From the category archives:

Observations

The lesson.

May 15, 2010 Observations

It doesn’t matter how old you are. It doesn’t matter what other people tell you.
If you can find some courage (in yourself) and some faith (in anything) and some perspective (it’s not that big a deal) and some kindness (always be the nicest person in the room) you can make things happen that will amaze [...]

Read it all →

Two Years

November 17, 2009 Observations
Thumbnail image for Two Years

Two years ago today, this happened. And I don’t mean my son’s tooth coming in; of course, I mean that I first tweeted.
What a weird two years.
As I’ve become increasingly engaged with some kind of Twitter community, I’ve encountered: love, anger, births, deaths, proposals, breakups, people gone missing, people found. Warmth, filth, and everything in [...]

Read it all →

Do bookstores matter?

November 16, 2009 Observations

For years—perhaps decades—my dad would walk to the flagship Kroch’s and Brentano’s store on South Wabash on Chicago, spending his lunch hour among the famously knowledgeable booksellers and the then-amazing array of inventory. I only remember being in that downtown store once or twice, but the mall Kroch’s and Brentano’s in the town where I [...]

Read it all →

Actually social media

April 7, 2009 Observations

I attended a little liberal arts college in Wisconsin, where we well-off kids were dipped into a fantasy island of hippie liberalism in the middle of a devastated post-industrial blue-collar town. We had to stick together or intoxicate ourselves out of our minds to keep the consensual reality held together, and generally it worked pretty [...]

Read it all →

Driving readers away with advertising

March 14, 2009 Commonplace Book

A Working Library – On advertising:
So, let’s stop pretending, shall we? Any economy which charges ever less for ever more intrusive ads will eventually be successful not in creating wealth but in driving the readers away, until the only ones left to heed the ads are all the other ads, the cell phones searching in [...]

Read it all →

Surprise! Birkerts resists the Kindle

March 13, 2009 Observations

Scott Esposito lines up Sven Birkerts’ Atlantic humbug on the Kindle.
There was a time (well over a decade ago now) when I thought Birkerts was a hero for The Gutenberg Elegies. But now I’m with Scott: at this point Birkerts just seems spent.

Read it all →

So delicious

March 2, 2009 Observations

Hey! I’ve created a Commonplace Cartography Delicious account as another means to share interesting links, etc with you.
Even better, you can use the inbox features of Delicious to send me links you think I might like.

My Delicious feed: http://delicious.com/commonplacecartography
To tag a link you think I might like to see, simply tag it as “for:commonplacecartography” [...]

Read it all →

When I realized I was a grown-up

January 24, 2009 Observations

I realized I was a grown-up when we brought my daughter home from the hospital. I walked upstairs and found my wife clipping the baby’s fingernails.
I remember thinking, “holy shit, that little thing can’t even clip her own fingernails” and realizing just how responsible we would have to be.
I had a similar realization when having [...]

Read it all →

Why my hip-hop posse would include nothing but badass chefs

January 24, 2009 Observations

For some reason, I like the idea of my hip-hop posse consisting entirely of chefs. Perhaps because I’d like my own hip-hop name to be Foo-Dee.
Anthony Bourdain
because he’s a badass and I’d really like him to guide me around the globe, smoking and drinking along the way.
Mark Bittman
because he’s the one I’d like to actually [...]

Read it all →

Inaugural tag clouds

January 20, 2009 Observations

A wordle.net tag cloud comparing Obama’s inaugural address with W’s.

Read it all →

← Previous Entries

Clicky Web Analytics