Thought 2.0 News | Addictomatic

Police loom over Byron Sonne's victory party

Uh-oh. A tweet from Toronto notes that weirdly, there are 4 cop cars outside #hacklabto as they are having a party for #freebyron. HackLabTo is the Kensington Market hackerspace that Byron Sonne (who...
Clay Shirky on the relationship between physical space and creativity

I really liked Clay Shirky's essay on the relationship between physical space and creativity. It's one of those classic, Shirkian riffs that includes a bunch of seemingly glib and merely clever ideas...
History of gendering in Lego

On Sociological Images, David Pickett is tracing the history of gendering in Lego toys, from the early efforts to produce girl-sets and boy-sets before 1988, to the full-blown gendering watershed atte...
Rocking Horses of the Apocalypse

Artist Carrin Welch's first foray into sculpture is a marvellous set of "Four Rocking Horses of the Apocalypse," made from wood. They're nearly finished, and eminently ridable. My interpretation of th...
Excerpt from Coldest War, sequel to Tregillis's fantastic supernatural alternate WWII novel Bitter Seedss

Tor.com has just posted an excerpt from Ian Tregillis's The Coldest War, a sequel to his smashing debut Nazi X-men vs English warlocks alternate history, Bitter Seeds. I've got a review queued up for...

More at Boing Boing »

Updates on previous entries for May 15, 2012*

Dear Leader meets Sim City orig. from Jun 03, 2010 When life gives you graffiti, make money orig. from May 14, 2012 How Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 orig. from May 14, 2012 * Q: Wha? A: These pre...
Texas executed an innocent man

Antonin Scalia once said that no one had ever been executed in the US for a crime they didn't commit. Well, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review is devoting its entire spring issue to the case of Carl...
How Yahoo killed Flickr

From Mat Honan at Gizmodo, an account of how Yahoo bought Flickr and then frittered away all its potential. Because Flickr wasn't as profitable as some of the other bigger properties, like Yahoo Mail...
How to blog anonymously

From former call girl blogger Belle de Jour, a guide on how to publish online and maintain your anonymity. You will need an email address to do things like register for blog accounts, Facebook, Twitt...
Fantastic time lapse map of Europe, 1000 - 2005 A.D.

This time lapse covers more than 1000 years and shows the shifting national borders of Europe. There's also a slowed-down version that shows the year and some annotation of events. (via ★inte...

More at Kottke »

Confession #112: Screen Rage

At five years-old, it’s no fun getting interrupted while you’re focused on something. As a parent, I compensate for that by employing a series of intricately planned measures to guide my s...
Confession #111: They Know You’re Reading This

I was recently complaining to a teller at my bank that the another bank down the street had given my 3 year-old daughter a stuffed horse for nothing more than walking past the front door. I jokingly a...
Confession #110: Kitties, Komen and The New Editor of Mainstream News

There’s a new editor in chief of mainstream news. You. About a year ago I was putting the final touches on an article for a major media outlet. I honed, I proof-read, I tweaked. My self-absorbed...
Confession #109: Something Disintegrates at a Burger King

The other day, while sitting in our car with the windows down, my wife and I had a heated argument. Bad words. Yelling. A fist or two slammed into our Volvo’s center console. Though we both rece...
Confession #108: I Made This on a Mac

I made this on a Mac. That statement is pretty common these days. But there was a time I would have never imagined creating something on a computer. Sure, I had some friends type up one of my essays o...

More at TweetageWasteland »

White House Correspondents’ Dinner: Soup to Nuts

In 1963, Andy Warhol set up a movie camera, aimed it at a sleeping friend, and (while he himself, I assume, caught a few z’s of his own) let it run all night. The resulting five-and-a-half-hour...
What Republicans Once Were

A long time ago, before the Grand Old Party got old, the Grand Old Party was grand. Here are excerpts from a speech by the grandest Republican orator of his time, delivered during the 1876 campaign...
TNC, Trayvon, and Juan

The blog of Ta-Nehisi Coates is one the half-dozen best in the English-speaking world. If it’s not on your regular rotation, it should be. TNC is always worth reading. His continuing chronicle o...
Ditty Nails Daily Mail

“In 2010,” Lauren Collins writes in our current issue, a bearded, guitar-strumming band called Dan & Dan had a YouTube hit with “The Daily Mail Song,” which, so far, has be...
Dame Edna and Lord Loudon, Cont’d

Exclusively for newyorker.com listeners! From “Older Than My Old Man Now,” the upcoming Loudon Wainwright III album I raved about in my last post, here is “I Remember Sex,” f...

