My favorites are the Danes, who get “carpenters in the forehead.”
A Few Too Many by Joan Acocella
Month: December 2012
Why I’m not a founder
A while ago Chris Dixon wrote a blog post saying that there are two kinds of people in the world: you’ve either started a company or you haven’t.
The Autism Adantage
For nearly a decade, the company has been modest in size — it employs 35 high-functioning autistic workers who are hired out as consultants, as they are called, to 19 companies in Denmark
—The Autism Advantage by Gareth Cook, New York Times
An unpurty mouth
I found myself neither in conversation nor not in conversation but looking into a particularly ugly mouth. I can’t recall how I arrived before this mouth—zigzagging across the square—but once in its presence I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
In it, there were many gaps, the raw rim of the gums showing where once there must have been teeth. Of the teeth still intact, many were chipped or split; none was straight: they appeared to have grown up at odd, unconventional angles or (more likely) been redirected by a powerful physical influence at some point in their career. All of them were highly colored—deep brown or caked with yellow or, like a pea soup, mushy green and vegetable soft with decay. This was a mouth that had suffered many slings and arrows along with the occasional thrashing and several hundredweight of tobacco and Cadbury’s milk chocolate. This was a mouth through which a great deal of life had passed at, it would appear, an uncompromising speed
Among the Thugs by Bill Buford (The New Kings Of Nonfiction, edited by Ira Glass)
Imaginative rationality
Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality….Metaphor is one of our most important tools for trying to comprehend partially what cannot be comprehended totally: our feelings, aesthetic experiences, moral practices, and spiritual awareness. These endeavors of the imagination are not devoid of rationality; since they use metaphor, they employ an imaginative rationality
–George Lakoff Metaphors We Live By
Objectivity and truth
The thing about reporting is that it is meant to be objective. It is meant to record and relay the truth of things, as if truth were out there, hanging around, waiting for the reporter to show up. Such is the premise of objective journalism. What this premise excludes, as any student of modern literature will tell you, is that slippery relative fact of the person doing the reporting, the modern notion that there is no such thing as the perceived without someone to do the perceiving, and that to exclude the circumstances surrounding the story is to tell an untruth.
Among the Thugs by Bill Buford (The New Kings Of Nonfiction, edited by Ira Glass)
