The Democrats and pessimism as self-pity.
David Rothkopf: There seems to be a reluctance of the Democratic Party to actually embrace their record of achievement during the past two years. Either because...
Category: work
Shorter Taibbi on Tea Party: Many older Americans believe colored people don’t deserve equal rights.
Matt Taibbi: “Let me get this straight,” I say to David. “You’ve been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax asses...
Holey vessels.
I spent at least an hour today retracing my steps of the last day on the web, in search of a passage I’d just read that suggests we can no more think outs...
News as meat: raw vs. aged prime, ground vs. choice cuts.
Or, to fight commoditization, provide analysis. I pay to read The New Yorker because its reporters provide a service that is rare in the information marketplace...
A massive multiplayer movie experience.
Reading Michael Heilemann’s celebrated investigation of how the character of Chewbacca was crafted, it struck me that movies are multi-player text-based v...
Movie math: the Descent.
(((The Bat Boy * 10) + Hot Babes) – believable characters) – believable plot = The Descent. It also grossed $57m on a $7m investment.
What’s good for the capital is good for the labor.
A great quote on immigration: Borders are imaginary lines across which capital flows freely. The idea that labor should not flow freely across borders, whether ...
Hope is only meaningful in the face of hardship.
David Rothkopf ties home ownership to America’s role as peacekeeper and protector of human rights abroad: “American optimism and self-confidence [ar...
Suggestions for new rickrolling memes.
In five years most people will be watching television on demand and their choices will be guided as much by their friends’ suggestions as by interruption ...
Monotheism and discovery.
Hearing about the Alhambra today it occurred to me that the main innovation of monotheism is certainty. “There is no God but God” is not a religious...
Block that metaphor, UBS tax-fraud expose edition.
Deliciously overcooked hard-boiled language: Downing saw in Birkenfeld nothing more than an overly clever informant trying to blow the whistle to his own tune. ...
The luckiest kid on Earth.
What if you could arrange it such that people who are really lucky married other people who are also really lucky? (You could measure luck in all sorts of ways....
The last mile: the human answer.
In retail, the last mile, the human touch, is the most important. Especially when you’re trying to launch a new kind of product, one that requires consume...
Weaving as a way of life: the global corporation.
There are crafts worth doing for the process alone, never mind the product. Weaving together the different strands of our lives is one such process which is rew...
possible alternative reality games involving celebrities
you, the protagonist, are accidentally emailed the login / confirmation email intended for someone who is quite famous. you become his/her doppelganger. it̵...
A word that we could live without: obviously.
“Obviously.” If you’re saying it, it’s not obvious.
Gourmet Magazine: now with easy to clean pages.
Gourmet magazine is back as an interactive iPad app. Here’s what I wrote about the end of Gourmet Magazine back in October of 2009, four months before the...
Yelp as a catalyst for business growth.
We first went to Al Watan, a great Pakistani restaurant by the airport, in June of 2009. By then, it had been reviewed 34 times on Yelp. It has since been revie...
Playing fetch.
One of our dogs loves to play fetch. The more the object he is fetching behaves like prey (a bouncing ball can change its trajectory in unexpected ways), the mo...