December 2008
19 posts
freelance conversation
Sarah: I can’t believe this is how I’m spending my time. As if I have nothing better to do than to look at all the MacArthur Fellows for 2008.
Doug: Hmm. Are you noticing any … patterns?
Sarah: People who produce work, that’s a theme.
What is the Federal Reserve? What does it do? How... →
A very readable breakdown of how the Fed operates on the economy, and how their balance sheet has changed over the last two years.
NYT on Tino Sehgal →
A short profile of an artist whose works leave no tangible evidence behind. No photos, no catalog entries, no objects, no transcipt, no bill of sale. And yet they can still be bought and sold.
Collapse Gap - Dmitri Orlov →
An interesting paper drawing analogies between the USSR, immediately before collapse, and the US today.
wednesday
we are approaching a state of universal telepathy, where thoughts, commands, and queries are conveyed instantly from mind to mind, moving across some frictionless ether.
The Philadelphia Independent, Issue #10 as PDF →
the atlantic ocean on long island, during the...
Last night we drove to the ocean and stared at the heavy starless black of the Atlantic, overcast in the middle of the night. It looked like the void. Like death. A pit with no bottom. A wide unnavigable body of water with nothing on the other side of it. You couldn’t imagine that it would ever be daylight on that beach, not in twelve hours, or twelve years.
Wednesday
It’s cold out. But not too cold. Lots of squirrels in the park around 11am. The sky has that thinly overcast quality that spreads light across the sky without dimming it. I have a cough and it isn’t going away. Oatmeal and coffee. Work to do.
from JDG
The financial services industry (did you approve of its $700 billion bailout?) has proven to us that our entire economy is a complete and total sham. It’s just a big fucking shell game. What a way to run a country!
from HWB
…I’ve particularly been toying with the aesthetics of business models, as the news and opinion industry is generally in failure (and I would argue that this is the case in both print and ‘new media’ ). I think the next exciting thing to happen in literary/journalism will not be a new voice, per se, but a better design for being heard…
thoughts on auto crisis, from Detroit →
excerpt …
One thing I do like about GM, Ford, and Chrysler is that they are companies that still make something. What do the vast majority of the Fortune 500 companies even do? What does Goldman Sachs do? What do all those companies in Silicon Valley make? They shuffle paper, sure, transmit blips of binary code, attend important meetings, and make “deals.” Maybe brown people...
physics troll →
from a recent issue of a popular magazine
I walked half a block back to my office—a building that houses many magazines aggressively devoted to selling people expensive things that won’t make them happier—but couldn’t go inside.
He wants to have himself made bigger until he weights 32 stone, have steel rods inserted into his arms and wear iron decorations weighing 2 cwt. … He has horses who eat no oats and a hundred golden castles with swans and with whales made of bullet-proof armor.
-Elias Canetti
At the mental hospital, Allen received stark lessons in simulated obedience. He learned to hide his psychiatric medication under his tongue instead of refusing it or spitting it out, and he studied what the medical staff seemed to want of him, so that they would pronounce him cured. “I made a decision to institute a high state of cooperation with the world again,” he says.
