Paul Wells claims he’s not a cynic. Like him, I like to believe the label more suited for “the tone that creeps into my writing is optimism dashed again and again.” Lawrence Martin however is not afraid to argue we have good reasons to be cynical about Canadian politics: “Exceptional leaders inspire, stir the imagination, [...]
August 2008
Continued… John McCain and Barack Obama both appear to be men of integrity, having “1. soundness of and adherence to moral principle and character; uprightness; honesty,” according to the most common usage. But that definition of integrity has been reduced over years, having been bandied around in political and business arenas, losing most of the [...]
The man inside the enigma is clearer to me after last night’s speech. The enigma of Barack Obama wasn’t just about the man; its unveiling showed a truth to me about humanity. The power and mystique of Barack Obama is a microcosm of the more general power and mystique of human nature, social unity, progress, [...]
Continued again… Somewhere in all of this there’s a book. I’m not talking about a memoire or another “accidental success” blog-to-book adaptation like Post Secret or Stuff White People Like. My models for using blogging as a platform for bookwriting are Kevin Kelly and Eliezer Yudkowsky. As I wrote here, I just find the immediacy [...]
Continued… “Ya but you could try submitting some of this work — then you’d get noticed, you’d get paid. You could have sent that last post to some journal as creative nonfiction, or you could’ve developed the traffic guru post into a proposal magazine article or something.” Well sure, but then I would have been [...]
My eyes are sore. I’m into a 5-hour-per-night sleep pattern and 90% of my waking time is spent staring at illuminated liquid crystal. Eight hours of that is occupied by a job I needn’t say anything more about, the rest is devoted to reading and writing. Some people might say I’m stupid for doing all [...]
The Olympics is more of a spectacle than a platform for articulating ideas, which is my directive here. So my only post is just going to link to some of the best photos of The Games. The Big Picture at boston.com… and more, and more. Photo Journal at wsj.com… and more, and more, and more. [...]
“When you treat people like idiots, they’ll behave like idiots… Whengovernment takes over the responsibility from citizens, the citizens can’tdevelop their own values anymore. So when you want people to develop theirown values in how to cope with social interactions between people, you haveto give them freedom.” That’s traffic engineer Hans Monderman, as quoted in [...]
Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch (also see this review) is a remarkable comparison to my own ideas. Crouch and I both believe that “after many thousands of years of accumulating human culture, the world which we must make something of—the environment in which we carry on the never-ending human cultural project—is [...]
Modifying Homer Simpson’s famous quip about alcohol, technology is “the cause of – and solution to – all of life’s problems.” The same force that’s generating the flood of information is also producing tools to direct it into more manageable channels. The standard examples (to make sure we’re all up to speed on basics here) [...]
Last week I was scrolling through Dan Brown’s blog on the London Free Press website, pointing to a critique of London indie media outlets by local designer John Leschinski. One of those things I felt an urgent need to comment on. But in my typical fashion, one thought led to another and my comments about [...]
New technologies aren’t just threatening old media, they may be the best chance old media has to save itself. I’m saying this as a fairly conservative and skeptical person. I admit I’ve been largely unimpressed with the content, functionality, and aesthetics of most of what’s out there in blogs and other social media. (My nuanced [...]
