Gordon Crovitz: Actress Gwyneth Paltrow told an interviewer last week that she spends so much time in Spain because "they seem to enjoy life a little bit more. ... They don't always have their Blackberrys on." In order to get passengers to pay attention to safety announcements, Air New Zealand decided to show a video of stewardesses and pilots dressed in nothing but body paint. Getting our heads around information abundance will mean becoming more discerning about what information is worth our time and what kinds of tasks require real focus.
David Owen: If you and your spouse are dressed almost identically, or if you are carrying your passport in a thing around your neck, or if you are wearing any form of footwear or pants that you clearly purchased specifically to wear on airplanes, or if you make it obvious (by repeatedly turning around and talking to passengers in seats not adjacent to yours) that you are traveling with a group, the charge is fifty dollars.
Samantha Power: There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
Maria Semple: It's a throwback to a better time, when people didn't check Defamer every 15 minutes.
Have you seen "Revolutionary Road"? Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.
Kurt Schwenk, via Carl Zimmer: I guarantee that if you had a 10-foot lizard jump out of the bushes and rip your guts out, you'd be somewhat still and quiet for a bit, at least until you keeled over from shock and blood loss owing to the fact that your intestines were spread out on the ground in front of you.
From a March 6, 2001, transcript of an online chat between Bernd-Juergen Brandes (cator99) and Armin Meiwes (antrophagus): antrophagus: It's only a few days until March 9 cator99: Still, I would have rather met you yesterday and felt your teeth antrophagus: One can't have everything. There's still some time before you really feel my teeth
Sam: You can't eat panda ... they are too greasy!
Joel Stein: There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta.
Atul Gawande: Let us look for the positive deviants.
Information Overload? Relax. |