February 2012
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Henry Miller's Writing Commandments →
Work on one thing at a time until finished.
Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
When you can’t create you can work.
Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
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Leon Wieseltier, on browsing →
Browsing is the opposite of “search.” Search is precise, browsing is imprecise. When you search, you find what you were looking for; when you browse, you find what you were not looking for. Search corrects your knowledge, browsing corrects your ignorance. Search narrows, browsing enlarges. It does so by means of accidents, of unexpected adjacencies and improbable associations. On...
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Malcolm Gladwell on writing about social science →
Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell have both made significant contributions to the public’s understanding of social science research. Gladwell’s books include The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers; Ariely’s titles include Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality.
In 2011, Ariely interviewed Gladwell as part of his “Arming the...
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Rise of the Independents
brycedotvc:
DHH put up a provocative post the other day questioning the societal norms of the startup culture. This isn’t a new rant for him or the 37signals crew, but he touched on a few things I thought worth amplifying. From the post:
The problem is that most “exciting new company” lore is intermingled with that of Startup Culture™. This means it’s hard to find your identity when it doesn’t...
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One's a Crowd →
By ERIC KLINENBERG NY Times Published: February 4, 2012
MORE people live alone now than at any other time in history. In prosperous American cities — Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Minneapolis — 40 percent or more of all households contain a single occupant. In Manhattan and in Washington, nearly one in two households are occupied by a single person.
By international standards,...
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The Lost Art of Doctoring a Baseball →
By Jonah Keri Grantland, February 8, 2012
Some pitchers grew to be known as artists, skilled practitioners who worked for years on mastering their tricky pitches and hiding their guilt.
“I was a big fan of Gaylord Perry,” said Derek Zumsteg, author of the book The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball. “I would go with my dad to see him pitch for the Mariners. Dad would say to me,...
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REVENGE OF THE ECONOBOX: EARLY JAPANESE IMPORTS... →
By RICHARD S. CHANG NY Times Published: February 3, 2012
WHEN Japanese cars and trucks began arriving in the United States in earnest during the 1970s, they were widely seen as disposable.
Reliable, maybe. Future classics? Not likely.
But in the past decade, those bargain-price models from the ’70s and ’80s have been revisited by a generation of enthusiasts who grew up riding in the back...
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Listen to Your Community But Don't Let Them Tell... →
1. 90% of all community feedback is crap.
Let’s get this out of the way immediately. Sturgeon’s Law can’t be denied by any man, woman, child … or community, for that matter. Meta community, I love you to death, so let’s be honest with each other: most of the feedback and feature requests you give us are just not, uh, er … actionable, for a zillion different reasons.
But...
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