Follow this advice and you’re sure to fulfill your dreams of Broadway stardom in no time, without all of the trifling effort and emotional sacrifice.
Playwright Llewellyn Hinkes dispenses with a hapless write-in question. Sure, there’s a lot of snark in there. But there’s also seems to a good point buried beneath all the shrillness. Plus it’s hilarious.
In a blog post last month, I mentioned the pep-up power of Merlin Mann – specifically, the pep-up power of a specific speech on the subject of Getting to Work that he delivered at MaxFunCon.
Here’s a recording of the speech and Mann’s writeup. Listen, read and be moved.
At this rate, I may as well just make a post category for David Foster Wallace.
A personal essay published in the December 1991 issue of Harper’s Magazine, for your reading enjoyment.
This book contains highlights from Russian artist Vladimir Arkhipov’s collection of unique artifacts. Objects made by ordinary Russians inspired by a lack of immediate access to manufactured goods during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I’d like to get my hands on a copy.
I dare you to tell me you don’t want one. I dare you.
ps: Make sure you watch the video
Just like the title says. Saul Bass – a graphic designer who did a lot of work with Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, in addition to many other directors – is responsible for some pretty iconic stuff.
Timothy Egan, writing like Cormac McCarthy from Hell, tells the class how he spent his summer vacation.
Any rational human being would be tempted to see this as another eco-stunt, but listen: Egan gave up technology only because technology brings news (news being the enemy, temporarily). That’s it.
His findings are more poetic than scientific.
The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert tears into the trendy practice of Thoreauvian eco-stunts – which typically consist of middle class white people voluntarily forsaking things in the name of conservation. And book deals.
Kolbert’s piece isn’t the first such criticism that I’ve read (that last link was to an excellent Mother Jones piece published last year) but hers is easily my favorite.
Today, an essay from The Morning News:
America has a problem with death; zombies have a problem with life. After seeing more than 60 zombie films, Johnathon Williams explains the difference.
Related to the much-discussed When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection.
Part IV of the Armageddon Series. Post title is fairly self-explanatory.
Michael Erard on the troubling effects of entertainment that rewards short attention spans.
We need a Ronald Reagan of attention, someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.
via Ideas.
Continuing my ongoing Armageddon Series, here’s some brand new information on what’s killing the honey bees. A teaser: it isn’t just one specific thing (i.e. cell phones).
For those of you who are just joining us, here’s why you should care: the extinction of honey bees will directly lead to ecological collapse and, thus, the end of the human race.
Newsweek’s Johannah Cornblatt confirms what we already suspected: that, for all our obsessive communicating and networking, loneliness is at an all-time high.
By one measure, Cornblatt writes, the rate of loneliness (defined as the inability to identify a single person in which to confide) in Americans has tripled since 1985.
This one’s for all the theoretical physics fans in the house.
Read along as Seed editor and confessed aficionado of pop-physics Elizabeth Cline tries to make some sense of Why Does E=mc²?, a new book by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw.
Guest blogger (and theoretical astrophysicist) Ethan Siegel responds.
Obama sips it. Paris Hilton loves it. Mary J. Blige won’t sing without it. How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?
Mother Jones’s excellent exposé on Fiji Water.
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