September 2011
1 post
June 2011
9 posts
“Sending more young Americans to college is not a panacea,” says David Autor, an...”
– College Degrees Are Valuable Even for Careers That Don’t Require Them - NYTimes.com
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
May 2011
4 posts
Norman Mailer set the agenda in the 1950s when he wrote that society was divided into two types of people: the hip (“rebels”) and the square (“conformists”). Cool (or hip, alternative, or edgy) here becomes the universal stance of individualism, with the hipster as the resolute nonconformist refusing to bend before the homogenizing forces of mass society. In other words,...
April 2011
1 post
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us...”
– Ira Glass (via nefffy)
March 2011
1 post
February 2011
2 posts
“A poem is like a girl at a party who gets to kiss everybody. No, a poem is a...”
– Charles Simic, Where Is Poetry Going? (via nybooks)
December 2010
1 post
November 2010
1 post
“Then from this dislike of others’ success and despair of their own, their...”
– Seneca On The Authenticity Hoax, on Andrew Potter’s site
September 2010
1 post
“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved...”
– Maurice Sendak (via bobulate)
August 2010
4 posts
“…certain environmentalists delight in proving that every catastrophe -...”
– Slavoj Žižek in the New Scientist. (via Andrew Potter)
“We have all of us considerable regard for our past self, and are not fond of...”
– George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life
“Yamasaki received the World Trade Center commission the year after the Dhahran...”
– via Brad DeLong
“All growth is a leap in the dark: a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without...”
– Henry Miller (via amaclean)
July 2010
1 post
songs you taught me: In which I get worked up abt... →
I got a stuck on this Letterman performance last night. Right around 1:05, when Robyn twists her hands upwards like she’s demonstrating a DNA helix, something happens. Her body starts to hear the music and Robyn begins to move differently, as if she’s perfectly happy to sing but would really…
June 2010
1 post
“Skill development depends on how repetition is organized. This is why music, as...”
– Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
May 2010
1 post
“Personal integrity is always ridiculed by adults and worshipped by adolescents,...”
– Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind
April 2010
1 post
“Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures...”
– Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon
March 2010
1 post
“Life is trouble, only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look...”
– Zorba the Greek
January 2010
5 posts
“Bad prose, like cholera, is a communicable disease.”
– found in Arthur Quinn’s Figures of Speech.
“The proofs of death are statistics and everyone runs the risk of being the first...”
– Borges, from Someone.
After giving the cropse of his wife a decent funferall, the man, really a fornicationist at heart, sinduced his daughter into an act of insect.
Thurber was once asked by a correspondent: “Why did you have a comma in the sentence, ‘After dinner, the men went into the living room’?”… “This particular comma,” Thurber explained, “was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.” -From Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves
“People are too demanding. People want to be in love every single day. What a...”
– Julie Christie, Away From Her
December 2009
3 posts
Ten days
In the monastery
Made me restless.
The red thread
On my feet
Is long and unbroken.
If one day you come
Looking for me,
Ask for me
At the fishmonger’s,
In the tavern,
Or in the brothel.
-Ikkyu
NPR: Adrian Tomine's 'The Donger and Me' →
“Maybe the perversity we all feel in the idea of striving at marriage — the...”
– Elizabeth Weil, A More Perfect Union - NYTimes.com
November 2009
4 posts
October 2009
5 posts
“Recently, a columnist for The New York Observer spotted a redundancy in the...”
– Grammar Gurus and Muphry’s Law
“Hence no force, however great,
can stretch a cord, however fine,
into a...”
– William Whewell, An Elementary Treatise on Mechanics, Vol. 1
Offensive Play: How different are dogfighting and... →
Article by Malcolm Gladwell on football, dog fighting, and brain damage. Disturbing.
“My favorite song is “Re:Stacks,” the last one on the record. I think...”
– Justine Vernon, mother of Justin Vernon (Bon Iver)
September 2009
1 post
“It’s a no-win argument—-that business of what we’re born with...”
– John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
August 2009
2 posts
“`Jesus fucking Christ,’ she says with that flawless hardpan accent of...”
– Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union