"So in effect you have to handcraft your own “app”…basically reinventing the wheel every time. Almost all of these apps are artisanal, and most are clunky, as were probably the first wheels or codexes or horseless carriages."

"In a way, reading on the iPad reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges’s haunting story The Book of Sand, in which the narrator comes across an infinite book that contains the pages of all other books in the universe. At first intrigued, the idea of the book begins to terrify him. He considers burning it, but reasons that the smoke from the book would be infinite and thus suffocate the world, so he ends up abandoning it in the National Library, on some anonymous shelf. I feel some sense of this low-grade unease when reading on the iPad, as if the book I am reading at that particular moment in time might be part of a much larger book, and that I am actually reading all books at once. Then again, maybe this feeling is not such a bad feeling because maybe it is true."

"I DESPISE MULTI-PAGE ARTICLES WITH THE HEAT OF A MILLION SUNS. The Page One extension for Safari and Chrome fixes them, automatically displaying the single-page version of articles for several popular news sites. Install the extension now:"

"Earl’s real name is Thebe Neruda Kgositsile…his father is Keorapetse Kgositsile, one of South Africa’s most celebrated poets. Sanneh spoke w/ Kgositsile, & learned that the father knew of Earl’s success, but had not listened to the music. “When he feels that he’s got something to share with me, he’ll do that,” Kgositsile said. “& until then I will not impose myself on him just because the world talks of him.”<br />
<br />
The person most responsible for Earl, however, is of course his mother, whose marriage to Kgositsile fell apart about a decade ago. She asked that The New Yorker not publish her name because she feared that Earl’s fans would harass her, & she is fiercely trying to protect her teen-age son from the exigencies of sudden fame. “There is a person named Thebe who preëxisted Earl,” Earl’s mother told Sanneh. “That person ought to be allowed to explore & grow, & it’s very hard to do that when there’s a whole set of expectations, narratives, & stories that are attached to him.”

"You might say that what looks at first like common sense is David Remnick’s most winning eccentricity."<br />
<br />
[via: http://tumble77.com/post/4526059297/you-might-say-that-what-looks-at-first-like-common ]

"Changes between the transcription of David Foster Wallace reading ‘A fragment of a longer thing’ (Dec. 2000) and The New Yorker’s publication of that story as ‘Backbone’ (Feb. 28, 2011)<br />
Blue are insertions, red reveal deletions."

"current New Yorker (Sept 6)…provides interesting details about how [Francis Collins, manager of The Human Genome Research Institute & current director of the NIH] was raised & unschooled.<br />
<br />
"For Francis, it was an enchanting, if arduous, childhood, part Boy's Life & part Woodstock. He could set a bar door & knew how to predict weather by reading the sky over the distant Alleghennies. He did not see the inside of a schoolroom until 6th grade, because Margaret taught her boys at home. "There was no schedule," Francis recalls. "The idea of Mother having a lesson plan would be just completely laughable. But she would get us excited about trying to learn about a topic that we didn't know much about. & she would pose a question & basically charge you w/ it, using whatever you had—your mind, exploring nature, reading books—to try to figure out, well, what could you learn about that? & you'd keep at it until it just got tiresome. & then she'd always be ready for the next thing.""

"You know, Mark Coatney brought Newsweek to Tumblr with astounding success because Mark knows how to be a part of a community, because he’s smart enough to see that his audience works just as hard as he does at producing the sort of content that makes this community worthwhile, an audience that did all this without ever expecting a ticker tape parade to celebrate our esteemed arrival.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, established media came to Tumblr to engage their audiences, and in so doing revealed that the only audience that really matters is themselves." [via: http://bettyann.tumblr.com/post/975158391]

via John Naughton via David Smith, http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2010/08/13/11597 : "“Painkiller Deathstreak” by Nicolson Baker. An extraordinary piece (alas, available only to subscribers to print or digital editions of the New Yorker, so maybe it’s unfair to include it here) about what happens when a gifted and observant writer spends a month of his life playing computer games. I’ve often blanched at the arrogance of adults denouncing ‘mindless’ computer games which (a) they’ve never tried to play, and (b) are actually far too complex for them to master. The result is a chasm between the shared cultural experience of entire generations — and total ignorance on the part of adults. The kids who understand and play games have better things to do than to delineate the contours of this exotic subculture for the benefit of their elders. So it was an extraordinarily good idea to get a sophisticated, observant, articulate writer to have a go."

"Mr. Coatney describes Tumblr as “a space in between Twitter and Facebook.” The site allows users to upload images, videos, audio clips and quotes to their pages, in addition to bursts of text.

"When you are sick, this is what you want from medicine. When you are a taxpayer, this is what you want from medicine. And when you are a doctor or a medical scientist this is the work you want to do. It is work with a different set of values from the ones that medicine traditionally has had: values of teamwork instead of individual autonomy, ambition for the right process rather than the right technology, and, perhaps above all, humility—for we need the humility to recognize that, under conditions of complexity, no technology will be infallible. No individual will be, either. There is always a velluvial matrix to know about."

"Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like." Also on Gladwell's blog: http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2008/12/teachers-and-quarterbacks.html

"We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy ... yet Obama has ... the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary & concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world & utterly representative of 21stC America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home ... be a symbolic culmination of the civil- & voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties & the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance & inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, & battered morale, America needs ... a leader temperamentally, intellectually, & emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe"

"Frédéric Bourdain is a Frenchman in his early thirties who has spent much of his life impersonating kidnapped or runaway teens....That's an interesting story by itself but just the tip of the iceberg. At some point, Bourdain's story gets intertwined with that of Nicholas Barclay, a teen who went missing in Texas in 1994. After that, the story proceeds like the craziest episode of Law and Order you've ever seen."

"coat is designed to serve as a final home in the case of a natural or man-made disaster...For warmth, you can stuff its many pockets with newspapers, or with the floppy nylon teddy bears which Final Home also sells."

"Elevator design is rooted in deception—to disguise not only the bare fact of the box hanging by ropes but also the tethering of tenants to a system over which they have no command"

"Decoding the chaos of Lagos. by George Packer" now online in full

"Malcolm Gladwell talks about the importance of stubbornness and collaboration in problem-solving, and how long it takes to master any challenge. Introduced by David Remnick."