January 2012
2 posts
“I just can’t imagine why John King didn’t say, “With respect,...”
– With 3% reporting… | MetaFilter
“The fact that we humans – who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental...”
– Stephen Hawking marks 70th birthday with speech to leading cosmologists | Science | The Guardian
July 2011
4 posts
“Oh, okay. He infused her with moonbeams and now she calls him...”
– Things I Learned Doing Preliminary Research for My Smurfs Review | Slog
thing
AVC: On the show, you frequently return to that theme: doing the work. That seems to be what earns your respect more than anything else.
Tom Scharpling: You get so many people who talk about what they are going to do. I think they get the same kind of emotional, almost chemical, satisfaction out of when they say, “I’m gonna write this thing, and it’s gonna be like this, and this is gonna happen, then that’s gonna happen.” They talk you through it, and they’re getting the same satisfaction from your reaction as if they actually did the thing. And that drives me up the wall. Then they never do it, because they’ve satisfied themselves by talking about doing it. I’ve known a bunch of people like that in life who start a thing, and they’ll talk all day long about the thing they’re gonna do, and how great it’s gonna be. But they’re not doing the thing.
2 tags
The Games that we Play in our Berlin Apartment
Squabble!: Guess what the Turkish family next door is arguing about this time.
Rain Dance: Avoid flooding the bathroom despite miserably designed curtain, basin, and shower.
Flatten!: Fit seven people into our one-room apartment for five days and nights.
Mouse Trap: The mice aren’t winning, but the cheese is.
Water Carrier: Retrieve all water from bathroom sink due to terrible kitchen...
June 2011
1 post
May 2011
1 post
“Humans have a tendency to fall prey to the illusion that their economy is at the...”
– Starting Over § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
April 2011
1 post
March 2011
3 posts
“Procrastination, he says, is a “spurious form of immortality,” the ego’s way of...”
– Barry Michels, Therapist for Blocked Screenwriters : The New Yorker
“This is why coffee is so damn amazing. Everyone else at work goes through three...”
– Who needs a fix? | MetaFilter
“By the way, it is customary for reviewers of books like this to note, in a...”
– LRB · Jim Holt · Smarter, Happier, More Productive
January 2011
1 post
“In April an Icelandic volcano caused my flight out of the city to be cancelled,...”
– I summarized Copenhagen’s 2010 in n+1.
n+1: Year in Review, Part 2
November 2010
6 posts
“The last thing we were looking for was people who were looking to extend their...”
– From an awesome profile of Suck.com.
“The function of an artist is to work for a) himself b) to leave something...”
– Under the Sun: The letters of Bruce Chatwin, reviewed by William Dalrymple - TLS
Great profile of Chatwin, how he’s supposedly gone out of fashion.
Nice to see a new thing launch that already has some idea about how it’ll make money.
The Staff Recommends is an advertorial publication that only features books we like.
From the about page:
So what you’re saying is that The Staff Recommends is kind of like the part in the bookstore where the employees put little cards on the books saying what they liked and why, only online?
Yes,...
“I have a number of friends who do amazing jobs running niche websites—and...”
– Choire Sicha @ Metafilter
“In the arts, moral seriousness speaks to an economy of form and aesthetic...”
– Austerity by Tony Judt | The New York Review of Books
Just got Memory Chalet, a book collecting many of Judt’s NYRB essay memoirs.
“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing...”
October 2010
3 posts
“Now we must ponder how chaos may yet organize itself through technology as the...”
– Chaos by Gore Vidal | The New York Review of Books, 1999. (subs)
“I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell....”
– Potential new mantra courtesy of Ezra Pound: Paris Review - The Art of Poetry No. 5, Ezra Pound
Right now, I’m all Europe, all the time. Living in Copenhagen, about to move to Berlin. So I’ve started writing a weekly column called Europe Adrift in which I try to work out if the whole damn thing is gonna get wrecked on the rocks. This week’s column: “The Rise of Europe’s Far Right Is No Tea Party.”
September 2010
4 posts
“ANTIFLUKE A situation in the universe in which rigid rules of action exist to...”
