“Ideas need oxygen.”
—The Event - Do Lectures
March 2012
11 posts
“Listen, I take care of myself. I am in better shape than when I was bonging kegs in college and eating Penn Station for lunch. Sometimes I even cook. My refrigerator usually has more than hot sauce, celery and a NuvaRing in it. With that said, there is no shame in standing naked in your kitchen dipping french bread into mug full of olive oil.”
—McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Open Letters: An Open Letter to People Who Judge My Single, Post-College Lifestyle.
“
Obama: — doing good. And I knew about Jeremy before you did, or everybody else did, because Arne Duncan, my Secretary of Education, was captain of the Harvard team. And so way back when, Arne and I were playing and he said, I’m telling you, we’ve got this terrific guard named Jeremy Lin at Harvard. And then one of my best friends, his son is a freshman at Harvard, and so when he went for a recruiting trip he saw Lin in action. So I’ve been on the Jeremy Lin bandwagon for a while.
BS: Are you taking credit for “Linsanity”? It kind of feels like you are a little bit.
Obama: I can’t take credit for it, but I’m just saying I was there early.
” —B.S. Report Transcript: Barack Obama - The Triangle Blog - Grantland
“While some have complained that Katniss’ calculating nature makes her off-putting, to me this difficulty is the very soul of the book. We live in a world where in the same year, Twitter is used to foment the Arab Spring, and it turns out that a popular lesbian blogger in Syria is a white guy from Georgia. The intersections of media, reality, perception and violence are very real in our world. Katniss’ internal monologue about her calculations and considerations is this global conflict writ at the individual scale.”
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Hmm. I’d never really thought about this parallell while reading the Hunger Games (because I was way too into the actual Hunger Games), but something to keep in mind for the second read. And the movie.
Can The Hunger Games really capture all of Katniss Everdeen?
“During her tenure as a fax flinger, she had an idea that would end up making her a very, very wealthy woman — the stretchy, shaping thighs and legs of nylons, but without the attached stockings. She didn’t tell anyone about her billion dollar idea for a year after it first occurred to her because she didn’t want to be pooh-poohed out of it by naysayers, and when she approached a patent attorney, he asked her if he was on Candid Camera. It took her two years to convince a factory to manufacture a run of her shapewear. But Blakely was undaunted. Now, for better or worse, the retooled girdle of the twenty-first century is now available in 35 countries and in 200 varieties.”
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Inspiring.
Inventor of Spanx is World’s Youngest Female Self-Made Billionaire
“On the next day, Saturday, March 10th at 3pm, the tent will begin its first phase of demolition. The tarps and fabric, enduring over 30 years of New York weather, both cultural and environmental, will be taken down forever. In a gothic burial ceremony, the “Flesh” of the tent will be peeled from the skeletal “Bones” of the structure and placed in a coffin. The coffin will be paraded around the block by pallbearers, while a funeral march is strummed by guitarist and tent-matriarch Lorraine Leckie. The coffin will be chained to the inside fence, and the remaining hollow structure will be painted fire-engine red in the days to follow.”
—Billy’s Antiques Will Bid Farewell to Its Tent with a Gothic Funeral - Discontinued - Racked NY
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But Wittstock says NewsiT was built around an important insight: “Every other user-generated content type play that we’ve seen over time expects regular folks to be journalists — and we don’t.”
So the startup doesn’t expect any of its members to create a complete news report on their own. Instead, it breaks a story up into manageable tasks, then assigns multiple members to each task. Members are rewarded with points and badges for both contributing and reading.
For example, the site is currently working on a story about the effect of digital media on politics. To participate, members can answer some basic questions, like whether they trust mainstream media or friends and social networks more as a source of political information. Or they can get more involved, by actually interviewing a panelist at SXSW about their opinions.
” —NewsiT Raises $500K To Gamify Crowd Journalism | TechCrunch