More at Hendrik Hertzberg »

Cooper Renner: “Ack-Ack”

Speaking, as we were, of recognition, Cooper Renner’s story “Ack-Ack” (in JMWW, Summer 2011) has been included in the Wigleaf Top 50 list of best stories of 2011.
my mom will be proud

(I’m about a minute in) (And for the record, I think the tweet preceding mine is about 100x funnier.)...
tweet of the day

Cable TV is now evenly divided between shows about preparing food and shows about losing weight. — Andy Borowitz (@BorowitzReport) May 15, 2012...
The new baby names are in

Have you heard? Apparently a lot more people named their kids Brantley or Iker this year.
Drones and Piano

New from Nico Muhly.

More at Clusterflock »

Hiatus

This blog is on hiatus, but you can follow me on Twitter and at DIY Drones, where I’m posting daily. I’ll use this blog for occasional longer pieces that don’t fit either of those two other spot...
The Long Tail of Travel

For a recent speech to a travel company, we pulled together some data on the changing shape of travel due to low-cost carriers, online travel information and social-media driven word of mouth taking t...
Is this how the singularity happens?

This was one of those freaky moments when the future sneaks up and smacks you. I was on a plane earlier this week and took a break from work to watch the movie while they served dinner. It was Termina...
Netflix data shows shifting demand down the Long Tail

A team at Wharton did some Long Tail analysis on the Netflix ratings data the company released for its Netflix Prize. Although I don’t agree with many of the conclusions in their paper (like some ot...
A New York Times Bestseller!

If you checked out today’s New York Times Book Review section, you’ll see that FREE made the list in its first week of eligibility. It’s #12, tied for #11 (that’s what that little asterisk mea...

More at The Long Tail »

Instapaper 4: Deciding to Read

Introducing Instapaper 4.0 for iPad and iPhone The lede here is that my pal, Marco, has just released the stellar new 4.0 version of his Instapaper suite. This is fantastic news, and–as if yo...
Cranking

1. Nothing wrecks your living room decor quite like a giant, rented hospital bed. The one my Dad laid in for a couple months in the fall of 1974 was an alarmingly stiff and sturdy affair, the frame...
Scared Shitless

Merlin Mann - "Scared Shitless: How I (Mostly) Learned to Love Being Afraid of Pretty Much Everything" Download MP4 Video of "Scared Shitless" This is the video of a talk I did last month at Webstoc...
Nerdiest Interview Ever: MPU Workflows Part II

MPU 046: Workflows with Merlin Mann II « Mac Power Users Download MP3 Huffduff It I have the life that I have because I've made a lot of weird decisions, and they've worked out well.
Fear

So, yeah. I'll be speaking at Webstock pretty soon. Which is insanely intimidating. I think I may have my topic. ”Fear” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on...

More at 43 Folders »

May 15, 2012: Afternoon

Germany’s growth helps the eurozone barely avoid returning to recession. Hollande to dine with Merkel in Berlin on his swearing-in day. Part two of “Our French Connection”...
May 15, 2012: Morning

Massachusetts, the most Sweden-like of states, is also one of the most successful in the country. When you have a bank as big as JPMorgan…almost anything could count as “hedging.̶...
Our French Connection

by Rosecrans Baldwin For some Americans, the French way of life is best. And other people simply prefer “freedom fries.” A two-week journey across the U.S.—passing through a handful of t...
May 14, 2012: Afternoon

Economists, scientists team up to find the gene that makes people good at business. Fraudulent Stradivari dealer was so persuasive banks provided him with millions in return for photocopied appra...
May 14, 2012: Morning

If Greece fails, global markets will plummet, and could take Obama’s re-election hopes with them. Europe slips in survey of the nations people admire most—China is on the rise. Cultu...

