things what I have read

You know when you read a thing and you think "ooh, that's a good thing" and then you carry on reading and forget about it? This is a place to put those things so that I don't forget and so that others can maybe find them good too.

[thingswhatihaveread]

It doesn't much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It is not *what* you say that prompts it, it is simply the fact you are saying it.

Mary Beard - Women & Power A Manifesto

[thingswhatihaveread]

It is still the case that when listeners hear a female voice, they do not hear a voice that connotes authority; or rather they have not learned how to hear authority in it [...] And it is not just the voice: you can add in the craggy or wrinkled faces that signal mature wisdom in the case of a bloke, but 'past-my-use-by-date' in the case of a woman.

Mary Beard - Women & Power A Manifesto

[thingswhatihaveread]

Content is something a consumer would choose to consume. Advertising is something a brand wants to say about itself. They occasionally overlap, but rarely.

Faris Yakob, Paid Attention

[thingswhatihaveread]

A brand or advertising proposition is the densest possible articulation of an idea, the work of a planner who has compressed everything necessary down into the smallest possible space. A tagline opens the meaning back up again, attempts to express as much as possible in the most memorable textual unit

Faris Yakob, Paid Attention

[thingswhatihaveread]

It’s like everything in football – and life. You need to look, you need to think, you need to move, you need to find space, you need to help others. It’s very simple in the end.

Johan Cruyff, http://gu.com/p/4hqx9?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

[thingswhatihaveread]

[E]ver since media became digital, and therefore a function of memory, the amount of available media bandwidth is also a function of Moore's Law.

Faris Yakob, Paid Attention, p60

[thingswhatihaveread]

Curiosity is stimulated by making people aware of manageable gaps in their knowledge.

Faris Yakob, Paid Attention, p54

[thingswhatihaveread]

I believe research should be thought of as triangulation: any one reading is unlikely to illuminate but a combination may do so.

Faris Yakob, Paid Attention, p32

[thingswhatihaveread]

Lines are statements. Arrows are especially emphatic statements. They divide and they define. They count up and count down. Circles are more careful. They come around again. They overthink. They analyse. They get back to the scene of the crime. They retrace their steps. That's where I end up, definitely maybe, always circumspect, always circumscribed by questions, by curiosity, by a certainty that I need a certain amount of uncertainty.

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, Mo' Meta Blues, p272.

[thingswhatihaveread]

It's not an album release. It's not a video. It's not a concert tour. To my mind, hip-hop was changed forever by the episode of The Cosby Show in which Stevie Wonder's driver crashed into Denise and Theo. Why do I say that episode changed hip-hop forever? Simple: it was the first time that 99 percent of us who went on to be hip-hop producers saw what a sampler was... It was the first time I saw anything like that, and I've surveyed the rest. It was the first time J Dilla saw a sampler. It was the first time Just Blaze saw a sampler... At that point, it was just something cool on a sitcom, and in response to it, in awe of it, an entire generation of talented, ambitious black kids leaned forward in their chairs to the point of falling out.

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, Mo' Meta Blues

[thingswhatihaveread]

[S]ometimes I only remember things through records. They're a trigger for me, they're Pavlov's bell. Without thinking about music, I can't remember the experience. But if I think long enough about a specific album, something else always bubbles up.

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, Mo' Meta Blues, p2

[thingswhatihaveread]

[T]he best thing the right has done for social cohesion lately was to spread rumours about its own ceremonial figurehead romancing a dead pig’s disembodied face, which at least brought the country together for 24 hours, before the goldfish-memoried populace promptly forgot about it, like fracking and that boy on the beach.

Stewart Lee, Now even bake off is being used to stir the pot of immigration, The Guardian

[thingswhatihaveread]

In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him were grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

Malcolm Gladwell summarising Mark Granovetter, New Yorker, How School Shootings Spread

[thingswhatihaveread]

We’ve deceived ourselves into thinking data is a camera, but it’s really an engine. Capturing data about something changes the way that something works. Even the mere collection of stats is not a neutral act, but a way of reshaping the thing itself. That is to say, I don’t weigh myself to know my weight, I weigh myself to change my mind. And it’s always a useful lie.

The deception that lurks in our data-driven world - Alexis P. Madrigal

[thingswhatihaveread]

Sometimes, when I look out at our world—at the highest level—in which thin data have come to stand in for huge complex systems of human and biological relationships, I wonder if we’re currently deep in the Normalbaum phase of things, awaiting the moment when Waldsterben sets in.

The deception that lurks in our data-driven world - Alexis P. Madrigal

[thingswhatihaveread]

For all the power wielded today by the world’s largest corporations – whether ExxonMobil, Walmart or Google – they are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarised East India Company. Yet if history shows anything, it is that in the intimate dance between the power of the state and that of the corporation, while the latter can be regulated, it will use all the resources in its power to resist.

William Dalrymple http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india-company-original-corporate-raiders

[thingswhatihaveread]

The utter capitulation of London’s planning system in the face of serious money is detectable right there in that infantile, random collection of improbable sex toys poking gormlessly into the privatised air.

http://gu.com/p/464ek