The header image for this interview is one of my favorite of all time. I stared at it and looked at every detail for about 10 minutes.1
Summary:
Great interview by Tina Essmaker Thoughtful and lengthy answers by Merlin Plenty of photos throughout Fantastic design. DO NOT READ THIS IN INSTAPAPER. I’m not a fan of “heroes” but Merlin seems to have his shit together in the ways I like:
Mental Floss has the scoop of the decade. They managed to get an interview with the notoriously private Bill Watterson.
Well, coming at a new work requires a certain amount of patience and energy, and there’s always the risk of disappointment. You can’t really blame people for preferring more of what they already know and like. The trade-off, of course, is that predictability is boring. Repetition is the death of magic.
Steven Poole over at The New Republic:
Gladwell is a brilliant salesman for a certain kind of cognitive drug. He tells his readers that everything they thought they knew about a subject is wrong, and then delivers what is presented as a counterintuitive discovery but is actually a bromide of familiar clichés. The reader is thus led on a pleasant quasi-intellectual tour, to be reassured at the end that a flavour of folksy wisdom was right all along.
From Mind Hacks:
The signs were clear to everyone but they were ignored because other people haven’t listened to the same point-of-view I expressed on the previous occasion the opportunity arose.
From the Globe and Mail:
It hadn’t. Indeed, the average rate of errors had barely budged in almost a century, from 2.11 errors per 100 words in 1917 to 2.26 words today. What’s more, there were “almost no instances” of the smileys or LOL-style short forms that have supposedly metastasized everywhere. (When students do deploy “textisms,” it’s not unintentional, University of Toronto linguist Sali Tagliamonte has found: They use short forms as flourishes of wit; and they do it more rarely than you would suspect.
My family really loves Miyazaki’s work. But I think he knows when you step down and when you push onward.
Sounds pretty horrible and not surprising:
“Mission after mission was always just getting eight-inch dredgers, six-inch dredgers … and food supplies, quads, jeeps, out to the diamond dredging operation outside of Kamonia,” Hinkle told the film-makers.
I’ve always been a fan of Sarah Silverman’s comedy. She expresses herself in a comedic but genuine manner. This is just genuine. It’s a bit more touching to know all of those moments with Duck on the Sarah Silverman Show were performed with her true-to-life buddy.
Neil Armstrong passed away on August 25th, 2012. NASA had a nice tribute. Whether you care about space travel or not (I do), I think it’s fair to say that Neil Armstrong inspired millions and millions of extraordinary people to go out into a variety of fields and do something significant. I know for a fact he inspired many children to become scientists that made the human condition significantly less terrible.
Jen Schradie on Mark Zuckerberg’s asinine essay:
Write this down: correlation is not causation. It’s a neat phrase to throw around at cocktail parties. But for our purposes, the Internet in and of itself will not solve the structural problems in the developing world. Think about it this way – the economic advantages that the developed world has, often on the back of the developing world, could be fostering Internet growth, rather than the other way around.
