Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
rating: 3 of 5 stars
I think of Malcolm Gladwell books as a sophisticated guilty pleasure.
He Who Must Name Patterns is the darling of airport bookstores (which I think amuses him; there is a part on airplane crashes in Outliers that is difficult to read on a flight, similar to beginning [...]

Do you ever find it difficult to describe the work you do to your family?
In anticipation of the upcoming Tryptophantastic week, I offer this video (from Zachary Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard) to explain my job, which on this particular October night included a Boston gathering to talk about the Knight [...]

The biscuits were baking, the jam cooling, and the bacon sputtering yesterday morning, for brunch (not Grease, though the bacon rendered plenty) was the word—brunch was the time, was the place, was the motion; brunch was the way we were feeling.
A small group of the leading lights in digital innovation filled the magic cottage with [...]

Voilà, the project I have been working on these few months at the Knight Foundation:
KnightPulse.org, a place to discuss the future of information—to talk about new ways to give, share, find, and receive information we need. We’re posting video conversations to start off, and we’ll build tools the community wants next.

All mistakes are [...]

I thought some of you might be interested in a talk I gave today on behalf of Knight Foundation.
This morning, my colleague Robertson Adams recorded my presentation of the News Challenge Garage (the incubator site I helped build for the Knight News Challenge contest to fund innovative digital news delivery ideas) at the Communications [...]

A week ago I gave a talk about my dissertation to a wonderfully supportive group of colleagues at the University of Virginia, and I launched what I’m now calling an open dissertation—a blog, at culturemodding.com, with updates on the project (the whole dissertation is called Culture Modding: How We Play With Our Food, Money, and [...]

After a storm, suspended rain drops reveal hidden webs on plants, dot the insides of flowers.

On my way to the University of Virginia this morning, I paused at a small outgrowth that held up a canopy of interlaced threads, much like I was about to do for a small audience of colleagues in the [...]

As we wait out a tropical storm in Miami, I am thinking of a sky loom rather than the looming sky, inspired by this part of Anthony Doerr’s breathtaking, brief piece in this summer’s Granta:
Salmon, wildebeest, locusts. Storks, swifts, snow geese. What if the torrents of animals migrating past us every year left behind traces [...]