Andy Carvin:

Several weeks ago, the family of information studies professor Phil Agre reported him missing, saying that they had not heard from him in over a year.

Charlotte P. Lee:

All of us had lost touch with him over the years. How would you know if one of your friends not only lost touch with you, but had also lost touch with almost everyone they know? You wouldn't.

Decius:

I regularly read Agre's Red Rock Eater News Service around the turn of the decade. I've also seen Agre speak at a conference. He was very interesting -- a real heavyweight.

I, too, was a long-time reader of RRE, and had seen him at CFP '99. I remember when he moved from UCSD to UCLA. I own Technology and Privacy, which Agre co-edited with Marc Rotenberg in 1997. On the Friends page, I see familiar names like Michael Froomkin, Keith Dawson, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Philip Greenspun.

Phil Agre, I hope you are well.

Sterling Hayden:

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea -- "cruising", it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

Sanford Schwartz:

If Schnabel is a surfer in the sense of knowing how to skim existence for its wonders, he is also a surfer in the more challenging sense of wanting to see where something bigger than himself, or the unknown, will take him, even with the knowledge that he might not come back from the trip.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Jeffrey Young:

The scholar apparently had many professional contacts but few close friends. An expert on privacy, he was always guarded about his own, say those who know him.

Libby Purves:

There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together,... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The Mysterious Disappearance Of Phil Agre

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Pascal Bruckner:

A revolution comes when what was taboo becomes mainstream.

Ruth Simon And James R. Hagerty:

23% of all mortgage borrowers in the US are underwater.

David Foster Wallace:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

Steven Pinker:

In every age, taboo questions raise our blood pressure and threaten moral panic. But we cannot be afraid to answer them.

Simon And Hagerty:

Mortgage troubles are not limited to the unemployed. About 588,000 borrowers defaulted on mortgages last year even though they could afford to pay -- more than double the number in 2007, according to a study by Experian and consulting firm Oliver Wyman. "The American consumer has had a long-held taboo against walking away from the home, and this crisis seems to be eroding that," the study said.

John Bird and John Fortune:

They thought that if they had a bigger mortgage they could get a bigger house. They thought if they had a bigger house, they would be happy. It's pathetic. I've got four houses and I'm not happy.

Decius:

I've gotten old enough that I now understand why adults seek to escape reality. Paradoxically, I think I was better at escaping reality when I was younger.

Richard Brody:

On the island where he encounters the Wild Things, Max talks of his desire to do away with the "sadness and loneliness" -- something that has less to do with their needs and desires than with his own -- or, rather, with the screenwriters' notion that so much of experience can be summed up under those two signifiers, and that there's some implicit happiness awaiting those who can suppress them.

John Lanchester:

It's becoming traditional at this point to argue that perhaps the financial crisis will be good for us, because it will cause people to rediscover other sources of value. I suspect this is wishful thinking, or thinking about something which is quite a long way away, because it doesn't consider just how angry people are going to get when they realize the extent of the costs we are going to carry for the next few decades.

The Economist's Washington correspondent:

By some measures, America already has a lost decade in its rearview mirror. A couple more would mean a lost generation. Worst of all, it would mean my generation. I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea.

1 in 4 Borrowers Are Underwater

David Pescovitz:

In 1990, MTV aired a groundbreaking TV documentary series called Buzz, a fantastic experiment in non-linearity and cut-up that drew heavily from -- and presented -- avant-garde art, underground cinema, early cyberpunk, industrial culture, appropriation/sampling, and postmodern literature.

Jonathan Lethem:

Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks?

Louis Menand:

Authenticity is a snark -- although someone will always go hunting for it.

David Thomson:

It is not that life imitates art, but that it is all art, all fictional as much as documentary, and it is cinema once any lens -- in camera or eye -- notices it.

Matt Knox:

If you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.

Jim Jarmusch:

Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent.

Jean-Luc Godard:

It's not where you take things from -- it's where you take them to.

Matt Jones:

Get excited and make things.

Lawrence Lessig:

By embracing "read-write culture," which allows its users to create art as readily as they consume it, we can ensure that creators get the support -- artistic, commercial, and ethical -- that they deserve and need.

MTV's Buzz: fantastically forward-thinking TV from 1990

Charles C. Mann:

If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants leaving?

Elizabeth Fenn:

You have to wonder: what were all those people up to in all that time?

Dean R. Snow:

It's really easy to kid yourself.

On Drew Gilpin Faust:

She wanted to understand how whole classes of people can get caught up in a shared worldview, to the point that they simply can't see.

Jose Saramago:

If only all life's deceptions were like this one, and all they had to do was to come to some agreement ... Were it not for the fact that we're blind this mix-up would never have happened, You're right, our problem is that we're blind.

Joe Nocera:

They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.

Charles C. Mann:

Minute changes in baseline assumptions produce wildly different results.

Paul Graham:

Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get.

Lucas Foglia:

Rewilding: the process of creating a lifestyle that is independent of the domestication of civilization.

Dan Kildee:

Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow.

Freeman Dyson:

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over.

Charles C. Mann:

I felt alone and small, but in a way that was curiously like feeling exalted.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

1491

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All of Mojo Nixon in free, legal MP3 - Boing Boing

Paul Graham:

There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals.