– Op-Ed Contributor - A Dictionary of the Near Future - NYTimes.com via The Morning News.
“People commonly use the word “procrastination” to describe what they...”
– The Acceleration of Addictiveness
“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a...”
– via Frank Chimero
“Socrates wants to provoke: he craves a response, a sign of life, a...”
– Plato—The Gadfly’s Role (Harper’s Magazine)
August 2010
1 post
“The truth is that there is no whale. We live in a world without hiding places;...”
– Outside the Whale | Granta 11: Greetings from Prague | Magazine | Granta Magazine
July 2010
1 post
June 2010
7 posts
Guardian liveblogger considers the longest tennis...
The sun is sinking and the court is a blur. It is at this stage that Zombie Isner starts to look like Zombie Mahut and the Zombie Umpire stops croaking and starts to chirrup like a grasshopper. In other words, we’re here but we’re gone. Is anyone still alive up in the stands or have they now all been eaten? It’s 40-40. And that’s games, not points
Still no sign of that...
“If a novel is an archeological record of 4.54 billion decisions, then maybe...”
– Pick up just about any novel and you’ll find the phrase “somewhere a dog barked.” - By Rosecrans Baldwin - Slate Magazine
“In episode 12 [Jack Bauer] eats some spaghetti and hides from a giant with a...”
– Charlie Brooker — Guardian
“We’ve got record unemployment, two wars, a bank collapse, a housing catastrophe....”
– Medicine or menace? (via themorningnews)
(FYI: I’m doing my tumblring over at The Morning News’ Editors’ Desk now. )
“We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may...”
– On Distraction by Alain de Botton, City Journal Spring 2010
May 2010
3 posts
“How many of the ragged workingmen who pass him in the street are secret authors...”
– From ‘Summertime’: Notebooks 1972–1975 | The New York Review of Books
“GLAUCON: Socrates, I have lived in this city for the majority of my life and,...”
– McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Socrates and Glaucon on the Home Shopping Network.
“Thinking for its own sake, non-instrumental, as opposed to transitive thinking,...”
– Our Brave, Stupid New World - Our Man in Boston - The Morning News
April 2010
5 posts
“While I was standing at the window arguing with the clerk about my forms a young...”
– LRB · Vol. 31 No. 2 · 29 January 2009 · letters
“At Heathrow, now turned into a museum, one would be able to walk unhurriedly...”
– BBC News - Today - A world without planes
“When she was a teenager, [Rielle Hunter’s] father, James Druck, was...”
– LRB · David Runciman · Enabler’s Revenge (sub req’d)
“Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary...”
– The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee by Balzac | Lapham’s Quarterly
“Umarov said the two suicide bomb attacks in the Moscow metro … constituted...”
– News Profile: Who Is Doku Umarov? - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty © 2010
March 2010
5 posts
“Bob putters home and returns with a mason jar of what looks to my relatively...”
– Tokeville: On the frontiers of federalism and dope—By Gideon Lewis-Kraus (Harper’s Magazine)
“The New Britain. An Internet. A train like those we have seen on our holidays,...”
– Malcolm Tucker’s election briefing | Comment is free | The Guardian
Malcolm Tucker (the notoriously abusive fictional Director of Communications for the Labour party from The Thick of It) provides frequently UK election briefings. Essential reading.
“The drugged but uncaged lion, it seems, woke up part way across. After puzzling...”
– How 1,000 days of blockade has stifled Gaza’s economy by Rex Brynen | The Middle East Channel
“If you’re doin’ what you love, the money might come, but it might...”
– Tina Brown on Building a Subculture of Impoverished Writers - The Awl
“At the beginning of 2008, the list of the richest Russians contained 101...”
– Guernica / 101 Billionaires
February 2010
4 posts
“…the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power...”
– Forget Shorter Showers | Derrick Jensen | Orion Magazine
“I saw that most of what passes for news today isn’t really news at all —...”
– Giving up News - Ignoring the News - Esquire I don’t completely agree but it’s interesting to consider. “What passes for news today” is the important distinction perhaps.