Especially when you’ve never done it. And really, everything you do is something you’ve never done. We feel that days are the same, but they aren’t. Monotony is a frame of mind, a passivity to pattern. So when you say, “I’ll do this by time X” you’re expressing a wish or an intent. The important… Read More Everything Takes Longer Than You Think
Mud. Music. Bad acid. The blueprint for every Grateful Dead Phish tour ever? The dress rehearsal to Alatamont? A bunch of histrionic nonsense that doesn’t merit our attention? The birth cry of our post-modern Return of the Primitive? Or maybe it was just a thing that happened, and meant something to someone, and got pictures taken… Read More Woodstock is a Bird
Quentin Tarantino has a new movie out, which has the Tate-LaBianca killings in its backdrop, and I both do and don’t want to see it. I want to see it because I’m a fan of Tarantino’s work and have been since I first saw Pulp Fiction as a college freshman. Then as now, no one makes… Read More Thoughts on Charles Manson
The Hulu documentary is a hoot. It’s more about the lie, the huckstering, Billy McFarland as the Incompetent P.T. Barnum of the time. The Netflix doc was more about How Not to Put On A Music Festival. This is about how people got suckered into believing something that was not physically possible. All from the… Read More Quick Review: Fyre Fraud
Picard is going to suck. It’s a bastardization of the character, reduced to catchphrases and some Borg plot. The question is, why? Why is it being made? Because member-berries? Because the carnival of 80’s nostalgia that’s been gripping us since the late 90’s just Will Not Die? Because J.J. Abrams ruined Star Trek and no… Read More Things That Are Going to Suck
I almost wrote a whole blog post about Leaving Neverland, the new documentary about Michael Jackson accusing him of pedophilia. I didn’t. Because ultimately I decided I didn’t want to wade into that morass. I don’t know if Jackson did anything. I wasn’t there. Rumor is less than truth and accusation less than proof. He’s… Read More So Barbara Streisand is a Monster…
James Lileks finally found a way to inculcate his classic Screeds into his regular blog, calling it the Wednesday Review of Modern Thought. This past Wednesday, he groused about the overuse of “crisis”: One of the manifestations of twitchy, sullen, self-righteous miserabilism is the desire to see every problem as a crisis, and every crisis… Read More When Everything in the Machine is a Crisis, The Crisis is What Feeds the Machine
All of Cal Newport’s books could be titled, “How to Be an Effective Person.” Or, maybe, “How to Be an Effective Person In This Technological Epoch.” Digital Minimalism is, like Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, about why you should quit or drastically limit the digital distractions that have proliferated in […]… Read More Digital Minimalism — Cal Newport — The Story’s Story
Is that a Hasty Generalization or a Sweeping one? I lack the data to tell. I also don’t care that it’s illogical. It’s how I feel, therefore it’s true. What am I talking about? This. Long story, short, an author allowed internet bullies who spoke for the “community” to shame her into not publishing her… Read More Anyone Who Refers to Themselves as Representing a “Community” is an Ass
Been a while since I came across a Megan McArdle piece I thought worth passing on, but this one is it. This past week the axe fell in the newsroom, most notably at BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post, but also… newspaper chain Gannett swung the ax through several of its publications this week, including the Indianapolis Star,… Read More Journalism is Dying Because It’s Not Free
Content Blues 