I was inspired to write this by the introductory essay in Lewis Lapham’s ambitious new periodical, Lapham’s Quarterly, which is about “finding the present in the past, and the past in the present.” “Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.” That [...]
November 2007
I’ve looked through the MIT Technology Review once or twice; I’m not sure why I don’t read it regularly. (I’m going to now.) Maybe because I buy all my magazines at the grocery store checkout. I guess shoppers just aren’t as in to nanostuff and biowhatnot as they used to be. Anyways, it’s available online [...]
I’m quitting for a little while (a few days? a few weeks?) to work on other projects, and to try cleaning more of the amateurisms and arrogancies out of my writing style. Sign up to receive posts by email when I come back. In the meantime, there’s still lots of good bedtime reading in my [...]
I just published (and deleted) a truly stupid post. Which is fine. This blog is all about trying things out, challenging myself to explore and define new boundaries — that I don’t quite understand yet — as opposed to beginning (and then staying) within bounds. Some of the best things are discovered by accident, and [...]
What if someone tried to make a genuinely original contribution to the way we see and think about ideas? How might the rest of us recognize such genuine originality amidst the crowds of people rhetorically posing as original? What are all of us (together and as individuals) hoping to accomplish here?… traffic and subscribers? attention? [...]
Last night I found a post by David Armano about a recent Bob Jacobson speech, promoting a new approach to Information Design: “Designing for Experience.” [links to these are below] As I’ve said elsewhere, there’s not much fundamentally new about these ideas. We can save ourselves from endless theoretical wrangling if we invest a little [...]
Less than a week ago I was trying to think of ways to satirize those popularized metaphors, like The Long Tail, The Tipping Point, and The Black Swan. Yet somehow by accident I’ve invented my own — which might be the silliest one yet — called The Woolly Mammoth. It occurred to me a couple [...]
I’ve got a lot of different sources and concepts converging this week. I’m not sure how (or even if) I might be able to synthesize them. First, there’s OpenSocial, which was the topic of my last post. Second, I want to develop the political and social concepts that I moved towards at the end of [...]
So I missed Grey’s Anatomy last night, which means I won’t have much to converse about with normal folks today. But normal folks might be missing a better storyline. Yesterday, MySpace confirmed they were joining Google’s new OpenSocial initiative, which became public late Tuesday. As TechCrunch put it: “Suddenly, within just the last couple of [...]
