[Jonathan Harris tells three stories about his fourth grade teacher, Baz

1. What make a great teacher?
2. How to engage your audience
3. On death]

"People are never scared by the commonplaces of daily life, no matter how risky they are; in 2031, people choose to be alarmed by exotic, eye-catching stuff, like rare diseases and psycho serial killers…

There are no political parties. They were entirely hollowed-out and disrupted by social networks. That happened fast.…

Suburbs are the new favelas, while the prosperous live cheek-by-jowl in repurposed downtowns. Architecture guts entire city blocks, preserving the historicized skins around flats packed to Hong Kong densities. Cars are rental-shared. Furniture is mobile. Most objects have IDs…

Nothing can be ‘innovative’ unless you are convinced that change makes a difference. Without the magic patter, the semantic context that sets expectations, a rabbit in a hat is not a wonder, it’s just a weird accident. A true network society cannot progress, because it reticulates; it’s all snakes and ladders, rockets and potholes, mash-ups and short circuits."

"We need help!

We're sending letters to everyone in the world, one town at a time. The letters all arrive on the same day, just like a huge dollop of fresh cream blobbed on the whole town. These cheerful handwritten letters prompt chats around neighborhoods and whip up all sorts of community curiosity and giggling confusion."

[via: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/646138685/especially-mysterious-letters/posts/125549?ref=base ]

"I hope kids are still finding some way, despite Google and Wikipedia, of not knowing things. Learning how to transform mere ignorance into mystery, simple not knowing into wonder, is a useful skill. Because it turns out that the most important things in this life — why the universe is here instead of not, what happens to us when we die, how the people we love really feel about us — are things we’re never going to know."

"A young-ish Christopher Walken appears in Annie Hall but his name is misspelled in the credits as "Christopher Wlaken". Were this 1990, I might have invented a eastern European backstory for Wlaken, who, perhaps, Americanized his name sometime after appearing in the film. But as we live in the future, a cool hunk of glass and metal from my pocket told me -- before the credits even finished rolling -- that the actor was born Ronald Walken in Astoria, Queens.

"I was intrigued by the letters so much that I kept them in a drawer in my room, wondering if Timothy was actually related to us...When a new letter would arrive, she would hand it to me, usually without reading it. I would pore over it for clues, then would add it to the stack...So many years later, when I was conceiving a name for this literary journal, the name Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern occurred to me...made sense on many levels...honor my Irish side of the family & also allude to this mysterious man & the sense of possibility and even wonder he'd brought to our suburban home...Knowing that the journal bore the name of a real person who had endured years of struggle threw melancholy shadows over the enterprise. But the McSweeneys insisted that the use of the name was acceptable, even appropriate, given Timothy's background as an artist & search for connection & meaning through the written word. Since 2000 we've implicitly dedicated all issues to the real Timothy."

"At this cafe, you get what the person before you ordered. The next person gets what you ordered. Welcome to the Ogori cafe! ... For the record, here are the rules of the Ogori cafe: 1. Let's treat the next person. What to treat them with? It's your choice. 2. Even if it's a group of friends or a family, please form a single-file line. Also, you can't buy twice in a row. 3. Please enjoy what you get, even if you hate it. (If you really, really hate it, let's quietly give it to another while saying, "It's my treat…") 4. Let's say "Thank You! (Gochihosama)" if you find the person with your Ogori cafe card. 5. We can't issue a receipt."

"OOPArt is a term coined by American zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson for a historical, archaeological or palaeontological object found in a very unusual or seemingly impossible location. The term covers a wide variety of objects, ranging from material studied

“Why Toys Shouldn’t Work “Like Magic”: Children’s Technology and the Values of Construction and Control “...describes the tension between “ease of use” and user empowerment” that is at stake in kids artifact design."

"traces his love of unseen mystery -- heart of Alias, Lost, and the upcoming Cloverfield -- back to its own magical beginnings, which may/not include an early obsession with magic, the love of supportive grandfather, or his own unopened Mystery Box."

"Modernism brings out the dark drives that slumber in us. It reserves no place for the unexplainable or the mysterious – and for precisely that reason causes a return to barbarism."

"Nothing is spelled out; it must be discovered. There is an unseen drama in the shadows which hide as well as describe. It is important in Japanese to talk around the subject; something is lost in being direct."