Nihilo Sanctum Est

Best Kid's Bedroom Ever?

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 20:03:56 -0400

Best Kid's Bedroom Ever?:

Dictator Botox

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 23:36:48 -0500

Good botox = objectionable and authoritarian, yes, but ultimately does the right thing

Mickey Rourke botox = holy shit this isn’t going to end well

Good Links

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 14:45:00 -0500

Back from LA. Sigh.

ArchDaily presents its Buildings of the Year.
Pepsi proves doing good can also mean Doing Good.
If you read this without tearing up, you’re not a human being, or at least not one from Boston who grew up steeped in Camelot.

Heading to Los Angeles this afternoon…

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 15:22:07 -0500

Heading to Los Angeles this afternoon…

I love this video, of then California Governor Ronald Reagan...

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 18:11:00 -0500

I love this video, of then California Governor Ronald Reagan debating a bunch of raggedy Yale liberals in their frat house, complete with casual pool playing in the background, cigarette smoking and a glam Nancy Reagan wearing sunglasses inside. Hard to imagine this scene unfolding today.

Good Links

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 18:07:00 -0500

NSE friend and NY Mag Daily Intel editor Chris Rovzar hopes the New York Times’ discovery of New York City Borough Brooklyn is somehow a self-aware nod to Brian Williams’s hilarious skewering of the paper of record’s habit of delayed trend-spotting. Doubtful.
Perhaps not as late to a trend that’s sure to send shivers down the spines of Brooklyn’s indie booksellers, the Times Book Review lists e-book bestsellers for the first time this week.
President Obama gives Robert Gibbs a pretty touching gift to hang in his new office. Those two have been through a lot in six years.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire and the Future of the Internet

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 12:08:00 -0500

Reading this terrific interview of Wolfram Alpha founder, and one-time intern-employer of young Sergey Brin, Stephen Wolfram, it occurred to me that Who Wants to be a Millionaire’s options for answering questions perfectly encapsulate the competing models of getting information online.

You want to know the “best” Vietnamese restaurant in Philadelpia. You can google it, which is the very rough equivalent of eliminating two of the four possible answers on WWTBM (or more accurately, the very rough equivalent of reducing an unknown and unworkably large number of possible answers down to a more manageable set).

You can also go to a respected expert, say the Philadelphia Inquirer’s restaurant critic. This would be calling a friend.

Or you can crowdsource the answer, either generally on a social network, or in a more targeted way on the expert-heavy Quora, for example. This is asking the audience.

An interesting recent trend is the decline of trust people have in their friends and associates on social networks, see here. Maybe this is because as our social networks grow ever larger and more anonymous, they seem more like the google result universe, i.e. unwieldy and unreliable. For questions seeking opinions, like the restaurant one, this might mean “asking the audience” increasingly means asking experts or curators instead of that guy you went to Kindergarten with 27 years ago.

Of course, the analogy to WWTBM isn’t perfect. For one thing, opinions are different than objectively correct answers (though many foodies seem to think otherwise!). Here is where Wolfram sees an opening — for getting correct answers to all sorts of questions, it provides the same service as Quora does for offering expert opinions.

One thing seems clear. Whoever provides the best alternative to Google’s eliminating possibilities option—who moves us away from “searching” to “asking”— is going to be a billionaire.

Maybe Obama was born in Japan!

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 13:54:01 -0500

Maybe Obama was born in Japan!

Good Links

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 21:19:59 -0500

An Afghan man leads camels across the desert (Boston Globe Big Picture)

The most interesting ideas I’ve considered in a long time on any subject: these touch on social movements in a socially-networked age, Egypt, and the author’s identification of a new sociological type, the “Graduate with no future,” among many, many others.
George Lakoff on the basics of cognitive linguistics and why journalists should stop pretending that “objectivity” is achieved when, for example, the make-believe of Creationism is “balanced” against the hard science of evolution.

The Indignities of Being Sane and Running for the Republican Presidential Nomination

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 19:13:32 -0500

Doing press for his book tour, the eminently reasonable Mitt Romney was forced, as every serious Republican candidate eventually is, to fawn about what a great President Sarah Palin would make. No Democrat ever had to say Dennis Kucinich would make a great President. This can only be good for Obama.

Good Links

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 14:24:18 -0500

These men may be married to the sea, but they’re looking for landlubber mistresses
Romano channels Talese deep in the heart of darkness — here’s hoping Tina Brown sends him out to do this kind of reporting into 2012
Of course hero of conservative nerds everywhere Ayn Rand supported government “handouts” when they were for herself, just like right-wing jurist Robert Bork reexamined the benefits of American tort law when he slipped and fell

Peter Zumthor's Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, ARCHDAILY

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:31:22 -0500

Peter Zumthor's Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, ARCHDAILY:

“To me, buildings can have a beautiful silence that I associate with attributes such as composure, self-evidence, durability, presence, and integrity, and with warmth and sensuousness as well; a building that is being itself, being a building, not representing anything, just being.” Peter Zumthor

Why I still love NY

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 18:08:00 -0500

Why I still love NY

quoted from thedailywhat SOTU: The word cloud for President Obama’s 2011 State Of The Union...

