Brian
https://www.goodreads.com/bhowell
“Cruise through the gargantuan sites—YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo!—and it’s as though modernism never existed. Twentieth-century print design never existed. European and Japanese design never existed. The Web’s aesthetic might be called late-stage Atlantic City or early-stage Mall of America.”
― Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet
― Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet
“teach 120 kids on Tuesday nights in my Brand Strategy course. That’s $720,000, or $60,000 per class, in tuition payments, a lot of it financed with debt. I’m good at what I do, but walking in each night, I remind myself we (NYU) are charging kids $500/minute for me and a projector. This. Is. Fucking. Ridiculous.”
― The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
― The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
“In order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to connect, we flee solitude. In time, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves is diminished. If we don’t know who we are when we are alone, we turn to other people to support our sense of self. This makes it impossible to fully experience others as who they are. We take what we need from them in bits and pieces; it is as though we use them as spare parts to support our fragile selves.”
― Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age
― Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age
“The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying.”
― Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
― Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
“Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing or even in a whole series of letters, where one letter corroborates another and can refer to it as witness.”
― Letters to Milena
― Letters to Milena
Brian’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Brian’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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