* “A Grand Plan to Make Silicon Valley Into An Urban Paradise: Maybe the suburban land of the tech giants could become a thriving dense metropolis.” Sounds good if improbable to me.
* I added to “On bad writing in philosophy: Derek Parfit on Kant.”
* Awesome: “Tenants’ Deal Removes Bar To New Tower.”
* A weird language moment, from the article “The Winners and Losers in the Fiscal-Cliff Deal:” “The Obama administration has gotten a lot done since Inauguration Day 2009, but what it’s never done is give strong partisan Democrats the kind of to-the-mattresses battle against the GOP that they crave” (emphasis added). The professional minutia of imagined gangsters is apparently well-known enough to use without any explanation of what a “to-the-mattresses battle” is, and how it differs from a non-to-the-mattresses battle.
* Kevin Kelly: The Post-Productive Economy and why we’ve barely seen growth from computing and the Internet, at least yet.
* The death of the American shopping mall. Good.
* A random thought: It’s hard to be alive and intellectually engaged without contemplating our relationship with technology.
* Perhaps related to the above, WordPress picked up “Why little black books instead of phones and computers,” and I must say that bloggers are chatty: there are 112 comments on the post (and rising), which beats “Unicomp Customer / Space Saver and the IBM Model M.” That one may have had many more readers, but it only has 68 comments.
* “Prostitutes in Brazil Take Free English Classes Ahead of 2014 World Cup;” the best quote is “I don’t think we will have problems persuading English teachers to provide services for free [. . .] We already have several volunteer psychologists and doctors helping us.”
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