Category: ideas

“This comes from Kai, my wife, who produced the film. She [quotes from] Rio Grande: ‘Get it done, Johnny Reb.’ It’s like, don’t make excuses. There aren’t any anymore. If you’re talking about it, you should be doing it and she doesn’t like to see talent go fallow. She doesn’t like to see people repeat themselves. She likes people to get it done, purely out of love of the person and then joy for the product itself.”

“Selfishness may be the default, automatic response — and the one that takes energy and self control to overcome.”

“Artistic forms — be they performance, installation, or more traditional methods of image-making — have come to the fore as a way of answering violence, challenging the official routes of art distribution.”

“The more psychologists investigate musicality, the more it seems that nearly all of us are musical experts, in quite a startling sense. The difference between a virtuoso performer and an ordinary music fan is much smaller than the gulf between that fan and someone with no musical knowledge at all. … We aren’t talking about instinctive, inborn universals here. Our musical knowledge is learned.”

Jonathan Kalb: “For the past thirteen years, my smile has been an incoherent tug-of-war between a grin on one side and a frown on the other: an expression of joy spliced to an expression of horror. … If a stranger approaches me smiling and I try to return the greeting, I watch the person’s face fade into apprehension and wariness.”

“Yes. I think eventually, robots will take over your job. If you work in the fast food industry, I think at this point the whole restaurant could just be run by robots. I’m not trying to insult fast food workers – I’m just trying to tell the truth. A robot can make some chicken nuggets and a robot can take your order. Robots can clean up and they don’t make many mistakes.”

“We can intuit that men cry less often than women owing to social conditioning; crying doesn’t really fit in with our image of stereotypical manhood, after all, and that’s no doubt a partial explanation of why men are more likely to hold in their tears. But men may also be biologically built to shed fewer tears.”

“Research shows that forgivers perceive a less daunting world, and perform better on challenging physical tasks.”

It’s “a market so constricted by high transaction costs and legal risks that it excludes the vast majority of small and mid-sized businesses and prevents literally 95 percent of all patented discoveries from ever being put to use to create new products and services, new jobs, and new economic growth.”