Maybe Obama should have let the plane crash. You get credit for bringing somebody back from the dead. You don’t really get credit for helping a sick person by administering antibiotics.
Category: Quotes
Chris Rock Interview
Black Riot
The destruction of property is a red herring, used to divert attention from the fact that it is the goals, not the methods, of the protests that the media and the state object to.
Black Riot, from 2013 but topical again.
What Would a Better Technological Society Look Like?
Overcrowded prisons, rapid gentrification, industrial disasters, and predatory banking practices aren’t bugs, they’re features of our current historical moment.
iPad at a Crossroads
And that may be the best summarization of the way that Apple seems to think about software on these devices: they believe apps should be optimized where really they should be reimagined.
The End of Apps as We Know Them
In a world where notifications are full experiences in and of themselves, the screen of app icons makes less and less sense. Apps as destinations makes less and less sense.
Jonathan Ive on products you can’t use
If you eat something that tastes awful, you assume the food’s bad. But when you use a product that you can’t use, you don’t assume it’s the product you assume it’s you.
Jonathan Ive – Vanity Fair conversation with Graydon Carter.
Every teacher must be a history teacher
I would propose here that every teacher must be a history teacher. To teach, for example, what we know about biology today without also teaching what we once knew, or thought we knew, is to reduce knowledge to a mere consumer product. It is to deprive students of a sense of the meaning of what we know, and of how we know. To teach about the atom without Democritus, to teach about electricity without Faraday, to teach about political science without Aristotle or Machiavelli, to teach about music without Haydn, is to refuse our students access to The Great Conversation. It is to deny them knowledge of their roots, about which no other social institution is at present concerned.
Neil Postman – Technopoly.
Life Atop Ground Zero
The new World Trade Center is the embodiment of New York City as the fantasy it has always projected, a constantly refurbished dream of America. In this place, images can change, but names are always waiting to be remembered.
How history forgot its role in public debate
But disentangling is what historians do. We are trained to balance different forms of data against each other, to be alert to the complexity of causality, to consider how long-term structures interact with short-term determinants.
Be human
When in doubt, be human.
Seth Godin – Two purposes of user feedback.