More at The Morning News »

Phil Zimbardo on Time

Now I love Phil even more.
Greatest Literary Love Scenes

On Pandalous I find a conversation about the "Greatest Literary Love Scenes" and posted there, this passage from For Whom The Bell Tolls (which I've never read): Then there was the smell of heather c...
Extreme Solitude by Jeffrey Eugenides

Years ago I too was given a copy of A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes, one of the singularly least romantic books about romance, as evidenced by the quote, also read to me once, at the end of this...
Unordered List AGAIN

It's been a long time since I've posted an unordered list, and since I'm already on a roll blogging today, here you go: Predictive Modeling Warns Drivers One Hour before Jams Occur "IBM is about to...
To do great things

I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all to matter, to count, to stand for someth...

More at Caterina.net »

Announcing the hibernation of lessig.org/blog (from the blogs-deserve-a-sabbatical-too department)

So my blog turns seven today. On August 20, 2002, while hiding north of San Francisco working on the Eldred appeal, I penned my first (wildly and embarrassingly defensive) missive to Dave. Some 1753 e...
Remix supporting a Medieval world (as critics have insisted)

Five-year old Felix's mom, Kierstin, sent me this image a bit ago. "I thought you would get a laugh out of these photos where your Remix became a crucial supporting wall for a Medieval Castle, manned...
REMIX unmixed

Dave Wiley has an interesting idea he calls unmixing (in contrast to remixing), which he demonstrates with the first bit of REMIX. Basically, using Yahoo's BOSS, he reassociates every three words to a...
The struggle to improve PACER

So you're likely not to recognize the term -- in all caps, PACER -- but if you do, the amazing sorts at the Stanford Law Library are trying hard to organize attention to getting this essential service...
Speak Out on (Canadian) Copyright

The wonderful Michael Geist has a site to facilitate organizing and thought around "the first Canadian public consultation on copyright policy since 2001."...

More at Lessig »

How To Spot A Liar

I'm not going to get into the subjective nature of truth, what's appropriate in theater, or Mr. Daisey's seemingly pathological need to nail himself to a cross. I just wanted to share this one observa...
Flickr: Domini Domini Domini, You’re All Christians Now

Flickr has added a Christian signifier to my virtual home and I have no way to remove it. In the eyes of the rest of the community, Flickr has turned me into a Christian.Read this post online:Flickr:...
Swan Swan Hummingbird

Could this be it? An insight to what those words mean, finally, after 20 years of them rattling around in my brain? Could I be right? Only Michael Stipe could know for sure. Read this post online:Swan...
Gelatinous Spooge, 1997-2011

In her prime, Spoo was a lap-warmer, fearless explorer, lover of boxes, occasional houseplant destroyer, hunter of moths, neighborhood cat brawler, and playmate to our dog, Chieka.Read this post onlin...
Our Generation’s John Lennon

The other day I was talking to my uncle. He's my dad's age, a boomer. I was struggling to explain the importance of Steve Jobs' death to my generation ("Generation X", more or less) when this popped o...

More at Powazek »

Ignore Hitler

Draw Something spawns a meme; I like the meta one [via] ...
Austin Seraphin on learning echolocation

he's a real-life Daredevil ...
Mat Honan's feature on Yahoo's mismanagement of Flickr

a depressing read, especially while seeing the team release great new features ...
Make interviews Bunnie Huang on the end of Chumby

sad end to a promising product, I received one of the prototypes at Foo Camp in 2006 ...
Rebecca Sugar's Singles

file under: scenarios I'd like to play in a videogame ...

More at Waxy »

Why The Bay Area Needs The Bay Lights

For a few months now, I’ve been talking to my new neighbors here in California about my old friend Leo Villareal’s proposed epic installation on the Bay Bridge, commemorating the Bridge’s 75th a...
Anatomy Of An Idea

People often ask me about my research techniques. You would think this would be a relatively straightforward question, but the truth is that I have to keep changing my answer, because my techniques ar...
Babble Joins Disney

On Tuesday morning, Disney announced that it had acquired the parenting site, Babble,com, which was founded a few years ago by my old friends Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman. I should say up front tha...
Thoughts on Steve Jobs, The Book

I just finished reading Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography on the flight back to SFO a few minutes ago, and wanted to jot down a few responses while they were fresh in my head. The first is that w...
Introducing Findings

I have been dreaming about new tools that would help me capture what I was reading for almost as long I have been reading. During my college years, I lost a semester trying to build an epic Hypercard...

