fieldus

The visionaries: Meet the men who predicted the crash - Profiles, People - The Independent
…I say listen to negative rather than positive advice. When you go to a book store there are plenty of publications telling you how to get rich, but none telling you how not to go bankrupt. To put it another way, […]

from a review of of Judith Thurmans’ New Yorker essay on Leni Riefenstahl:
Time, that is intolerant
of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week,
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons […]

Oliver Burkeman on stimulating the intellect | Life and style | The Guardian
But there’s another barrier to iconoclastic thinking: fear. Once you’ve jolted your brain on to a new path of thought, pursuing it further - either in your head or by acting on it - will stimulate the fear of uncertainty, failure or disapproval. […]

Ken Baldwin, (c) Chronicle / Christina Koci Hernandez

Letter from California: Jumpers: The New Yorker
Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. “I wanted to disappear,” he said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water […]

from Adam Phillips in conversation with Philip Davis in The Reader:
Samuel Johnson said it’s very difficult to be friends with people who hold views directly opposed to your own…

It’s not that I think ‘How fascinating it is that there are other people’. What reassures me or makes me feel better is the fact that I […]

Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something […]

iD: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century by Susan Greenfield review | Non-fiction book reviews - Times Online
Lady Greenfield posits three types of identity. Those who are “Someone” locate themselves in relation to others, changing and responding as they gain experience. Those who are “Anyone” are characterised by action, not reflection, and have […]

Smile and kiss your right to privacy goodbye (according to David Byrne)
Technorati Tags: byrne, copyright, photography

Tags:  design ethics pic value zeitgeist

Oliver Burkeman: This column will change your life | Lifeandhealth | Life and Health
…the psychologist Neal Roese explains in his book, If Only, “If you decide to do something and it turns out badly, research shows that it probably won’t haunt you down the road. You’ll reframe the failure and move on. But […]

The Happiness Project: This Saturday: a happiness quotation from Schopenhauer.
“To attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and…though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something […]