Ellen Ullman quote:

"I think that literature—essays, stories, poems—is the one form where we can meet, imagination to imagination, without hosts of people in between, no directors and actors and set designers and so on. The medium itself is fairly transparent. You don’t need equipment or electrical outlets. You can go off alone to read, and, if the work is good, you are then intensely close to other human beings."

Tim's comment:

"I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately — how literature overcomes (or tries to overcome) the deficiencies of language — all those failures of imaginations to connect — WITH language. Like, only the spear that made this wound can heal it. Cf also Mallarmé, “to purify the language of the tribe.”"

"So rather than focusing on emulating particular techniques and methods, we should be doing everything we can to embrace, inspire, and use our own empathy in order to better understand and relate to our students. It is only from this space that we can effectively generate and use the appropriate techniques and methods for any particular task. In this way, there is no “recipe,” “secret sauce,” or “silver bullet” for teaching effectively that can be used by anybody, anytime, anywhere. Instead, I’m proposing a “generative” method, one in which we “generate” the appropriate method that takes into consideration the broadest range of factors that we can manage to accommodate."

'Culture is a balanced blend of human psychology, attitudes, actions, and beliefs that combined create either pleasure or pain, serious momentum or miserable stagnation. A strong culture flourishes with a clear set of values and norms that actively guide the way a company operates. Employees are actively and passionately engaged in the business, operating from a sense of confidence and empowerment rather than navigating their days through miserably extensive procedures and mind-numbing bureaucracy. Performance-oriented cultures possess statistically better financial growth, with high employee involvement, strong internal communication, and an acceptance of a healthy level of risk-taking in order to achieve new levels of innovation."

"From the many, many ideas Popova has sparked in my brain, one has stuck more stubbornly than any other: We need to start treating discovery, connection and sharing as creative acts."

"Why do these heady observations on nostalgia matter for busy media professionals? Because I’d argue there’s real opportunity in our affinity for nostalgia. Think of Instagram: I’d argue it’s taken off partly because its filters lend an artificial veneer of nostalgia to those in-the-moment digital photos; they instantly make a moment seem more distant or unrecoverable."

[via: http://bettyann.tumblr.com/post/16433811360 ]

"How can design bring empathy back in an increasingly disconnected world?  Modern war has lost traditional connection between soldiers on the battlefield and civilians at home.  Shifting enlistment to the poorest members of the nation, increased media coverage of data, rather than individuals, and government censorship has lead to apathy.  The Beat Empathy Device records the heartbeat of an anonymous soldier, and physically taps it into the chest of a civilian.  They share excitement, fear, calm, and death.  The news becomes news about your soldier, not just some soldier.  Now, imagine if this was your drivers license or Government ID."

"Wallace has already signaled that this is going to be a paragraph about repetition to exhaustion or even injury before he even does it. You could say he needs to keep clarifying & repeating these things because his sentences are so convoluted that otherwise you couldn’t follow them, but 1) his syntax is pretty clear 2) it’s not like he’s a freak about specifying everything… But it’s also just Wallace — who understands all of this, by the way, better than we do: communication, information, redundancy, efficiency, purity, the dangers of too much information, and especially the fear of being alone and the need to find connection with other human beings — creating a structure that allows him to ping his reader, saying “I am here”… and waiting for his reader to respond in kind, “I’m alive right now; I’m a person; look at me.” 

"Brene Brown studies human connection -- our ability to empathize, belong, love. In a poignant, funny talk at TEDxHouston, she shares a deep insight from her research, one that sent her on a personal quest to know herself as well as to understand humanity. A talk to share."

"I still feel like a homeschooler. I think I might always be…<br />
…my strange education feels relevant to everything. The way I think, the decisions I make, the things I’m good at, the things I’m terrible at, the way I understand my place in the world, the way I understand other people– it all starts w/ my education.<br />
This is always true. Just like it’s always true that the way you think starts w/ your family. But for most people, family & education aren’t mixed together to extent that homeschooling necessitates…for most people, education doesn’t distinguish you from everyone else. It makes you more similar…attempts to equalize, & in some ways it succeeds. From a outside perspective, a homeschooled one, the experience of school sometimes seems practically uniform. It isn’t, of course, but school is still an experience that most people have in common.<br />
…My life is built on something else entirely. I can’t even tell how steady it is…I might be floating. I feel kind of free."

"Shteyngart says the first thing that happened when he bought an iPhone “was that New York fell away . . . It disappeared. Poof.” That’s the first thing I noticed too: the city disappeared, along with any will to experience. New York, so densely populated and supposedly sleepless, must be the most efficient place to hone observational powers. But those powers are now dulled in me. I find myself preferring the blogs of remote strangers to my own observations of present ones. Gone are the tacit alliances with fellow subway riders, the brief evolution of sympathy with pedestrians. That predictable progress of unspoken affinity is now interrupted by an impulse to either refresh a page or to take a website-worthy photo. I have the nervous hand-tics of a junkie. For someone whose interest in other people’s private lives was once endless, I sure do ignore them a lot now."

"Continuous City, the latest play from the Builders Association — an experimental theater company that's made a name using technology in innovative ways — centers on a corporation that's trying to sell a new brand of video phones.

"Bruce Sterling ... proposed ... the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on “connections” like the Internet, Skype & texting. ... “Poor folk love their cellphones!” had the ring of one of those haughty but unforgettable expressions of condescension, like the Middle Eastern gem “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.” “Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard."