May 2011
10 posts
4 tags
The Transparent Society →
No matter how many laws are passed, it will prove quite impossible to legislate away the new tools and techniques. They are here to stay. Light is going to shine into every aspect of our lives.
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Lionel Messi: Boy Genius →
He is 23, with a grown-up’s income reported to exceed $43 million this year. Yet Messi still has a boy’s floppy bangs, a boy’s slight build and a boy’s nickname, the Flea. Even the ball stays on his feet like a shy child clinging to his father’s legs.
5 tags
Tool for Thought →
We use the computer to process words, but the ideas that animate those words originate somewhere else, away from the screen. The word processor has changed the way we write, but it hasn’t yet changed the way we think.
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The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels →
If you’re the kind of reader who doesn’t intend to give up on a Great Big Important Novel no matter how inhumanely it treats you, then there’s a sense in which Joyce or Pynchon or Gaddis (or whoever your captor happens to be) owns you for the duration of that captivity. In order to maintain your sanity, you may end up being disproportionately grateful for the parts where they don’t threaten to...
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Who Owns Your Body Parts?: Everyone's making money... →
With scientific advances there has emerged an enormously beneficial market in remains. But the players most fundamental to that market, donors, are locked out, prohibited by law from sharing in the benefits that others derive from their bodies. At the heart of this inequity is a confusion over to what extent we control our own persons-over whether we own our increasingly valuable component parts.
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The Information Sage →
“There is no such thing as information overload,” Tufte says at the start of his courses. “Only bad design.”
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Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How To Make... →
Freelancing is basically just courtship, but the freelancer-editor relationship is nothing more than friends with benefits. The editor likes you because you remind the editor of when she had enthusiasm and appetite and vision and so you make the editor feel powerful in the way that nostalgia empowers people.
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Predilections: Profile of moviemaker Errol Morris →
“I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing,” Morris says. “I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That’s what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we’re in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we’re just a bunch of apes running...
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J-School Confidential →
Post editor Katherine Boo agrees. “It’s just a huge hoax,” she says. “I think how you become a journalist is that you write. You don’t see any correlation between journalistic education and an ability to write a story. When you get a great piece, and you call the person to see who he is, he never says, ‘Oh I just came from journalism school.’”
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The Management Myth →
I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.”
