Gertrude Stein on Answers
It's in stone, so it must be true... It’s a little hard to read, so here’s the transcription: There ain’t any answer, there ain’t going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that’s the...
View ArticleKen Robinson on Creativity, Assessment, and De-industrializing Education
TED and Reddit recently ran an online poll to select questions for an interview with Ken Robinson. Here are a few snippets of his responses, with my own emphases in bold, for enhanced skimming: “The...
View ArticleShutter Speed: 11 Days
That’s how long it took the Hubble Space Telescope — pointed towards “absolutely nothing” — to capture the 10,000 galaxies visible in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image: via gizmodo
View ArticleTininess, Unveiled
The focus needs some work... No, that’s not a pinhole-camera photo of someone with a plutonium throat lozenge in their mouth. Researchers at IBM have created the first image of a single molecule using...
View ArticlePredicting the Participatory Nature of Electronic Culture — in 1964
No, I don’t mean Marshall McLuhan. I’m doing some research on Glenn Gould at the moment, and was floored at the prescience of this passage: “Electronic transmission has already inspired a new concept...
View ArticleAttend Attentive
“…I know how difficult it is to refrain from searching. It takes long hours of waiting, indecision, boredom, exasperation, presence and hope. Hours in which one is mainly occupied in being attentive,...
View ArticleThe Airline Industry as a Work of Art
In an excerpt from from his recent project “A Week at The Airport“, Alain de Botton interviews the head of British Airways, and considers the true yield of ‘profitless’ industries: “Considered...
View ArticlePaper Airplanes of Affection
Kate Monahan shares her experience with putting Carolyn See’s “charming note” idea into practice. Quoting See: “These notes are like paper airplanes sailing around the world, and they accomplish a...
View Article“Eventually you get to Sentence Z.”
William Zinsser: The epidemic I’m most worried about isn’t swine flu. It’s the death of logical thinking. The cause, I assume, is that most people now get their information from random images on a...
View ArticleWhat should we work for?
Words once in common use sound archaic. And the names of the famous dead as well: Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus…Scipio and Cato…Augustus…Hadrian and Antoninus, and… Everything faces so quickly,...
View ArticleWe Must Try
A few excerpts from Esquire’s recent profile of Roger Ebert: Ebert is waiting for a Scottish company called CereProc to give him some of his former voice back. He found it on the Internet, where he...
View ArticleTime Every Day To Read
Roget Ebert: As I fell into the rhythm of the words, as I savored the way Dickens was planting his signposts for the development of the plot, as I watched him create unforgettable characters in a page...
View ArticleNot with eyes, but thoughts…
These stanzas from Thomas Traherne’s “Walking” seem to resonate with the idea of small stones: To walk abroad is, not with eyes, But thoughts, the fields to see and prize; Else may the silent feet,...
View Article“…a restless few…”
A reminder of what we will lose if we abandon exploration — despite all its costs:
View ArticleThe Ones Who Do
This ad is almost universally referred to as “The Crazy Ones” – but I prefer to focus on the actions of creative people rather than the pejoratives applied to them. I almost titled it: No Respect for...
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