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 22:34:00 -0500

quoted from thedailywhat

SOTU: The word cloud for President Obama’s 2011 State Of The Union address.

On elitism

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:48:10 -0500

Interesting piece on elitism from the editors of N+1. I’ve been thinking about the endless battle between aw-shucks “Real Americans” and the “elites,” which is strictly cultural, not economic, since Aaron Sorkin gave an awkward shout-out to elitism at the Golden Globes.

*Bonus in the link: best adjective I’ve ever heard to describe George W. Bush: “uneducable.”

OMG -- Matt Bai on Obama struggling to adapt to the short-form

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 14:01:38 -0500

OMG -- Matt Bai on Obama struggling to adapt to the short-form

Twitter Palin and Long-Form Obama

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 14:24:00 -0500

With the benefit of time and hindsight, conventional wisdom on the Giffords shooting and the tenor of our national political conversation/cagematch has settled, reassuringly, into the solid, respectable and above all responsible position it always does: this really was the wild and demented act of a lone, non-political and somehow g-stringed nutjob. Phew. Now we can go back to pumping automatic rounds of rhetoric back into our ideological opponents. Jared Loughner’s glock unleashed 20 rounds so fast it’s hard to imagine his victims had time to even fully understand what was happening to them, to grasp that their neighborly, almost quaint civic meeting had turned into Grand Theft Auto.

Any given day, Sarah Palin et al unload a dozen or so cutesy, sometimes psychotic, always misinformed tweets into the ether, and like those innocent good citizens of Tuscon, we don’t have time to fully process or make sense of them before they do their damage. It’s not a phenomenon restricted to the right wing — my own instant reaction to the tragedy was to blame Palin, and I even did it in my Facebook status message. But I wasn’t swinging wildly, and as long as my reaction is judged in the context it should be — as one from the gut before all the facts were in — then I’m not ashamed of it. The important distinction here is between the streaming impressions captured in a twitter feed and deeper, longer-term analysis and thought. It’s the difference between reaction and understanding. Clive Thompson describes the difference smartly here, recognizing the value of both and arguing somewhat counter-intuitively that the rise of the short-form and instant has begun to nourish a renewed appreciation for and celebration of the long-form and deliberate.

It’s an interesting distinction to keep in mind as we consider Palin and President Obama’s near comically divergent responses to Tuscon. Who could be more thoughtful and, well, long-form, than Barack? And nobody would blink if Twitter replaced its little birdy mascot with a cartoon version of Palin’s wild-eyed face. Listening to one of her chirpy outbursts, all overly grammatical and non-stop, is like trying to make sense of hashtags and @ symbols. Sure, the President needs to better connect in a more emotional and immediate way — his typically professorial and restrained handling of the oil spill and often infuriating patience with the slog of health reform through Congress are the most prominent examples of how non-twitterific he can seem. But he’s making the adjustment: though mildly derided, his “jumping in rain puddles in heaven” line from his already classic eulogy for the victims makes for a lovely tweet.

It’s much harder, though, for a master of the short-form to go long, and sadly, Sarah Palin doesn’t seem to realize that Americans like their Presidents to be Presidential at times, like when a Congresswoman gets shot in the brain and a federal judge, nine year old girl and other innocents get murdered outside a Safeway. Her Vimeo-posted video response to the shooting was so shockingly inappropriate because it painfully exposed how Palin’s nothing more than a tweet machine, one after the other, most of them meaningless or confusing, some—like the “blood libel” line—causing lots of real world twitter, but taken together, failing to provide the kind of thoughtful reflection that is the stuff of long-form analysis and, when we need it most, leadership.

Good Links

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 16:52:00 -0500

The resurgent Republican Party is unlike anything we’ve seen in American history, ideologically rigid in a system premised on compromise and interested only in destroying the President’s agenda, no matter the consequences.
LBJ orders some pants.

Two arresting post-Tuscon magazine covers emphasize the gun...

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 10:12:00 -0500

Two arresting post-Tuscon magazine covers emphasize the gun problem. Not surprisingly, they come from Bloomberg and the Economist — exemplars of a responsible strand of conservatism that is sadly near extinct in the US.

Good Links

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:42:00 -0500

On overconfidence: works well in the boxing ring, not so well in business and politics

News Beast political writer and NSE friend Andrew Romano on how Chris Christie, Haley Barbour and Mitch Daniels — seemingly quite different kinds of 2012 Republican hopefuls — all seem to be imitating Barack Obama

New social network lets you know when your friends are in the news. Results range from the routine, like your reporter friends’ stories, to the hilarious, like your elementary school classmate’s recent arrest for indecent exposure!