January 2010
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“When you make a thing, a thing that is new, it is so complicated making it that...”
– Pablo Picasso quoted by Gertrude Stein in Jonah Lehrer’s “Proust was a Neuroscientist.”
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“Iris describes her own letters and airgraphs – single quarto sheets distributed...”
– “The letters of Iris Murdoch,” Times Online
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“… boredom is woven into the very fabric of the literary enterprise. We...”
– “Our Boredom, Ourselves,” in NYTimes.com, where I learnt that fear of boredom is a condition called ‘thaasophobia.’
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Собаки в метро →
www.metrodog.ru, where Russians post clips and pics of the stray dogs who have learned to ride the Moscow subway.
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“In Web 2.0 jargon the words “friend” and “community” are...”
– AdPulp.com
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“The trance-like state we fall into while following the undirected path of links...”
– Kevin Kelly
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“All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this -as in other...”
– John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous via Marginal Utility
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“The internet helps drives a wedge between information and meaning: Previously we...”
– Internet Thought via Marginal Utility
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“Doing stuff. Doing stuff because it’s healthy to do stuff. Doing stuff because...”
– William Pym in the essay ”Let’s Hear it for the Boys,” for Big Brother, an accompanying artist book for Alex Da Corte’s Activity #91 (via britticisms)
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“It breaks my heart when I talk to energized young people who idolize the icons...”
– Jaron Lanier via Marginal Revolution
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“… at the heart of shabby chic lies the admirable, classless truth that...”
– “Old, pretty things have given way to new, ugly nothings.” The death of ‘shabby chic’ The Spectator
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“Login to Twitter. Login to Facebook. What you see is a world that you’ve...”
– Danah Boyd
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“Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is...”
– Danah Boyd
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Cool
Taking party photos and printing them for your friends instead of blogging them.
Reading cookbooks like novels and not necessarily cooking the recipes.
Introducing two real life friends you know will love each other.
If you see a solo tourist trying to take their own photo in front of a landmark, stopping and taking it for them.
Fool
Flashmobs put on by commercial enterprises or...
“BEEEEEEP. Hello Laura, this is your mother. Your father’s angina’s a...”
– I sometimes find myself thinking of this answering machine message Laura’s mum left her on High Fidelity, and I repeat “your father’s angina” to try and nail an imitation of that sinister, singsong voice.
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“When something becomes cool, it almost immediately becomes uncool, it’s...”
– A 15 year old female from Liverpool on how she defines cool. Via youth researcher Ruby Pseudo
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The sheer scale of human suffering can "inhibit...
Paul Slovic [a psychologist at the University of Oregon] found that when people were shown a picture of a single starving child named Rokia in Mali, they acted with impressive generosity. After looking at Rokia’s emaciated body and haunting brown eyes, they donated, on average, two dollars and fifty cents to Save the Children. However, when a second group of people were provided with a...
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“… social media like Facebook, Twitter, etc. always seem to become extra...”
– Jonah Lehrer on how Charity is Social
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“Virtual life is not real life and it never will be, but this [Avatar] is the...”
– Dr. Stephan Quentzel, psychiatrist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. “Audiences experience ‘Avatar’ blues,” CNN.com
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“As you get older, you revisit the issues that sit with you in the course of your...”
– Antony Hegarty of Antony & The Johnsons. (via coolidiots)
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“As a girl you grow up seeing yourself in male characters, because...”
– Molly Lambert
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“This waking dream we call the Internet also blurs the difference between my...”
– Kelvin Kelly (via Robin Sloane) on how the internet has changed the way we think. (via lanipauli)