Link Salad, the Fortress of Solitude Edition
-- Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview - Andy Greene, Rolling Stone, Oct. 31, 2014
"Yeah. I mean, we aren't talking about shows like NCIS and CSI that basically show one story over and over. I'm not even talking about Mad Men, which I don't like. But Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead, The Bridge, The Americans. Those things are so textured and so involving that they make movies look like short stories. I was watching a show 12 years ago called The Shield. And in the first episode, Michael Chiklis, who played the protagonist, turns around and kills a fellow cop. And I thought to myself, "TV just underwent this seismic change." That show was the most important show on television. Breaking Bad is better, but The Shield changed everything."
-- Listening to Books - Maggie Gram, n+1, Feb. 9, 2012
"This is part of the appeal. Since the 1980s there have been more sighted people than blind people listening to audio books, and most of us have done so because we were also doing something else. Audio books are good for long trips. They are also good for housework, although they can be drowned out by a vacuum. I started listening to audio books because I was reading for my first set of graduate-school qualifying exams. My list of books seemed endless, and I thought that listening to some of them on mp3 might solve the problem of having too little time to read. Or rather, too little time to both read and run. With audio books I could do both at the same time."
-- On Kindness - Cord Jefferson, Matter, Nov. 2, 2014
"While your loved one is at home battling death, stand in a restaurant line behind a person complaining loudly that their burrito came with sour cream, even though they asked for no sour cream, and they guess they’ll just eat it with the sour cream, even though the calories, but maybe they should get a discount now, or, like, a soda?"
-- Friending Aaron Sorkin - Lynn Hirschberg, W, Oct. 2010
"Sorkin’s research unearthed the very first words on what became Facebook-an angry blog post that Zuckerberg allegedly wrote after being dumped by a girl. That blog morphed into a Zuckerberg-invented computer program called Facemash, in which photos of Harvard women were posted online, and compared and contrasted based on their looks. It was a classic misfit’s revenge: If he couldn’t get the girl, he would trash the girl. “I think there’s a subset of nerds who are not the cuddly kinds of nerds we made movies about in the Eighties,” Sorkin said. “These nerds don’t understand why attractive women are still dating the quarterback and not them, why women don’t get that they’re the ones running the universe right now. There’s an arrogance that has alchemized into real nastiness.”"
-- The Shortness of Life: Seneca on Busyness and The Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long - Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
"“How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard memorably wrote in her soul-stretching meditation on the life of presence, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And yet most of us spend our days in what Kierkegaard believed to be our greatest source of unhappiness - a refusal to recognize that “busy is a decision” and that presence is infinitely more rewarding than productivity. I frequently worry that being productive is the surest way to lull ourselves into a trance of passivity and busyness the greatest distraction from living, as we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from our selves, mistaking the doing for the being."
"Yeah. I mean, we aren't talking about shows like NCIS and CSI that basically show one story over and over. I'm not even talking about Mad Men, which I don't like. But Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead, The Bridge, The Americans. Those things are so textured and so involving that they make movies look like short stories. I was watching a show 12 years ago called The Shield. And in the first episode, Michael Chiklis, who played the protagonist, turns around and kills a fellow cop. And I thought to myself, "TV just underwent this seismic change." That show was the most important show on television. Breaking Bad is better, but The Shield changed everything."
-- Listening to Books - Maggie Gram, n+1, Feb. 9, 2012
"This is part of the appeal. Since the 1980s there have been more sighted people than blind people listening to audio books, and most of us have done so because we were also doing something else. Audio books are good for long trips. They are also good for housework, although they can be drowned out by a vacuum. I started listening to audio books because I was reading for my first set of graduate-school qualifying exams. My list of books seemed endless, and I thought that listening to some of them on mp3 might solve the problem of having too little time to read. Or rather, too little time to both read and run. With audio books I could do both at the same time."
-- On Kindness - Cord Jefferson, Matter, Nov. 2, 2014
"While your loved one is at home battling death, stand in a restaurant line behind a person complaining loudly that their burrito came with sour cream, even though they asked for no sour cream, and they guess they’ll just eat it with the sour cream, even though the calories, but maybe they should get a discount now, or, like, a soda?"
-- Friending Aaron Sorkin - Lynn Hirschberg, W, Oct. 2010
"Sorkin’s research unearthed the very first words on what became Facebook-an angry blog post that Zuckerberg allegedly wrote after being dumped by a girl. That blog morphed into a Zuckerberg-invented computer program called Facemash, in which photos of Harvard women were posted online, and compared and contrasted based on their looks. It was a classic misfit’s revenge: If he couldn’t get the girl, he would trash the girl. “I think there’s a subset of nerds who are not the cuddly kinds of nerds we made movies about in the Eighties,” Sorkin said. “These nerds don’t understand why attractive women are still dating the quarterback and not them, why women don’t get that they’re the ones running the universe right now. There’s an arrogance that has alchemized into real nastiness.”"
-- The Shortness of Life: Seneca on Busyness and The Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long - Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
"“How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard memorably wrote in her soul-stretching meditation on the life of presence, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And yet most of us spend our days in what Kierkegaard believed to be our greatest source of unhappiness - a refusal to recognize that “busy is a decision” and that presence is infinitely more rewarding than productivity. I frequently worry that being productive is the surest way to lull ourselves into a trance of passivity and busyness the greatest distraction from living, as we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from our selves, mistaking the doing for the being."