May 2013
6 posts
“Am strikingly good looking but not stuck up about it. I also have a sense of...”
– I posted a Craigslist ad for my room, and this is an actual quote from a response I got.
6 tags
When we long to move the stars to pity
Virginia Heffernan’s essay on Instagram in the latest issue of Wired is a beaut:
When we live only in language—in tweets and status updates, in zingers, analysis, and debate—we come to imagine the world to be much uglier than it is. But Instagram, if you use it right, will stealthily persuade you that other humans—and nature, and food, and three-dimensional objects more generally—are worth...
April 2013
12 posts
1 tag
Ilya Zhitomirskiy: Life, death, and free culture... →
I went to middle school with Ilya Zhitomirskiy. By simple coincidence of our last names, we sat next to each other every morning in seventh-grade homeroom. He moved away after a year or two, and his life in Massachusetts is compressed into a three-word dependent clause in the Fortune story. While I did not know him well, a few of my friends would receive Happy New Year phone calls from him for...
March 2013
8 posts
1 tag
2 tags
February 2013
1 post
January 2013
3 posts
“Twitter is almost entirely a projected fantasy life of people you think or wish...”
– Man Hates Self, Twitter | The Awl
December 2012
3 posts
“A method, operable in a computer system, for determining a background noise...”
– Sympathy for the patent agent.
1 tag
“My parents and I talked mostly about whether I was eating and sleeping enough,...”
– Chang-Rae Lee learns to make a proper Manhattan with the father of his college girlfriend.
November 2012
5 posts
3 tags
Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Munchausen
For the most part, mental illness is an amplification of behaviors and beliefs that are normal in moderation. The DSM is, as such, a catalog of human nature taken to the extreme.
Like most people who think too much, I worry that the loosening of a screw here or there could send me off the mental deep end. That’s why I was uneasy reading The Strangers’ feature on Munchausen syndrome, a...
Feeling this so hard today.
DO YOU WANT TO RECEDE DEEPER INTO THE COMFORTS OF THE STATUS QUO OR DO YOU WANT TO BE A BIG GIRL?
— Jenny Holzer, Mom (@JennyHolzerMom) October 4, 2012
October 2012
8 posts
Now this is how you write a hurricane advisory →
SOME IMPORTANT NOTES...
1. IF YOU ARE BEING ASKED TO EVACUATE A COASTAL LOCATION BY STATE
AND LOCAL OFFICIALS, PLEASE DO SO.
2. IF YOU ARE RELUCTANT TO EVACUATE, AND YOU KNOW SOMEONE WHO RODE
OUT THE `62 STORM ON THE BARRIER ISLANDS, ASK THEM IF THEY COULD DO
IT AGAIN.
3. IF YOU ARE RELUCTANT, THINK ABOUT YOUR LOVED ONES, THINK ABOUT
THE EMERGENCY RESPONDERS WHO WILL BE UNABLE TO REACH YOU WHEN...
1 tag
spaceships:
Lana Del Rey > Summertime Sadness...
1 tag
Autumn Comes to California
In California, the accoutrements of fall arrive in chain stores like they do everywhere else in the country. Halloween decorations, gourds, pumpkin spice-flavored everything. This, along with subtly shortening days, are how we know that time has passed. Summer is over.
For a New Englander used to leaves turning scarlet and a chill that begins to nip at the nose, this doesn’t quite feel...
It’s hard to believe sometimes, but a year ago I was living in Israel. I arrived in the country with no real political beliefs about the Middle East, other than the biases of any American who is brought up to think of Israel as a political ally and who personally knew many more Jews than Arabs. By the time I left three months later, my sympathies had undeniably shifted toward the...
Why Do America’s Super-Rich Feel Victimized by... →
Why do the America’s non-rich feel no sympathy for the super-rich?
When Cooperman told me the story of his lucky escape from dental school, he concluded, “I probably make more than a thousand dentists, summed up.” (A thousand dentists would need to work for a decade—and pay no taxes or living expenses—to collectively earn Cooperman’s net worth.)
September 2012
5 posts
Producing a charbroiled hamburger emits the same... →
So far, the team has grilled more than 4,000 pounds of meat since May to study the issue. College students eat most of the food.
“We are a very popular group when we are testing,” Mr. Welch said.
