"Looking, really looking, at art (some might say seeing…feeling) is like this: It is like all the other really amazing things in life…You do it too much & you forget how good it can actually be…you become jaded. You don’t get enough & it is all you can think about—the good & the bad. Then, there is one photo…drawing…performance & you want to know all there is to know about it…It is a little bit like falling in love. It’s best, most exciting, when you don’t know why you like something…the thing you are looking at is something you might usually be inclined to dislike…But, with this, you cannot stop looking, cannot stop thinking. And so, in every other thing that you think about, talk about, read about, talk about, read about, you start to see it in all of those other things, whether or not they, directly, have anything to do with that thing you are suddenly, entirely, falling for…all of those other things have changed. And everything that you thought you knew is no longer the same."

"My friend Nick wrote to me earlier this week and scolded me for constantly critiquing the existing paradigm while rarely proposing specific solutions. So, with a nod to Nick, here’s my specific advice:

1.    Hire talented teachers and let them teach what inspires them.

2.    Never require—in fact, never allow—a teacher to teach content that doesn’t inspire him or her.

3.    Allow teachers to bring their whole selves to work; don’t limit their ability to share talents and things they love simply because it falls outside of their academic department.

I know what you’re thinking: If we followed this advice, we’d have to completely re-invent the way we’ve structured our schools. The current model simply can’t accommodate these recommendations.

Exactly. We have to re-invent the way we structure our schools."

"We have witnessed financial services (think asset management, hedge funds, buyout funds, private equity, and venture capital) grow as a percentage of GNP for the past thirty years. The best and brightest don't go into engineering, science, manufacturing, general management, or entrepreneurship, they go to wall street where they will get paid more. And on top of that, we have been giving these jobs a tax break. That seems like bad policy. If we force hedge funds and the like to compete for talent on a more level playing field, then maybe we'll see our best and brightest minds go to more productive activities than moving money around and taking a cut of the action. .. It's time for asset managers to start paying their fair share of taxes. We are among the most highly compensated people in the world. And we've been getting a huge tax break for years. It's not right and I am happy to see our government finally do something about it."

"I think the reasons these more casual recommendation and discovery methods work better for me are 3-fold: 1. They allow me to employ my fuzzy, intuitive perception of peoples’ broader personality and taste to determine how likely I am to like the things they like (I thought the person on Brightkite looked cool, so I trusted her taste; I think my Last.fm friends are cool, so I trust that new stuff I see them playing will be interesting to me). 2. They aren’t explicitly recommendation systems, but rather allow people to implicitly recommend things just by going about their normal business (someone likes a web page so they post it to Delicious to remember it later, the hipsters at Frankies like Gene Clark so they play his music while they work and I hear it incidentally). I think people are more likely to participate in this kind of system than one where they are expected to formally recommend things. 3. They don’t require me to narrow what I’m looking for by overly specific criteria"

"I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker."

"Feigning disinterest in something while actually desiring it."