September 11, 2001. I remember staying up past midnight, flipping through my hundred or so cable channels. Everything covered the attack. I went for a walk. TV light flickered from windows of every house. Everyone was up but nobody was out. Except one guy, on a payphone, highlighted by a street light glowing over him, speaking [...]
{ 0 comments }
We have to make a choice: divert more & more energy to avoid & repair leak after leak or come to terms with an open world. # This is the big ethical and practical choice we need to confront. Every time we choose to keep even the smallest secrets we sow seeds that’ll grow into [...]
{ 0 comments }
Revitalizing downtown is an ever-relevant topic in London, as I’m sure it is in most cities. (There may be cities where downtown isn’t an important part of the story; those are cities I don’t want to live in.) Last night we had a bit of a thing here as part of Downtown London and the [...]
{ 0 comments }
Lately I’ve been scouring the nets and local book-lenders for guidance and inspiration on writing. I stumbled on this at Nieman Storyboard [recommended, and the source of this post's title]: Now, just as I don’t know what a story is going to be when I start out working on it, I have no idea how to [...]
{ 1 comment }
Complain or celebrate if you like but you’re wasting your time. What matters is what we do about this — or rather, what we do with this. Because if promoting creativity is important to you, as it is for me, then I hope you’ll be open to exploring ways to reconceive what it means and [...]
{ 3 comments }
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields One of 2010′s most talked written-about books. For anyone interested in writing and storytelling this might be worth owning and occasionally flipping through for inspiration. A lot of great insights about truth and fiction — and whether either can really exist in pure form — much of which [...]
{ 0 comments }
Tyler Cowen started this meme, which I noticed via Michael Martin. Arnold Kling took it up as well. I’ve already written a very long post about all of the books that influenced me. The books on this list are by no means the ones I love or respect the most. Some of them influenced me in [...]
{ 0 comments }
Yesterday I read a really interesting story about a project to develop a new tool for researchers at the massive CERN laboratory (the folks who made that gigantic particle accelerator in Switzerland) to collaborate and share expertise more effectively. It’s a great complement to what John Seely Brown and John Hagel recently wrote about growing [...]
{ 1 comment }
Generativity: maybe the most important word we’ll use in the next 10 years. It applies to all aspects of the challenges we face: social, technological, cultural, intellectual, economic. There’s a big article in the newest Atlantic that got me thinking about it: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America: If it persists much longer, this [...]
{ 1 comment }
Literally! Out of all the things buzzing in my head for a “new decade” post, the idea I want to highlight most is the increasing importance of making stuff. It’s been germinating in my mind via MakerCulture in the Making by UWO + Ryerson’s online journalism classes. Last week it was crystalized by Umair Haque’s “Builders’ Manifesto” [...]
{ 6 comments }
