They also engaged in an early 20th-century version of “hooking up.” With women earning little, “treating” was a key to relationships: Men paid for dinner and theater tickets with the expectation that women would reciprocate with sexual favors, as women extracted as much they could from their dates—hats, shoes, jewelry—while trying to maintain their respectability by flirting, even petting, but not going all the way. This was a high-stakes game, in an era when birth control was not legally available. But this new social life also created sexual norms that continue to inform what women and men expect of each other.
Why I prefer to go dutch.
(Singles in the City, WSJ)
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Sometimes we create amazing things. Sometime we create garbage. The point is to keep creating.
Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind
Source: makinads.blogspot.com
User experience (UX) is now becoming a critical point in customer engagement in order to compete for attention now and in the future. For without thoughtful UX, consumers meander without direction, reward, or utility. And their attention, and ultimately loyalty, follows.
Source: Fast Company
Eric Schmidt once quipped that ‘the Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand.’ To a large extent, this is also true of Google. Even its founders—and Page and Brin must have the best understanding of the company’s inner workings—must be profoundly confused about Google’s impact on privacy, scholarship, communication, and power. It is for this reason that writing about Google presents an almost insurmountable challenge. To understand the company and its impact, one needs to have a handle on computer science, many branches of philosophy (from epistemology to ethics), information science, cyberlaw, media studies, sociology of knowledge, public policy, economics, and even complexity theory. The ultimate analysis of Google and its impact on the world still remains to be written.
Evgeny Morozov in “Don’t Be Evil,” The New Republic review of Steven Levy and Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Google books. (via mediology)
Source: mediology
Most days, I feel like most internet writers and editors are engaging in the kind of vapid conversation you find at parties that is neither enlightening or entertaining, and where everyone is shouting and no one is saying anything. I don’t have time for this.
Brian Lam, Happiness Takes (A Little) Magic
Source: thewirecutter.com
Informationally, we are becoming lard-asses. In the pageview and ratings driven media economy, too much of the content these days is designed to be just like junk food to quickly boost quantifiable viewership. If you make content that is the intellectual equivalent of gummy bears, your site will appear to grow quickly.
Brian Lam, Happiness takes a little Magic (Wirecutter)
Source: thewirecutter.com
The French, I found, seem to have a whole different framework for raising kids. When I asked French parents how they disciplined their children, it took them a few beats just to understand what I meant. “Ah, you mean how do we educate them?” they asked. “Discipline,” I soon realized, is a narrow, seldom-used notion that deals with punishment. Whereas “educating” (which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagined themselves to be doing all the time.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
The seven step, ten minute download process (which will be about ten seconds when US internet speeds catch up with the rest of the world) is the real enemy the studios should be trying to tackle. Right now, the industry is still stuck in the past, and is crawling oh-so-slowly into the future. They still believe people are going to want to buy DVDs or Blu-rays in five years, and that a movie ticket is well worth $15. Netflix is the closest thing they have to an advocate, but the studios are trying to drive them out of business as they see them as a threat, not a solution. It’s mind boggling.
Paul Tassi, You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You (Forbes)
Source: forbes.com
If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales.
People once invested in their memories, they cultivated them. They studiously furnished their minds. They remembered. Today, of course, we’ve got books and computers and smartphones to hold our memories for us. We’ve outsourced our memories to external devices. The result is that we no longer trust our memories. We see every small, forgotten thing as evidence that they’re failing us altogether. As we store more and more of what makes us us outside of ourselves, we’ve forgotten how to remember.
Joshua Foer (author of Moonwalking with Einstein), on the Cyborg Dilemma
Source: The New York Times
The inconsistency of genius is a consistent theme of creativity: Even those blessed with ridiculous talent still produce works of startling mediocrity.[…] The larger point is that mere imagination is not enough, for even those with prodigious gifts must still be able to sort their best from their worst, sifting through the clutter to find what’s actually worthwhile.
Jonah Lehrer, on How We Identify Good Ideas
Source: Wired
If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy.
David Ogilvy, on his habits as a copywriter.
Source: lettersofnote.com
“First—if you are in love—that’s a good thing—that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.
Second—There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.”
John Stienbeck, on how nothing good gets away.
Source: feedproxy.google.com
During your best years you don’t need a husband. You do need a man of course every step of the way, and they are often cheaper emotionally and a lot more fun by the bunch.
Helen Gurley Brown, Former Editor of Cosmopolitan.
Source: books.google.com
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Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
