≡ Category: Life, Psychology | ≅ Leave a Comment
Pico Iyer, the British-born essayist, has a nice reality check in today’s New York Times, and it’s now the most emailed article of the day. Here are a few key passages:
“I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and [...]
≡ Category: Life | ≅ Leave a Comment
Google co-founder Larry Page spoke at commencement this weekend at the University of Michigan. While the talk may not rise to the level of Steve Jobs’ masterful presentation at Stanford back in 2005 (the graduation speech that really stays with me), it does have a nice personal touch, particularly at the beginning and end. And there [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Life | ≅ 2 Comments
Take Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers: The Story of Success. Boil it down. Make it funny. And here you have our next video produced by Kirby Ferguson. NB that there are a few words sprinkled in that won’t be safe for work (unless you work in a special kind of place).
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Life | ≅ Leave a Comment
It’s time to put a human face on the disheartening economic statistics that we’re hearing almost daily. This video features students from a Southern California high school talking candidly (and without scripts) about how the economic collapse has affected their day-to-day lives. Unemployment, parents leaving the family, homelessness, scarce food — it’s all part of the [...]
≡ Category: History, Life, Literature, Philosophy | ≅ 2 Comments
Writing in The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier offers a response to the Feb 25 piece in the NYTimes: In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth. His argument is worth a read, and here is one lengthy money quote:
The complaint against the humanities is that they are impractical. This is true. They will not change the [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Life | ≅ 5 Comments
Ricky Gervais, the comedian and brains behind The Office, talks here about the difference between British and American humor, and it really gets down to deep cultural differences. Optimism, the belief that anything is possible, versus an ingrained pessimism and penchant for the underdog. I wonder whether UK readers would agree with this characterization. And, [...]
≡ Category: Life, Philosophy | ≅ Leave a Comment
If you’re not familiar with him, Peter Singer is an Australian-born philosopher who teaches at Princeton and who wrote Animal Liberation in 1975, helping to launch the animal rights movement. A practitioner of applied ethics, he has also taken controversial positions on euthanasia. Nowadays, he’s working on less sensitive issues. His latest book is called [...]
≡ Category: History, Life | ≅ Leave a Comment
Appearing at the TED Conference in 2008, Pulitzer-Prize Winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin talks about what we can all learn from American presidents, including particularly Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson. This is not another talk about what makes presidents great. It’s more about the balance between work, love, and play, and how we can generally be [...]
≡ Category: Life | ≅ 2 Comments
Randy Pausch, the computer science professor from Carnegie Mellon University whose “Last Lecture” caught the public imagination, has died of pancreatic cancer. Thanks partly to a Wall Street Journal article written last September, the public discovered the remarkably upbeat and uplifting lecture Pausch gave soon after getting diagnosed. Titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” (see [...]
≡ Category: Life, Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
Ira Glass, host of the beloved radio show This American Life, offers a helpful reminder that excellence doesn’t come automatically. (See video below.) It takes work, years of it. And he revisits some of his early radio work in order to prove it.
The Glass video has been added to our YouTube playlist. (Thanks to Kottke.org [...]
≡ Category: Life | ≅ 3 Comments
By now, many of you have probably seen (or at least heard about) the last lecture by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor from Carnegie Mellon University, who is dying from pancreatic cancer. Entitled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” the lecture (see video below) is upbeat and uplifting without being the slightest bit morose. And [...]
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