You don’t have to ‘Like’ a book, you can just read a book… You don’t have to ‘Like’ a movie, you can just watch a movie… You can just eat a meal, you can hike a trail, listen to a song. You can connect to anything in any way that you want.
— An amazing quote from Facebook’s unveiling of the new Timeline. So many thoughts all at once!
Imagine a guy walks up to you on the street and says:
- “Hey man, my name is Gilt City and I got a great deal: Four margaritas at Dream Hotel’s Ava Lounge for $24 bucks, half the regular price.” You say: Sure, I’ll head over right now.
- Then he says, “Well, thing is, it’s not that…
Zadie Smith takes an interesting look at Facebook and our generation in her review of the Social Network. It’s worth the full read, but I pulled the graphs I really liked:
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.
I’m 79 years old. I worked for 10 years for the Times, and I wrote a whole book about it later. But the high point of my life, if I die tomorrow, the point of my life that is relevant is the 10 years I worked on the daily staff. Because during that time, my whole value system was reinforced by the wonderful world of trying to work within the realm of truth. The clergy doesn’t tell the truth. Bankers don’t tell the truth. The government doesn’t tell the truth. Bush doesn’t tell the truth. Obama doesn’t tell the truth. Nobody tells the truth as much as the Times tries to tell the truth. And without the Times, we might as well be the Soviet Union in the old days.
— Gay Talese in Vanity Fair
When I was the age of these guys here that are in the film, I was always complaining about the paper. I was complaining about the editor, I was complaining about me, and why wasn’t I getting more assignments and doing this and that. It is the nature of journalists to complain, and the city room of a newspaper is really a therapy session. One of the greatest things about being a journalist and being young is you have all these like-minded people of a similar age that share your frustrations. Because we all are in a way idealistic, and journalism, while it is the most idealistic of professions, always falls short, as anything human falls short.
— Gay Talese in Vanity Fair
Sometimes at work I literally have flashbacks to learning to write my first big research paper in high school. I still follow the same steps: research/gather information, copy it out long-hand into my notes, organize notes/highlight which quotes and info I want to use, (occasionally) outline, write. That’s kind of amazing, when you think about the fact that at 15 I had no idea what I would end up doing and was basically just counting the hours till lunch. Well, that’s not all that different from now, either, come to think of it.
WANT THIS.
wnyc:
Street Furniture: Pit In from STORE MUU design studio
Standing at your desk is so last year.
It’s interesting how fast that “Sitting at Your Desk Will Kill You” graphic whipped around the internet yesterday. Clearly we’re all terrified that our internet-based jobs will kill us, despite hours at the gym before/after work. Could the million or so people that saw it, presumably stuck at their work desks, effect some workplace change? Could we actually get healthier work environments if we tried?
We had more in our lives than just men; we had our work, travel, friends, Then why did our lives seem to come down to a long succession of sad songs about men? Why did our lives seem to reduce themselves to manhunts? Where were the women who were really free, who didn’t spend their lives bouncing from man to man, who felt complete with or without a man? We looked to our uncertain heroines for help, and lo and behold — Simone de Beauvoir never makes a move without wondering what would Sartre think? And Lillian Hellman wants to be as much of a man as Dashiell Hammett so he’ll love her like he loves himself. And Doris Lessing’s Anna Wulf can’t come unless she’s in love, which is seldom. And the rest — the women writers, the women painters — most of them were shy, shrinking, schizoid. Timid in their lives and brave only in their art. Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers … Flannery O’Connor raising peacocks and living with her mother. Sylvia Plath sticking her head into an oven of myth. Georgia O’Keefe alone in the desert, apparently a survivor. What a group! Severe, suicidal, strange. Where was the female Chaucer? One lusty lady who had juice and joy and love and talent too? … Almost all the women we admired most were spinsters or suicides. Was that where it all led?
— Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (via lenachen)
“Page One” trailer
Very excited to see this movie
The trailer for this is more intense than Black Swan’s. I wish I weren’t frothing at the bit to see this movie, but I am.
(Source: devour.com, via velvethardware)
The Daily’s front today.
