown away is past.
Whatsoever remains is future.”
– Augustine, Confessions XI
“The entire impulse behind Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks assumes...”
– Verlyn Klinkenborg, Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader
“I never understood alienation. Alienation from what? You have to want to be part...”
– Boyd Rice, quoted in Noise/Music: A History
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“But there are no measures of ‘unaided’ ability, nor are we really...”
– R. C. Lewontin, Biology as Ideology
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“In order to establish oneself in the world, one does everything one can to...”
– La Rouchefoucauld, Maxims
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“One deceives oneself when one believes that only the violent passions such as...”
– La Rouchefoucauld, Maxims
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“Design is…the originality that repeatedly extracts astounding ideas from...”
– Kenya Hara
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“[Mankind’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can...”
– Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
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“In medieval Japan, poets and Zen priests directed the Japanese towards aspects...”
– Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
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“A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge...”
– Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
April 2010
9 posts
1 tag
“I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the...”
– David Foster Wallace, An Interview With David Foster Wallace
2 tags
“What will the hipsters be remembered for? The last few months I have raised this...”
– Christian Lorentzen, Wes Anderson and the Problem with Hipsters; Or, What Happens When a Generation Refuses to Grow Up
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“I had the misfortune to be nourished by the dreams and visions of great...”
– Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945)
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“Not every day of your life are you going to wake up and the clouds are going to...”
– Jack White, via
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“When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members...”
– Clay Shirky, The Collapse of Complex Business Models
March 2010
29 posts
1 tag
“A designer is often easily baffled by a question: “And what if your...”
– Artemy Lebedev, Designers and design
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“As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome,...”
– David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster
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“Up to the age of 25, you read wholesale & in a mercenary way, to...”
– Nassim N Taleb, Favorite Literary Works