December 2009
30 posts
“The medieval philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas noted the irony that in...”
– Ellen Ruppel Shell in Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture
“Whether craftsmanship even matters in our postindustrial world depends on who...”
– Ellen Ruppel Shell in Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, a book that’s rocking my world
“How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking...”
– Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide
1 tag
“The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence—the...”
– Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide
Brian fills my wine glass
Me: A little more.
[Brian pours.]
Me: A little bit more.
[Brian pours.]
Me: Just a little more; it's a small glass.
[Brian pours to the rim.]
Brian: Now it's SARCASTICALLY full.
1 tag
1 tag
“Deep reading — the kind that you engage in when you get lost in the syntax and...”
– Wife/Mother/Worker/Spy - The Endless First Chapter - NYTimes.com (via karigee) (via whilebird) (via literarypiano) (via kendalllouise) (via nihilnoetia) (via originalface)
“Episcopalians are not all liberal nor are they all conservative. We are not the...”
– Mother Kate’s Meditations: The Unfundamentalist Church
play with, learn about, create (goals)
monicalm:
I’ve condensed Emily’s thoughtful list of goals, but it provides me with the perfect reason to recommend my favorite book ever about department stores (and John Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, specifically): William Leach’s Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (1994). It’s all about color, glass, and light and totally mesmerizing.
The history of...
3 tags
“1954. You don’t get years like that anymore. It was my favorite year....”
– The opening voiceover from My Favorite Year
play with, learn about, create (goals)
The past few months have been a time of intense reflection and exploration. I’ve been meandering, spending time with friends and loved ones, reading whatever catches my fancy, and developing new obsessions. I’m finally starting to pull my thoughts together and think about what I want to do next. Here’s the left-brain list.
Play with/achieve some level of competency in:
Adobe...
“The removal of faults is only a small part of the improvement process.”
– Edward De Bono, Serious Creativity
“I was lying to you when I named this book. Marketers aren’t liars. They...”
– Seth Godin, who presumably wrote the above with a straight face, in All Marketers are Liars. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need a stiff drink and possibly a nap.
“Having heroes is wildly important. To be able to say, ‘that work is...”
– Artist/designer/director Mike Mills in Beautiful Losers
“The gallery and my entire being were so inextricably linked … it was such...”
– Aaron Rose, founder of Alleged Gallery, in his documentary Beautiful Losers
1 tag
“Kate had been a cop long enough to know that likable people can be villains,...”
– Laurie R. King, To Play the Fool (my current “fun” read)
2 tags
Brian and I make dinner plans
Me: Does chicken pot pie sound good?
Brian: No. If chickens were supposed to come in pies, they'd be round.
3 tags
“If you live in the United States you do not really need to leave. It’s all...”
– “Don’t leave the United States,” one of Simon Doonan’s “tricks of the trade” from his book Confessions of a Window Dresser.
2 tags
“Though he’s famous for food that often resembles high art, [Thomas] Keller...”
– A Great Chef Fires Up The Heat, ‘Ad Hoc’ Style : NPR
I heard this story more than three weeks ago, but what Thomas Keller said about ketchup keeps popping into my head. (Initially I thought I’d read it in this lovely piece in the New York Times about Keller’s...
3 tags
The Great Exhibiton (1851)
The exhibition’s displays were designed to highlight the best goods and industrial advances each country had to offer: German porcelain, rubber from India, Egyptian carpets, Russian furs, and Roman mosaics; in fact, there was so much to see that they catalog that accompanied the exhibition spanned four volumes.
That the Great Exhibition of 1851 was a consumer paradise in many ways...
“Many of us have walked into a Chili’s with some feeling of guilt because...”
– Sam Pocker, from his book Retail Anarchy (he also maintains a blog of the same name). I have (at least) a slightly different take on almost every argument Pocker presents, including the above, but he won me over by at least being thought provoking. If insufferably so.
