— George Packer on “Celebrating Inequality.” A sobering read.
— Happy birthday, Brian Eno, you fabulous person, you.
— Really incredible piece by British stand-up comedian Stewart Lee on why there are no right wing stand-ups. Read to the last line, which actually made me gasp out loud, and I pride myself on having no shame when it comes to “bad” words.
— Don’t know if it’s just me but with comments like this, Mark Zuckerberg sounds like all the magazine and newspaper publishers I’ve known over the years. And so the wheel turns.
— Thoughtful, fascinating profile of Minecraft creator, Notch. I think we’ll see more (private) companies rising up which are not driven by the capitalistic imperatives of the past. Suddenly wealthy, young founders have different ideas about management, and are designing corporate systems that suit their own philosophies and thinking. In this case, Notch employs twenty or so people at his company Mojang, which has a flat management struture and no set working hours. “When you have the kind of success Minecraft has brought, you can just choose yourself the way you want to do things,” says Persson, which includes not rabidly pursuing the Next Big Thing. “I try to have a studio where people go to make games for the fun of it, not just because some investor has said we have to make money.” This is a small company, of course, but just imagine how this might float up to influence larger corporations, who always need to be able to attract and hire talent.
How beautiful is this? Christo’s Big Air Package, a ginormous piece in the Gasometer Oberhausen, Germany, and the artist’s first major project sans partner in life, Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009. As the blurb puts it, at 90 meters high, with a diameter of 50 meters and a volume of 177,000 cubic meters, “the work of art is the largest ever inflated envelope without a skeleton.” I die.
Photo: Wolfgang Volz © 2013 Christo
— Mark Zuckerberg on turning down Yahoo’s offer of a billion dollars for his then-fledgling social startup. Whatever you think of the young founder and Facebook, that takes some guts.
The Alan Partridge movie. Oh no oh no oh no (oh yes).
[via Emily McManus]
— Beautiful, thoughtful piece by Berg’s Timo Arnall, on the fallacy of “invisible” interfaces. Must-read.
“The Marble Answering Machine demonstrates the great potential of making digital information graspable.” This project by Durrell Bishop is from 1992. 1992!
Oh, Olafur Eliasson, how I heart you so.
[via Creative Review]
— Ok, so truthfully, I’m not entirely sure what Mariko Mori is driving at here, but I like the sound of it, don’t you?
“A growing, living artwork.” I love this.
(via Alison Prato)
— Smart words from the always-sage Clay Christensen, featured in a Q&A with Wired’s Jeff Howe. Imagine if all managers thought about their role in this way.
—
So says “The Shooter,” the protagonist of the extraordinary Esquire story, The Man Who Killed Osama Bin Laden… Is Screwed. This is his typically dry, pithy response to watching the movie, Zero Dark Thirty, and the story is packed full of his wry humor. What’s not funny is the disgraceful way in which veterans are being treated once they return home. As writer Phil Bronstein puts it:
The Shooter will discover soon enough that when he leaves after sixteen years in the Navy, his body filled with scar tissue, arthritis, tendonitis, eye damage, and blown disks, here is what he gets from his employer and a grateful nation: Nothing. No pension, no health care, and no protection for himself or his family.”
Bronstein touches on the idea that the business community would be smart to tap the skills of retired SEALs for less violent settings. He details discussions with (now former) Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Orbitz chairman, Jeff Clarke. “It would be great to get a panel of CEOs together who are ready to help these guys get hired,” says someone associated with the Navy SEAL Foundation. Yes, yes, yes. Make it happen!