More at Steven Berlin Johnson »

We're hiring: Help us significantly improve conversion and retention

We’re looking for another teammate. This time we’re looking for someone who is completely focused on improving conversion and retention. You love moving the needle, one small step at a tim...
Taking the Pain Out of MySQL Schema Changes

A common obstacle we face when releasing new features is making production schema changes in MySQL. Many new features require additional columns or indexes. Running an “ALTER TABLE” in MyS...
Basecamp in Antarctica

We have customers around the world doing extraordinary things with our software, but Ben Saunders is taking it to a whole new level. Ben and his team are using Basecamp to organize an expedit...
Sortfolio: Going once, going twice...

A year ago we put Sortfolio up for sale. We entertained a variety of offers, met with a few potential suitors in person, and negotiated numbers. Ultimately nothing came together. Then we shelved t...
VIDEO: Keynote by David from RailsConf 2012 on progress…

Keynote by David from RailsConf 2012 on progress, curiosity, fear, and the danger of easy-bake ovens.

More at Signal v Noise »

The Coming Meltdown in College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Any Time Soon

This is what I see when i think about higher education in this country today: Remember the housing meltdown ? Tough to forget isn’t it. The formula for the housing boom and bust was simple. A lo...
Some Olympic Thoughts

NBA and the Olympics...
The Greatest Business Risk You Don’t Know About – Your Business Will Be Sued Over Patents

Your business is at risk. For a lot of money. No matter what type of business you are in, you are susceptible to a patent infringement lawsuit. The worst part about this risk is that there is noth...
Dont Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort

I hear it all the time from people. “I’m passionate about it.” “I’m not going to quit, It’s my passion”. Or I hear it as advice to students and others “...
I Hope Yahoo Crushes Facebook in its Patent Suit

Anyone who reads this blog knows how much I hate patent laws. I think 99pct of the time they are anti-competitive, corruptive, impede creativity and innovation and can kill small businesses. I think...

More at Blog Maverick »

Top 5 Economic Charts of 2011

Wall Street Journal: Top Five Economic Charts of 2011....
Identical twins, one of them transgendered

Wow, read the story of the identical twin boys, one of whom has known from early childhood that she was transgendered. It is hard to imagine what this family has faced, but how blessed Nicole and Jona...
Why is the USPS failing?

I was speculating to my husband recently on the reasons for the dire financial straits of the United States Postal Service. Well, the Internet, of course, but the alternative delivery services seem to...
How to make Star Wars cookies with ordinary cookie cutters

Yes, it's time to make Star Wars cookies using holiday cookie cutters. You can thank me later....
How N.K. Jemisin and Anthony Durham

If Tolkien were Black. African-American authors N.K. Jemisin and Anthony Durham are reimagining the fantasy genre - and in the process, winning awards and selling lots of books. I'm putting them on my...

More at Rebeccas Pocket »

Why I Love UX Week

Every year, San Francisco company Adaptive Path hosts a conference called UX Week, and I sometimes get to go for a day or so. This year, I was at the opening and the closing days of the conference, an...
Library

A few weeks ago, I rejoined the Library and promptly put several books from my Amazon wishlist on the "request" list. They were sent to my local library (the Chinatown branch, which is near...
Sindy's 1972 -1976 Wardrobe

Oh I love the Internet. I was daydreaming about my favorite doll growing up: Britain's answer to Barbie - Sindy, and I decided to see if I could find images of the outfits I had for her when I was you...
Jamie and Me

This is classic procrastinator behavior. When I was in Ireland, fellow lazy blogger Dave and I made a pact that we would do two blog posts before the end of February, so what do I do? Two posts in one...
Tim

We found out on Friday January 29th that my dad's scan had revealed colon cancer which had spread to his liver. By Monday, February 1st I was on a plane home. I just couldn't stand to not be there. I...

