a collection of things that caught my eye/ear/brain
see also:
mlarson.orgWhy cities grow and why urban planning as we now practice it won’t really help the millions who are moving to mega-cities (read: slums) in other parts of the world.
Apres Garde is one of my favorite tumblogs.
Hyperbole and a Half: The Four Levels of Social Entrapment. “There is a special kind of awkwardness between two people who don’t know each other well enough to interact effectively, but are familiar enough that ignoring each other’s presence isn’t really an option.”
Single-minded focus too soon can be a hindrance. Better to branch out and learn how to practice and fail well.
Phony wildlife photography warps nature and is rarely revealed.
From historian Daniel Boorstin’s introduction to The Image, his book from 1961:
When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect — we even demand — that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio as we drive to work and expect “news” to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press. Returning in the evening, we expect our house to not only shelter us, but to relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theater, and a bar. We expect our two-week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place; and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a faraway place. We expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night. We expect everybody to feel free to disagree, yet we expect everybody to be loyal, not to rock the boat or to take the Fifth Amendment. We expect everybody to believe deeply in his religion, yet not to think less of others for not believing. We expect our nation to be strong and great and vast and varied and prepared for every challenge; yet we expect our “national purpose” to be clear and simple, something that gives direction to the lives of nearly two hundred million people and yet can be bought in a paperback at the corner drugstore for a dollar.
We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for “excellence,” to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to go to a “church of our choice” and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be a God.
Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never have people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.
A 1910 illustration of how Atlanta’s Peachtree Street would look in 2010. The future is now! « pecanne log.
P.J. O’Rourke goes to Afghanistan.
A Pashtun tribal leader told me that a “problem among Afghan politicians is that they do not tell the truth.” It’s a political system so new that that needed to be said out loud.
Bowie + Keaton. Photo by Steve Schapiro, I believe.
A VICTORY OF SORTS : a newspaper blackout poem by Austin Kleon
This was nicely juxtaposed in my tumblr stream.
