The thing is, none of that actually matters. How we feel on Facebook doesn’t matter. How we Tweet what we feel doesn’t matter. Even how we feel in the world doesn’t matter — it’s all useless unless it inspires us to do something. So here are a few things I think will be useful to […]
Life
People
Marcy Borders, made famous as the subject of ‘The Dust Lady’ photograph by Stan Honda, has died following a year-long battle with cancer. As a 28-year old Bank Of America employee, she’d barely escaped from the 81st floor of the North Tower before it collapsed, saved in the end perhaps by someone who pulled her […]
Human Rights
Life
War
Via: War Child subverts Call of Duty games with video portraying the nightmare of being a warzone kid | The Drum
Life
Jeff Atwood is interesting as always, on being an expert: So what does it mean to be an expert, then, when expertise is perceived as impractical at best, and a liability at worst? In a recent Google talk, James Bach presented the quintessential postmodern image of an expert performing – Steve McQueen in The Towering […]
Life
“The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato. Less well known […]
Arts
Life
People
Privilege
Four years ago, intimate photographs of Danish journalist Emma Holten were posted on the web. Thousands viewed them and she still receives online harassment. The issues of revenge porn and hacked photos are part of a larger problem with our relationship to consent, she argues. So Holten decided to pose for and release a new […]
Arts
Life
Mood
People
There’s a lovely interview in Vanity Fair with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer for The Sound of Music's 50th Anniversary. It would surprise no one, perhaps, to learn that Julie Andrews travels with her own teakettle. On a late afternoon last winter she and Christopher Plummer met me at the Loews Regency Hotel, in Manhattan, […]
Bits & Bobs
Life
Curious: Icelanders will soon be able to publicly worship at a shrine to Thor, Odin and Frigg with construction starting this month on the island’s first major temple to the Norse gods since the Viking age. Worship of the gods in Scandinavia gave way to Christianity around 1,000 years ago but a modern version of […]
Arts
Health
Life
Oddities
People
‘Wise mad man gives you the best life advice you will ever get’. […] perhaps he’s full of truth because he is not really crazy (or maybe it’s because he’s the right kind of crazy.) His name is Matthew Silver, a clown and street performer who thinks that playing the role of a raving lunatic […]
Life
People
This is terribly poignant. The ghost of Christmas Future will hang around our table this year. As we decorate the tree, open our presents and sit down for lunch, I will not be the only one imagining what these same rituals will be like next December when I am no longer there. This is my […]