More at Wexford Girl »

Short Take: The Minimalist Design of This is My Jam

(Roy Plumbley on the virtual desert Island he created for Desert Island Disks) Thousands of apps try to embed themselves into the successful ecosystem of bigger social networks by Tweeting or adding t...
Use Case Study House #1 - A house designed like a web application

User Experience House Design Since I’m both an architect and a web product person, I thought it would be fun to design a building the way that web applications are. Web Design vs Building &...
Internet Pawn

For me, there is no startup that gloms onto the depressing zeitgeist more wretchedly than Borro which follows mockney Wonga into the foggy world of dodgy debt - the very thing that got us into this me...
I Used to Love Trains

I used to love trains, in secret I think that I became an architect because I spent so much time building infrastructure for my model railway set, as a kid. Having watched trains crawl along at the sp...
Tech Crunch

We are experiencing a tech boom during a financial crisis. Not just a mere slump but what threatens to be a continuation of global financial meltdown that started with sub-prime mortgages in the US an...

More at David Galbraith »

Maurice Sendak: "Cannibals and Psychotics"

I remember the first time I saw a Maurice Sendak book. It was In The Night Kitchen. I was eleven or twelve, and had been given a small allowance by my parents to buy my littlest sister, who did n...
An extremely exciting week

So, last year I recorded a piece for a This American Life episode about adventure. It's a little memoir about adventures, and how I mostly don't have them.It wasn't the piece I originally wr...
Happy Birthday Amanda, and the Future of Music

This makes me so happy:It's such a sweet, funny video. Even if you have no interest in my wife or what she does, you should click on it and watch it.Her Kickstarter went live at 7 this morning,...
Popular Writers: A Stephen King interview.

I interviewed Stephen King for the UK Sunday Times Magazine. The interview appeared a few weeks ago. The Times keeps its site paywalled, so I thought I'd post the original version of the interview her...
Slow Motion Bees...

I've been a very bad blogger recently. I promised myself that I would simply finish the thing I was working on and then blog again, but by the time I finished I had such a ridiculous backlog of things...

More at Neil Gaiman »

My greatest triumph!

Sorry. I can't resist. John Carson, a fellow runner from Canada, unearthed this photo from the archives of the Toronto Star. It's the finals of the 1500 meters at the Ontario 14-year-old championships...
Drug Development

On Forbes.com, the drug industry analyst Avik Roy has written a comment on my piece "The Treatment" in last week's New Yorker. A few small points, in response. Roy is of the impression that...
Speaking Tour!

I will be doing a short tour of the U.K. next week, speaking on a brand new mystery topic! I'll be in Edinburgh on Sunday May 9th, Oxford on the 10th, Manchester on the 11th and Newcastle on the 12th.
Pinker, Round Two

In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Steven Pinker responds to my description of him as occupying the “lonely ice floe of IQ fundamentalism”: What Malcolm Gladwell calls a “lonely ice floe�...
Letting Igons be Igons

From "Blowing Up," by Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, April 22,2002...

More at Malcom Gladwell »

Shared: Fungible

Fungible: An excellent, must-read treatise by Stijn Debrouwere about how journalism is slowly being replaced by other services which perform journalistic duties (inform, entertain, etc.) without being...
Shared: The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever

The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever: Fascinating article about how memories work and how we are very close to being able to biologically destroy them.“Memory comes with a natural upd...
Shared: How The Huffington Post Ate the Internet

How The Huffington Post Ate the Internet: This is the best article about the Huffington Post that’s ever been written. If you care at all about business or the news industry, it’s an absolute must...
Shared: The Daily Show on Easter vs. Passover. When you’re done…

The Daily Show on Easter vs. Passover. When you’re done with part one (above), make sure and check out part two. I guarantee it’s the funniest thing you’ve seen all week.Comments...
Shared: The “worst” baseball cards in history… which…

The “worst” baseball cards in history… which of course means they’re the best. The Bill Pecota one is particularly great. Thanks Fleer! (via @gruber)Comments...

More at Mike Industries »

How To Fix Popchips' Racist Ad Campaign

Update: I just got off the phone with Popchips founder Keith Belling, who was sincere and contrite as he offered a thoughtful, apologetic response that...
Why you can't trust tech press to teach you about the tech industry

If there were one lesson I'd want to impress upon people who are interested in succeeding in the technology industry, it would be, as I've...
A Note About Panther Pride

Update: The students did it! The re-vote from the board yielded a unanimous vote in favor of forming the Coexist club. I'm sincerely thankful to...
Readability, Instapaper, the Network and the Price we Pay

This is a long-ass post. In summary: Readability and Instapaper are two awesome reading tools that actually aren't in competition since Readability is mostly a...
A Golden Era of Prince Scholarship

Despite his obviously profound impact on popular culture, Prince has generally not been the subject of nearly as much academic study as his peers such...

