- David Ferry’s Beautiful Thefts | The New Yorker
“One reason people’s aversion to poetry sometimes passes over into strong annoyance, or even resentment, is that poems steal our very language out from under us and return it malformed, misshapen, hardly recognizable”. - Poet’s Kinship With the President | The New York Times
“‘Richard was always a complete engineer within poetry,’ Professor McGrath said. ‘If you said it needs a little work here or there, a whole transfiguration of a poem emerged. He understood revision not to be just a touch-up job but a complete reimagining, a reworking. I know that’s connected to his engineering skill.'” - The pun conundrum | BBC News
“The late William Safire, the New York Times’s long-time language writer, wrote in 2005 that a pun ‘is to wordplay what dominatrix sex is to foreplay – a stinging whip that elicits groans of guilty pleasure'”. - Samuel Beckett meets the Teletubbies | Improbable Research
A possible reason why the Teletubbies always had that element of “[n]othing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”. - “Jane Austen, Game Theorist”: Full Transcript | Freakonomics
“…in Pride And Prejudice, Mrs. Bennet is not a very sympathetic character, and she seems to be very foolish. But if you look at what she accomplishes it’s pretty good. She gets Jane married and she even sort of incentivizes Lydia…the younger sister, who in a very sort of crisis-y kind of way…runs off with Wigham without being married, which is a scandal. But I argue in the book that maybe she does that because she realizes the only way she can get some money in her marriage is to marry somebody who is not necessarily super committed to her…to create [a] crisis situation so the richer members of her family will then solve the problem for her. And that’s what happens”.
Category - Shared Items
- There’s More to Life Than Being Happy | The Atlantic
“‘It is the very pursuit of happiness,’ Frankl knew, ‘that thwarts happiness.’ This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness… ‘Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided,’ the authors write”. - What are the three ways to train your brain to be happy? | Barking Up The Wrong Tree
Sounds like mumbo jumbo pseudo-science, but for people who find that they’re perpetually pessimistic/down/depressed/unhappy, consider doing this. - Life Skills: Ivanka Trump, Thich Nhat Hanh And Others On The Things Everyone Should Master By Age 40 | The Huffington Post
Some things you learn in school. Others, you learn from experience. But some things can neither be learnt at school nor should they solely be learnt from experience. This list has most of what you need to know. - Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss | The New York Times
“Managers also had a much greater impact on employees’ performance and how they felt about their job than any other factor, Google found.‘The starting point was that our best managers have teams that perform better, are retained better, are happier — they do everything better,’ Mr. Bock says. ‘So the biggest controllable factor that we could see was the quality of the manager, and how they sort of made things happen. The question we then asked was: What if every manager was that good? And then you start saying: Well, what makes them that good? And how do you do it?'”
- 37 Conversation Rules for Gentlemen from 1875 | The Art of Manliness
Relevant for both women and men, even in this day and age.
For Tara and Lucas, with quite a bit of New Yorker thrown in for good measure.
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- The Evolution of the Web, in a Blink | The New Yorker
A damn good analytical recount of how web browsing has evolved over time from the perspective of the <blink> HTML tag. - EpicMealTime: The Early Days – By Mooky Gwopson | EpicMealTime
“The next video on the lineup was a self-challenge to smash the shit out of a KFC sandwich that was labeled the Double Down. It was said by the crew at the time that they wanted to make a sandwich so insane, so greasy and delicious that no one would ever pay attention to the KFC creation again…the team created a 2 foot layered sandwich, that when placed side by side with the Double Down, created an embarrassing food vision of Twins, the movie. The EpicMealTime monstrosity smothered the little KFC sandwich. To this day, we are convinced The Colonel stopped selling his puny sammy because of us”. - Hello Laptop, My Old Friend | The New Yorker
“Laptop’s air of general anachronism makes this cultural detritus doubly strange… . His Web syntax is charmingly outmoded: I was a relatively early arrival to Facebook, and the standing bookmark still goes to TheFacebook.com, the site’s Mesozoic incarnation. Two of his three browsers are so out-of-date that Web sites think he is an early smartphone; home pages answer him with giant type and stripped-down formatting, as if yelling, at full voice, into his digital ear. The Internet has a cruel nose for obsolescence”. - Goodnight Hotmail, You Sweet Prince | The Bygone Bureau
I never used Hotmail – I was adamant that I’d never use Hotmail because (1) everyone was using it (I was quite the hipster, on hindsight); and (2) it didn’t cater for POP3 usage (definitely a hipster), so I ended up using all sorts of other email messaging systems, like Geocities and MyRealBox. But Hotmail’s presence as one of the pioneering forces of the ’90s Internet revolution cannot be denied. - The Ongoing Story: Twitter and Writing | The New Yorker
“Most great writers could, if they wanted to, be very good at Twitter, because it is a medium of words and also of form. Its built-in limitation corresponds to the sense of rhythm and proportion that writers apply to each line. But…[n]ot everyone is primed to be a modern-day Heraclitus, like Alain de Botton, who starts each day, it seems, by cranking up his inner fortune-cookie machine and producing a string of tweets that are, to varying degrees, sour, funny, fatalistic, and bitingly true”.