Flavors of the One Love
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That Swatch commercial
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1 min read
Does anyone know which musician created the music for the new Swatch commercial? It’s gets me all dancy and stuff. Found it: It’s Five for Fighting’s Something About You (.wav) (iTunes). Whew.
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Elevators demand poems
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1 min read
The The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms is a compilation from the journal that asserts “reading is the last refuge from the real-time epidemic. To that end, the selections gathered here are grouped by how long they offer escape from real time: waiting rooms need long stories, for example, while…
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Beers and Carbs
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1 min read
The beer wars are cracking me up, as product design meets marketing, awkwardly. Bud light, feeling out-marketed in a category they already designed for, runs ads that remind us ‘All light beers are low in carbs.’ Miller Light responds, ‘That’s right, so choose on taste.’ Here’s the beer carb chart if you’re curious. Interesting that…
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Ending with a preposition is O.K.
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1 min read
Chatting with some IAs recently, we wondered into grammatical territory where to my relief everyone felt passionately that it’s alright to end sentences with a preposition. One or two people said that was a rule carried over from Latin that shouldn’t apply to English. Winston Churchill illustrated the preference of comfortable convention over artificial rule:…
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Baked Asparagus Wrapped in Prosciutto
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1 min read
Quite possibly the most delicious way to prepare asparagus. Easy too.
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Storm King
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1 min read
Really, it’s how museums should be. The Storm King Art Center, situated on the mountain of the same name, is 500 acres of gorgeous former farm land, now creatively farmed with long grasses and devoted to the display of sculpture. We visited on a perfect Spring day and I can’t imagine a more beautiful place.…
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The wisdom of crowds
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2 min read
James Surowiecki’s Financial Page in the New Yorker has become a must read, a one-page column connecting topics such as macro-economic statistics, currency policy, and Argentina’s promptness policy in clear, concise, enlightening language. He’s coming out with his first book next week, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and…
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Anita O’Day
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1 min read
Tea for Two (560K mp3)
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Jazz
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0 min read
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Costing not less than everything
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1 min read
I’m rather tired of every amateur scientist weighing in with his or her opinion of the Space Shuttle Columbia’s destruction or the entire space program, so I’m reluctant to do the same here. But tonight I walked onto the subway, sat down, and in front of my eyes was this passage from Four Quartets by…
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The Fred Astaire of Cartooning
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1 min read
Al Hirschfeld died yesterday.
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Lay and Lie
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1 min read
Handy table.
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Contract vs. Status writing
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1 min read
An attack on postmodern literature by Jonathan Franzen, which equates difficulty with high art. I see an analogy to design. The original article is offline in the New Yorker, an interview is online. ‘…I think it’s kind of a natural idea. As a student, you’re handed Milton or Shakespeare, you’re told that it’s great literature,…
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Logical Fallacies
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1 min read
A nice list… http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/index.htm
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The Times Sports Section
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1 min read
Only in the New York Times, in a story about Lance Armstrong and the Tour de France, would a sports article end with four paragraphs about wine… ‘…Leaving the red-wine district, the road headed toward Mâcon and its whites, including St. Véran, Pouilly-Fuissé, Mâcon itself and the deservedly little-known Beaujolais white…’