More at Anil Dash »

helping the kids think about infinity

The "all the grains of sand on all the beaches" metaphor is played out. What we need are some new ways to help kids think about infinity. Here are a few that I might use with mine. * Every pixel...
competing v. fulfilling expectations

I was listening to an episode of The Talk Show (I know, I know…) with Chairman Gruber and John Siracusa on the way to work this morning, the one where they talk about Mountain Lion. A good part of t...
status updates

It's my last day at SAY Media. Proud to have been part of such an incredible team here and at Six Apart.— Michael Sippey (@sippey) January 20, 2012 It's time for new challenges: very excited to join...
notes on pandodaily

I've been enjoying PandoDaily this week; kudos to Sarah Lacy. (Disclosure: I've enjoyed her chicken[1].) I am seriously impressed with how much great content they've produced in these first few days,...
everything and nothing

When I visit the beach I come back with pictures of the kids and sand in my shoes. When Kevin Kelly visits the beach he comes back with blog posts like this one, A Whole Lot of Nothing: > Water...

More at Sippey »

→ Responsive Images and Web Standards at the Turning Point

I like the proposed <picture> markup except for the tag name. “Picture” is much more specific than “image”, and I bet a very large portion of images used on the web are n...
→ Sponsor: Igloo Software

Work isn’t a place – it’s what you do. And you might work on a lot of devices – a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad – in a lot of places. You might work on the road or maybe from home (with y...
→ World Aeropress Championship winning recipes

The AeroPress recipe (really) at the World AeroPress Championship (yes, really) that took home the Gold AeroPress (these are all real things) this year is remarkably simple. I tried it, and the resul...
The rumored thin 15” MacBook Pro with Retina, USB 3

9to5 Mac posted a rumor about the next 15” MacBook Pro being in a much thinner (but not wedge-shaped) case, having a Retina display of an unspecified resolution, and having USB 3 ports. It soun...
→ Build and Analyze: I Had A Baby, You Launched An App

This week’s podcast: the new 5by5 Radio app, why Apple may not want to add paid upgrades to the App Store, the infinite market for podcast clients and to-do apps, Instacast’s in-app-purcha...

More at Marco Arment »

The Citizens Agenda in Campaign Coverage

The idea is to learn from voters what those voters want the campaign to be about, and what they need to hear from the candidates to make a smart decision. So you go out and ask them: "what do you...
The Afghanistan War Logs Released by Wikileaks, the World's First Stateless News Organization

"In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerf...
Objectivity as a Form of Persuasion: A Few Notes for Marcus Brauchli

"Reporting can be trusted if it is cured of opinion. Reporting can be trusted if it is dusted with opinion. Or even completely interwoven with opinion. It can lead to conclusions. Or the conclus...
The Politico Opens the Kimono. And then Pretends it Never Happened.

"Think about what the Politico is saying: an experienced beat reporter would probably not want to 'burn bridges' with key sources by telling the world what happens when those sources let their gu...
Fixing The Ideology Problem in Our Political Press: A Reply to The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder

"If your job is to make the case, win the negotiations, decide what the community should do, or maintain morale, that is one kind of work. If your job is to tell people what's going on, and equip...

More at Press Think »

Creepy

I just reamed an ITN producer who emailed me this clip about Google seeking a patent for using background noise in audible search requests and wanted to talk to me “off the record” (why he...
Consumer Reports’ moral panic

I’m very disappointed in Consumer Reports for falling into the moral panic about privacy and social services. Today it issues a survey and a Reefer Madness report that covers no new ground, only...
Social (network) pressure

By adding an organ-donation tool to Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is setting up a dynamic of social pressure for virtue. Is that always good? Now getting us to sign our drivers’ licenses so our vita...
Journalism Inside®

I wonder whether we should be teaching journalists to embed themselves and their abilities into the world rather than always making the world come to them. Thinking out loud… The other day, when...
A new BuzzMachine

At long last, and by popular demand (and disgust at my old design), BuzzMachine is reborn thanks to my son and webmaster, Jake. After I’d let my old design go to seed, he didn’t much like...

