March 2011
23 posts
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“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the...”
– Fmr. MLB commissioner Bart Giamatti, “Green Fields of the Mind”.
One. More. Day.
Bubblesnarking
What a day we had yesterday, huh? Sure seems like nothing gets the wheels spinning on the insidery tech commentariat snark machine quite like the news that some pre-launch startup nobody had ever heard of pulled in a massive $41M A-round, because in a matter of mere hours the internet’s hivemind digital soapbox was buckling under the weight of ten thousand hecklers and self-anointed experts...
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Dana Vachon on Rebecca Black's "Friday" as radical... →
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“I never trust anyone who’s more excited about success than about doing the thing...”
– XKCD alt-text on this comic. (via thegongshow)
“To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one’s life, and...”
– Yesterday’s gruesome photographs out of Afghanistan show how little has changed in the seven years since Susan Sontag wrote this piece about Abu Ghraib.
WatchI am at a dinner party. I just did a frontflip onto my friend’s new leather sofa. Because I’m a grownup.
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“I don’t understand a culture that punishes women for the slight transgression...”
– Ally Millar on that abomination in the New York Times.
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Coming Soon to a Social Network Near You
If you’ve been around for a while you already know what’s coming, but if you’re new here, well, get ready! Because a spectacle is about to take place here on the internet as thousands upon thousands of enthusiasts descend on a small hamlet in the American south to trade business cards and compare iPhone home screens and passionately argue about “who will be this...
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Way to go, us!
Last week I tried to argue that if you’re paying attention to Charlie Sheen—this awful, horrible, disgusting man (seriously! go read Anna Holmes if you’ve been living under a rock!)—then you’re actually helping him make money. I also tried to gently suggest in the subtlest possible way that maybe this might make you an asshole!
So to everyone blowing up my Tumblr and...
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I have no words-- →
—for how moving and heartfelt and brave and insanely well written this article is that came out yesterday aka a hundred years ago aka you probably read it already because you’re better at the internet than me but! in the off chance you haven’t seen it yet I implore you to stop what you’re doing and go read it right now because I was literally just fighting back tears on the...
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How To Make Friends & Influence People: Creepy...
A few helpful tips for meeting people from the internet that apparently (at least judging from personal experience) aren’t nearly as obvious as they should seem.
Requesting to connect on LinkedIn with someone you’ve never met: creepy! Emailing someone you’ve never met to introduce yourself: perfectly acceptable!
Applying for a job at the company of someone you’ve never...
Dollar Votes & The New Attention Economy
My stepdad is an economist—or was, at least, before abandoning his post at the OMB when Reagan took over from Carter and asked his budget nerds to figure out how to reduce taxes and increase defense spending and balance the budget all at the same time and my stepdad was all “LOL WUT.” And anyway, growing up, my stepdad the economist always talked about dollar votes. Dollars are...
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In Defense of Downtime
“Sorry, an error has occurred.” “Twitter is over capacity.” “We’re incredibly sorry for the inconvenience.” Frustrations so prevalent as to have become clichés. Memes, even! (You did see that animated gif of the angry panda bears, right?) And yet I’m going to say something crazy here: I’m a big fan!
I mean that only in the abstract, of course,...
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“Political obsession is easy to fall into and hard to climb out of, in large part...”
– Ben Dolnick, “I Know the 2012 Election Will Destroy My Life.”
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RUSH HOLT: 1, MACHINES: 0
Back home in Princeton seemingly every third Volvo sportwagon has a bumper sticker announcing “My congressman IS a rocket scientist!”, a reference to Rep. Rush Holt’s prior work as a nuclear physicist and his former role as director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, where he oversaw the first ever sustained nuclear fusion reaction.
Oh and he’s also a five-time...