- Omg, avocado rug! Handmade rugs in the shape of breakfast foods.
- “We’re just playing sunset. We just travel around, like how the sun sets.” – drawing by Mimi, 3 years old.
- How Batman obsessively labelled his gadgets in the 1960s.
- A Japanese bonsai tree’s 10-year journey around the world: “The artist explains how the botanical plant suspended from a square carbon-fiber frame is an examination of how human limitations are placed upon the infinite aspects of nature, in their attempts to contain and control.”
- 2016 AICP Sponsor Reel: Iconic dance moves conveyed via motion capture, procedural animation, and dynamic simulations. Can you recognize all the moves?
- Brief rapture in deserted places.
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“Love’s taught me a loneliness I never imagined.”
— Eileen Myles, from Maxfield Parrish: Early & New Poems
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“I like to tell kids there’s so much opportunity in repetition—it means you can do it better this time than you did last time. You can always do it better. And until you’ve done it a thousand times, you haven’t done it. Until you can fix it, you haven’t done it at all. You get to make it the best, and then make it better. You get to understand it inside and out.”
— Life, And How It Happens To A Cook (via Lucky Peach)
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I was caught off guard when Stephen Colbert asked me a profound question. He said, “Don’t all those little tweets, don’t all those little sips of online communication, add up to one big gulp of real conversation?”
My answer was no, they don’t add up. Connecting in sips may work for gathering discreet bits of information, they may work for saying, “I’m thinking about you,” or even for saying, “I love you,” — I mean, look at how I felt when I got that text from my daughter — but they don’t really work for learning about each other, for really coming to know and understand each other.
And we use conversations with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves. So a flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for self-reflection. For kids growing up, that skill is the bedrock of development.
Over and over I hear, “I would rather text than talk.” And what I’m seeing is that people get so used to being short-changed out of real conversation, so used to getting by with less, that they’ve become almost willing to dispense with people altogether. So for example, many people share with me this wish, that some day a more advanced version of Siri, the digital assistant on Apple’s iPhone, will be more like a best friend, someone who will listen when others won’t. I believe this wish reflects a painful truth that I’ve learned in the past 15 years. That feeling that no one is listening to me is very important in our relationships with technology. That’s why it’s so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed — so many automatic listeners. And the feeling that no one is listening to me make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.
— Sherry Turkle’s phenomenal TED Talk from 2012, Connected, but alone?