More at Buzz Machine »

Unseen Narratives: The TEDSalon in London

Books, film, art, food — and science and social issues — were at the center of the talks at the sixth TEDSalon in London. The event took place on May 10 in a packed Unicorn Theatre, with t...
Reports from the road: TED Talent Search in Nairobi …

As the TED team travels around the world hosting salons in 14 cities, we’re collecting great local stories. Start with this Storify from Nanjira Sambuli that rounds up tweets from TED@Nairobi: F...
Life on Mars: Fellows Friday with Angelo Vermeulen

When artist and scientist Angelo Vermeulen (watch his TED Talk) first started weaving together biological and technological systems in his artwork, little did he know he’d someday be asked to consid...
Watch Vidal Sassoon’s moving, funny TEDx talk

At TEDxOxford last September, legendary stylist Vidal Sassoon, who died this week at 84, shared this moving talk about his extraordinary life. As a YouTube commenter writes: “A good way to re...
Revealed! Speaker lineup for TEDGlobal 2012: Radical Openness

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the TEDGlobal 2012 speaker lineup — exploring the theme “Radical Openness.” As the world becomes ever more interconnected, the ways we relate,...

More at Ted Blog »

May 15, 2012: Afternoon

Germany’s growth helps the eurozone barely avoid returning to recession. Hollande to dine with Merkel in Berlin on his swearing-in day. Part two of “Our French Connection”...
May 15, 2012: Morning

Massachusetts, the most Sweden-like of states, is also one of the most successful in the country. When you have a bank as big as JPMorgan…almost anything could count as “hedging.̶...
Our French Connection

by Rosecrans Baldwin For some Americans, the French way of life is best. And other people simply prefer “freedom fries.” A two-week journey across the U.S.—passing through a handful of t...
May 14, 2012: Afternoon

Economists, scientists team up to find the gene that makes people good at business. Fraudulent Stradivari dealer was so persuasive banks provided him with millions in return for photocopied appra...
May 14, 2012: Morning

If Greece fails, global markets will plummet, and could take Obama’s re-election hopes with them. Europe slips in survey of the nations people admire most—China is on the rise. Cultu...

More at The Morning News »

via http://www.booooooom.com/2009/09/15/goran-jovanovic-photographer/...
via http://gsavis.com/blog/...
via http://cache-01.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/9/2010/05/goldenbookse7enweb.jpg...
via http://cache-02.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/9/2010/05/goldenbookgodfather.jpg...
via http://www.etsy.com/listing/82651704/hardcore-fishing...

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My Demo Tape Proposal by Matt Garczynski

Dear Record Executive, I am aware of the immense number of demo EPs you must receive. Knowing that you are a busy person who does not have time to listen to even a fraction of them, I submit this prop...
Family Practice: An Occasional Column by “Dr.” Amy Fusselman: On the Four Components of a Child’s Psyche; Plus: a Business Proposal and an Open Call by Amy Fusselman

OK, Worldwide Web. Today we are going to just take this parenting situation apart and clean its clock. As you have probably already guessed, my medical expertise is a bit limited. However, my medicali...
Monologue: A Frustrated Chief Executive Engineer Addresses His Staff Entirely Composed of Disney Imagineers by Liz Arcury

I’ve gathered everyone in the lobby this morning to address some ongoing issues that are difficult to bring up during the day-to-day hustle and bustle. Being hired at Stantec Incorporated means that...
The Being and Nothingness Network: Social Media for Existentialists by Michael H. Rowe

How Do You Begin Your Being and Nothingness Experience? You already have. You were born, and your inheritance is pain. Make sure you are connected to the Internet. Your Being and Nothingness Network F...
The Peculiar Arab Chronicles: I Think My Mom Just Died by Nour Ali Youssef

I heard a loud thud a minute ago, the kind you would expect when a short, plump woman falls on uncarpeted, ceramic floor. It was followed by the sound of breaking glass. I would go check, but I am rea...

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