When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.

But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon ...

From last year, more PG:

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

Nicholas Dawidoff, on Freeman Dyson:

... always preaching the virtues of boredom ...

Samantha Power:

The French film director Jean Renoir once said, "The foundation of all great civilizations is loitering." But we have all stopped loitering. I don't mean we aren't lazy at times. I mean that no moment goes unoccupied.

From the archive:

To be sure, time marches on.

Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

Maggie Jackson:

Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment. In this new world, something crucial is missing -- attention.

Stefan Klein:

We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.

Walter Kirn:

Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy.

Donald Rumsfeld:

Simply because a problem is shown to exist doesn't necessarily follow that there is a solution.

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power.

Michael Lopp, on Managing Humans:

This book isn't just about management, it's about creating places where people can comfortably build stuff. It's about what to do during the first ninety days of your new gig, and explains why you should pick a fight, because bright people often yell at each other.

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

The Onion:

After nearly four months of frank, honest, and open dialogue about the failing economy, a weary U.S. populace announced this week that it is once again ready to be lied to about the current state of the financial system.

Paul Graham:

Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

Two kids on a school bus:

Lisa: Can't you see the difference between earning something honestly and getting it by fraud?

Bart: Hmm, I suppose, maybe, if, uh ... no. No, sorry, I thought I had it there for a second.

Saul Hansell, from last year:

How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers

Recently, The Economist:

Darker days lie ahead.

Cormac McCarthy, "Blood Meridian":

At dusk they halted and built a fire and roasted the deer. The night was much enclosed about them and there were no stars. To the north they could see other fires that burned red and sullen along the invisible ridges. They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.

Nation Ready To Be Lied To About Economy Again

Brandi Hitt, reporting from Sacramento:

There are no rules and no regulations. Here, at Tent City, you are on your own.

Decius, reporting from the sprawling exurbs:

First world shanty towns.

Look for similar towns to spring up all along the US side of the Mexican border, as migrant workers fall out of work but are afraid to return home because the situation across the border is even more perilous.

But with so much unsold (and unsellable) housing stock in the US, there's no reason for these people to remain homeless. (See Tijuana, below.)

This situation makes "drug war" reform all the more urgent.

From 2006, John Rapley:

Kingston's gang-controlled neighbourhoods are just one result of a growing worldwide phenomenon: the rise of private "statelets" that coexist in a delicate, often symbiotic relationship with a larger state. Large sections of Colombia have gone this way, as have some of Mexico's borderlands and vast stretches of the Andes and adjoining rainforest. Nations such as Afghanistan and Somalia are more or less governed by warlords, and Pakistan's borderlands submit to Islamabad only when the state's armed forces force them to. And the list is growing.

Wandering through many cities of the developing world today, one comes up against the limits of modernity. Vast metropolises, growing so quickly their precise populations are unknown, are dotted with shantytowns and squatter camps that lack running water, are crisscrossed by open gutters of raw sewage, and are powered by stolen electricity. Developing states are constantly struggling to catch up.

In some places, they succeed, barely. In others, they are losing control of chunks of their territory.

Still, although the weakness of the state today is most pronounced in the developing world, the state's retreat is also a global phenomenon.

Also from 2006:

One of the strangest sights in Tijuana is a row of vintage California bungalows resting atop a hollow one-story steel frame. Once destined for demolition across the border, they were loaded on trucks and brought south by developers who have sold them to local residents.

To squeeze them into tight lots, many homeowners mount them on frames so they can use the space underneath for shops, car repair and the like. On one site, a pretty pink bungalow straddles a narrow driveway between two existing houses, as if a child were casually stacking toy houses.

It's not that he romanticizes poverty: he recognizes the filth and clutter, the lack of light and air, that were the main targets of Modernism nearly a century ago. But by approaching Tijuana's... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Sacramento 'Tent City'

Barry Ritholtz:

Years ago, the expression was “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel” (meaning newspapers).  The modern, updated version is “Never pick a fight with people who have acerbic, award winning comedy writers, a broad TV reach, and a strong internet presence ...”

From last year's best-of:

If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.

You are more likely to become a better athlete by watching ESPN than you are likely to become a better investor by watching CNBC.

CNBC is about helping companies to present and manage their public image. CNBC endeavors to instill in viewers the sense that they are well-informed, but this is mostly just a tactic designed to keep them tuned in. The 'viewers' are really just eyeballs for advertising -- the paid placements, of course, but also the 'coverage', which is only another form of advertising.

Television programming that actually made you a more effective investor would probably look a lot like graduate school. If that's what you want, there are places to get it, and you don't even have to sit through the ads.

From the archive, P.J. O'Rourke:

I wonder, when was the last time a talk show changed a mind?

Nouriel Roubini, in a recent interview with Maria Bartiromo:

When the best minds of the country are all going to Wall Street, there is a distortion in the allocation of human capital to some activities that become excessive and eventually inefficient.

Daily Show vs CNBC | The Big Picture

Professional 3D animation, accurately reconstructed to match the event.

Hudson River Plane Landing (US Airways 1549) Animation with Audio