Fantoft stavkirke, Norway by Erika Szabo
(via understatementman)
Persons, places and things of interest in an ongoing investigation.
Ask me anything
April 24, 2013
February 25, 2013
January 2, 2013
"Can someone else plug in the Laffster technology and drive three times the amount of videos, three times the amount of ads watched and ultimately drive revenue? Because they’re coming there, and they’re interacting. They’re engaging."
—
Laffster CEO Daniel Altman in this tedious NPR story. Pity the person who had to make punctuation choices while transcribing this soundbite.
Listening to this story made me think of this video, which made me laugh, but I guess I’ll never understand why until someone represents that association as an explicit set of repeatable procedures.
December 26, 2012
"
I must confess to considerable irritation on this score. When people tell me that “Story” does this or that for us, I always want to throw up my hands and cry, Which story? Haven’t you noticed the astonishing variety of literary productions? Haven’t you noticed that some are brilliant and many are stupid and most are somewhere in between? That some are mean-spirited while others are generous-hearted? And that people don’t agree about which are which? How can anyone who has thought about such matters for five seconds think that you can say anything meaningful about an abstraction as vast and wooly as “Story”?
Christians have been guiltier than most of this tendency, arguing that people love stories because they are responding to the story God is telling through salvation history. Thus Brian Wicker’s 1975 book The Story-Shaped World; which sounds good until you ask which story the world is shaped like. The One Hundred Days of Sodom? The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin? Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen? It matters, you know. Now of course, a reasonable person is likely to reply that the gospel is the story Wicker is referring to, which is true. Why not, then, refer to “The Gospel-Shaped World”? Because, I submit, Story is a word to conjure with, as Wicker and Gottschall alike, in their very different ways, know. But it is time to stop conjuring.
"— Me on Just-So Stories in Books and Culture — behind a paywall, though. Sorry. (via ayjay)
(via ayjay)
December 4, 2012
“You should be skeptical of Congress’s ability to develop a rational policy given the knowledge problem X presents and the public choice pressures at work.”
A generalized version of a good sentence from Jerry Brito’s contribution to Copyright Unbalanced: From Incentive to Excess, found via willwilkinson.
November 14, 2012
November 7, 2012
"The Framers, so often credited with farsightedness, saw no farther than the noble Washington. Only the Anti-Federalists, it seems, could envision Lyndon B. Johnson or George W. Bush. Well, I hate to break it to the demigods of the Philadelphia Convention, but George Washington had not discovered the elixir of eternal life. He was not going to live forever, let alone serve as president for the life of the republic. Lesser men would come along, and be granted those same powers, and the powers would expand, as the executive branch expanded, until you have men I’d not trust to serve as Exalted Rulers of the Batavia Elks Club being serenaded by “Hail to the Chief” and sending hundreds of thousands of American boys to the other side of the world to kill and die for… whatever it was and is that men killed and died for in Vietnam and Iraq."
— Who Needs a President? | The American Conservative (via mwfrost)
(via mwfrost)
November 6, 2012
TURNER, Joseph Mallord William
Snow Storm, Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps
1812
Oil on canvas, 145 x 236,5 cm
Tate Gallery, London
(via pegobry)
October 2, 2012
"The old pre-industrial community and culture are gone and cannot be brought back. Nor is it desirable that they should be. They were too unjust, too squalid, and too custom-bound. Virtues which were once nursed unconsciously by the forces of nature must now be recovered and fostered by a deliberate effort of the will and the intelligence. In the future, societies will not grow of themselves. They will be either made consciously or decay."
—
W. H. Auden, Introduction to The Oxford Book of Light Verse (1938)
Life’s work as I see it, expressed concisely 74 years ago.
(via mwfrost)
September 17, 2012
"In the last culture war, relativism’s influence was evident in the stock arguments that kept appearing in magazines and op-ed pages: Breaking taboos is valuable for its own sake; people have a right to make their own choices and not be judged for it; what you call a social evil is really just a cultural difference; et cetera.But those articles are no longer seen so often. Now, the most annoyingly ubiquitous genre in journalism is the social-scientific analysis, as if a person can’t speak with authority without citing economics or sociology.This is bad enough in political conversation, but it has begun to affect people’s ethical thinking. Under the new cultural rules, moral condemnation is a legitimate thing to express, but only if you can demonstrate that the sin you want to condemn makes someone twice as likely to take antidepressants or 40 percent less likely to be promoted at work. Malcolm Gladwell and the Freakonomics guys have more moral authority than the archbishop of New York. Great artists are producing movies, TV shows, and songs about tough moral dilemmas, but although liberals buy the tickets and the albums, they don’t take the art they consume very seriously. When moral questions arise, they forget The Wire and The Hold Steady and ask what the studies show."
— Helen Rittelmeyer at The American Spectator : Moral Relativism, R.I.P. (via mwfrost)
(via mwfrost)
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