Jeff Scott > Recent Status Updates

...but every failure dropped out of sight and out of mind: somewhere they accumulated in secret--the rubble of his failures. One day they would choke up, he supposed, altogether the source of grace.

Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before--usually said much better.

...we're constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves often enough that something happened, we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it.

Avoiding moral shortcuts, he consistently upheld such high ethical standards that he seemed larger than any other figure on the political scene. Again and again the American people had entrusted him with power, secure in the knowledge that he would exercise it fairly and ably and surrender it when his term of office was up.

When a jingle lingers in our ears, or a fad turns fashion upside down, or a hoax dominates the global chatter for months and vanishes as swiftly as it came, who is master and who is slave?

But then she began to think about what a long life it was, and how the way she pictured herself lay in the presence of those fears, in the conflict they provided; it occurred to her that the struggle for which she had steeled herself..with it had gone that other possibility, the unnamed one: the possibility of changing her mind. It suddenly seemed to her that her whole life had come and gone.

#fridayreads Drawing on a thin pool of talented officers Washington was forced by circumstance to tolerate a high rate of failure among his generals. A master politician in the making, he had a knack for spotting and rewarding faithful subordinates who repaid his trust with absolute devotion. He seemed to know implicitly that no loyalty surpassed that ofa man forgiven for his faults who vowed never to make them again

Look around. Think for a moment. It's the middle of the night, not a soul anywhere. In this city, at this time. Not a dog in the gutter. Empty. Except for this elephant and you're going to tell your idiot friends about it? Why? Do you think they'll understand it? Do you think it will matter to them...this is yours. It belongs only to you. And me. Only to us.

For the stones in the river of history look different depending on where you stand.

#fridayreads

#fridayreads Closing her eyes, she listened to the faint cooing of her flock and drifted off to thoughts of Robinson Crusoe, stranded alone on his desert island of despair. If she couldn't continue her lessons, if she couldn't finish the book he would be stranded there in her mind forever.

At its worst, the filter bubble confines us to our own information neighborhood, unable to see or explore the rest of the enormous world of possibilities that exist online. We need our online urban planners to strike a balance between relevance and serendipity, between the comfort of seeing friends and the exhilaration of meeting strangers, between cozy niches and wide open spaces

The filter bubble tends to dramatically amplify confirmation bias--in a way it's designed to. Consuming information that confirms to our ideas of the world is easy and pleasurable; consuming information that challenges us to think in new ways or question our assumptions is frustrating and difficult.

A spicy headline will win over a more trusted news source any day. "People don't make much of a distinction between the New York Times and some random blogger"...

#fridayreads Professional human editors are expensive, and code is cheap.

Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another's point of view, but instead we're more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead we're being offered parallel but seperate universes.

Too often I have talked with library staff who are literally irreplaceable, and yet they don't get the keys to the librarian club. It is reprehensible for a profession about service to create a class system with their services and institutions. To replace a meritocracy...with some sort of librocracy where only accredited librarians count...shows real insecurity.

In his own way, David also accepted this contradiction: as if he knew the truth does not exist, only the wish to discover it, he fought not against truth itself, but against the fragility of its appearance.

#fridayreads

#fridayreads