January 2012
3 posts
“Even in our weird information-saturated world, there’s so much we don’t, and...”
– Robin Sloan, “The Limits of Knowledge,” Snarkmarket
“I love that there can be an art to nearly everything. I love that geometry is...”
– Sam Potts of Sam Potts Inc et al.
“Anybody who is tempted to question my use of frozen pancake batter might want to...”
– Kenny Shopsin and Carolynn Carreno, Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin
November 2010
1 post
“Every technology is a metaphor. That much is clear. The difficult matter is to...”
– Yara Flores, “Spirit Duplication,” Cabinet Magazine
September 2010
1 post
“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness,...”
– Stephen King, From “What Writing Is,” On Writing
“Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch,...”
– David Mitchell, From the veranda of the room of the last chrysanthemum at the magistracy, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (thx)
June 2010
3 posts
“Of course, the marginalia that corrected, quarrelled, and...”
– Ian Frazier, “Marginal,” The New Yorker
“My T158 is playing someone else’s tune, not mine. I grabbed my CASIO FX...”
– Mr. Joffray to Steven Strogatz, The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned about Life While Corresponding about Math
“A small girl with beribboned braids was asked to find the solution of 735352314...”
– Anne Cutler, Extract from the foreword from Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics, translated and adapted by Anne Cutler and Rudolph McShane
May 2010
4 posts
“I used to be a normal psycholinguistics graduate student. I wanted to study how...”
– Jessica Love, “They Get to Me,” The American Scholar
“Architects, particularly the kind who win big international prizes, tend to...”
– Paul Goldberger, “Apple Polishing,” The New Yorker
“Bach is distilled Something Else. He composed against the currents of his day;...”
– Jeremy Denk, “Bach the Romantic,” Think Denk
“This is it: the book critic’s nightmare. A creature of unquiet dreams,...”
– Gavin McNett, “’Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea’ by Charles Seife,” Salon
April 2010
3 posts
“Victor Gruen was short, stout, and unstoppable, with a wild head of hair and...”
– Malcolm Gladwell, “The Terrazzo Jungle,” The New Yorker
“Now, a pianist has a function, which is to play too loud while waving his/her...”
– Jeremy Denk, “Joshua Bell Tour Trauma: Meatball Edition,” Think Denk
“Calculus is the mathematics of change. It describes everything from the spread...”
– Steven Strogatz,”Change We Can Believe In,” Opinionator, April 11, 2010
March 2010
3 posts
“I argued with Plato, mocked Immanuel Kant, challenged the logic of William...”
– Ralph Caplan, Why you should write in your books. Or, Talking Back to Aristotle and Loewy
“We do not, first off, have a proper creative department. We like to think of the...”
– Sam Potts of the now “on hold” Sam Potts Inc. in response to “Do you have music in the creative department?”
“When it is cold at home, or he has a couple of weeks with nothing to do but...”
– Larissa MacFarquhar, “The Deflationist,” The New Yorker, March 1, 2010