January 2011
35 posts
Launch school 2011 starts Sunday: http://bit.ly/ifSQcL Very exciting.
The One Random Quora Question I've Answered
(And I only just linked the account, so instead of syndicating, I’m cutting and pasting…)
Why haven’t more successful startups emerged from New York?
It’s not that you don’t see entrepreneurial ventures in New York; it’s that you don’t see a lot of hard technology startups here. I think it’s systemic, and there are a few factors that...
War Of The Snow Days
johncarney:
My boredom is at war with my reluctance to go out in the snow tonight.
Someone throw a really amazing party so that I have no choice but to go out.
I think this may be the first time in history that Carney and I are thinking the same thing.
WatchI’m just going to take shamelessly take credit for this: I think one of my proudest accomplishments in life so far was having the forethought to introduce Dana Vachon to Greg Gutfeld.
The Doree Chronicles: Favorite New York Fiction,... →
doree:
- Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents - Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy - Candace Bushnell, Sex and the City - Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s - Truman Capote, Summer Crossing - John Cheever, The Collected Stories - Junot Diaz, Drown - Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the…
I’d add Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, which is such a quintessential...
The upside of this is that I can now send an email to Ma Spiers noting that the New York Times reports that despite working from home, I voluntarily and regularly crawl out of bed before noon. (Also, Sloane is quite fashionable, even at breakfast. I am not.)
Launch school 2011 Deadline is tomorrow
At midnight. Details are here. Acceptances go out Sunday.
RE: Obama's speech, cheering in the stadium, etc.
I generally like Adrien Chen’s writing (on many occasions I even love it and have recommended him for a variety of jobs in which he’d probably have no interest) but I have to disagree here. I don’t think there was anything categorically confusing about the memorial service. I think Obama gave an eloquent and distinctly non-partisan speech that touched on larger themes that go...
Spiersblr: Re: Jared Loughner's family →
theawfulrowing:
Elizabeth Spiers hits the nail on the head. You can’t force someone into treatment for mental illness. While most states have a 72 or 120 hour hold for people who present a danger to themselves or others, it takes a lot more than a simple threat to cross the threshold for compulsory care. How do I know this? Because I am a mental health practitioner who worked, until very...
Re: Jared Loughner's family
Reading the comments on this Gawker thread about Jared Loughner’s family, a few thoughts:
It is far harder than you probably think to get an adult with paranoid schizophrenia help—professional treatment or otherwise. And I know this from painful direct experience. Paranoid schizophrenia runs in my family on my dad’s side and we’ve had to deal with it in the worst possible...
“This relentlessly hostile rhetoric has become standard issue on the right. (On...”
– Interesting Times: It Doesn’t Matter Why He Did It : The New Yorker
Pretty much nails it all.
(via dailyhuff)
This is a terrible tragedy, but we can only hope that the silver lining will be the cold water effect it seems to be having on people/the media. Note to Sarah Palin et al.: It’s...
Sometimes I don’t think people remember that until the 1960s or so, there were both conservative and liberal wings of both the Republican and Democratic parties. Party identifications weren’t always ideological proxies. My father is a traditional conservative (pro-“life”—and I find that term ridiculous, but am using it as he would; pro-teaching creationism in schools;...
RT @walterkirn: middle name “lee.’ favorite books include both mein kampf and communist manifesto. grammar: garbled. tone: urgent. moral …
1 tag
Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, met on the China fellowship program I did in October. It’s a small program and you get to know each other pretty well. They weren’t there this year, but I’d hear about them in stories from previous years—always glowing—and they’re on the mailing list, so I see their names here and there. So it’s...
RT @ryantate: @carr2n And, minor point, but Forbes beat Bloomberg on HuffPo profitability by about two months http://gaw.kr/c0GThW
After seeing several Kunis/Culkin photos in the last few hours, I have decided that Macaulay Culkin vaguely resembles a young Tom Scocca.
FYI, I refuse to be officially “back at work” till tomorrow.
Modern propaganda
Morning reading: Peter Maass on how the media inflated the toppling of the Saddam statue in Baghdad in 2003. [The New Yorker]
Launch School Reminder
It’s now January 2nd. If you’re interested in doing launch school, you have two more weeks to get in your application. Acceptances go out January 16th.
“It is believed that Denton grew up in Hampstead.”
–
Nick Denton’s Wikipedia entry.
In the age of the overshare and the death of privacy, especially around its most popularizing forces, can we still start sentences with “It is believed”?
Yes.
Perhaps mystery isn’t dead, even on Wikipedia and Gawker.
(via fimoculous)
Editing for accuracy: It is...