Category Archive

without a formal repertoire, internalized to the extent of being automatic, performance is haphazard and without shape or boundaries.
—Stanley Fish: NYT

it is hard to find examples where government-run businesses compete with private companies and win. One reason is that governments are not very good at innovation. As the great 19th-century economist Alfred Marshall wrote, “A government could print a good edition of Shakespeare’s works, but it could not get them written.”
—Richard Thaler: NYT, 15 Aug 2009

…and insurers are?

think of the world economy as driven by social epidemics, contagion of ideas and huge feedback loops that gradually change world views. These social epidemics can travel as swiftly as swine flu: both spread from person to person and can reach every corner of the world in short order.
—Robert Shiller: NYT, Economic View – 30 Aug 2009

Struggling for his identity within the materials at hand, [they] show us, in the mere turning of a sentence this way or that, how to keep from being smothered by the inherited structuring of things.
—Richard Poirier on close reading, who died last weekend at 83

We ought to be grateful to language for making life messier than ever.
—Poirier

is not dirty silence/Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
—The Creations of Sound, Wallace Stevens

Why the Hipster Must Die Time Out New York: May 30 – June 5, 2007

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization, Adbusters: 29 July 2008

For the second month in a row, we’re seeing some positive signs. The U.S. National Composite rose in the 2nd quarter compared to the 1st quarter of 2009. This is the first time we have seen a positive quarter-over-quarter print in three years. Both the 10-City and 20-City Composites posted monthly increases, as did most of the cities. As seen in both seasonally adjusted and unadjusted data, as well as the charts, there are hints of an upward turn from a bottom. However, some of the hardest hit cities, especially in the Sun Belt, show continued weakness.
—David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor’s

Oil remains abundant, and the price will likely come down closer to the historical level of $30 a barrel as new supplies come forward in the deep waters off West Africa and Latin America, in East Africa, and perhaps in the Bakken oil shale fields of Montana and North Dakota. But that may not keep the Chicken Littles from convincing policymakers in Washington and elsewhere that oil, being finite, must increase in price.
—NYT: Michael Lynch, former director for Asian energy and security at the Center for International Studies at MIT

The deep global recession is winding down. Growth is firming overseas and helping to support a revival in our own exports. If the economy is going to grow more quickly, it’ll have to be by selling more to overseas customers.
—Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com

We are seeing signs of stabilization that we hope will set the foundation for an eventual recovery. Fiscal policy and monetary stimulus have been introduced around the world, and we are seeing signs, particularly in China, that they are beginning to work.
—Jim Owens, CEO of Caterpillar, 21 July 2009. And so it is…

Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in June suggests that economic activity is leveling out. Conditions in financial markets have improved further in recent weeks. Household spending has continued to show signs of stabilizing but remains constrained by ongoing job losses, sluggish income growth, lower housing wealth, and tight credit. Businesses are still cutting back on fixed investment and staffing but are making progress in bringing inventory stocks into better alignment with sales.
—FOMC, 12 August 2009

Best of all, the Republican party has traded in Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America for a suicide pact with itself
—Niall Ferguson

Publishers who fool themselves into thinking pay will save the day only further forestall the innovation and experimentation that is the only possible path to success online.
—Jeff Jarvis, possibly employing hyperbole as a rhetorical device