Japanese influenced pastry

Pâtisserie Sadaharu Aoki, Paris

precariousness of reason

"Do not glory in your state, if you are wise and civilized men; an instant suffices to disturb and annihilate that supposed wisdom of which you are so proud; an unexpected event, a sharp and sudden emotion of the soul will abruptly change the most reasonable and intelligent man into a raving idiot."
- Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, pp.211-212

The Madhouse

Francisco de Goya, The Madhouse, c. 1812-14

meat water

http://www.dinnerinabottle.com/

landscapes of an embattled mind

"Living with lunatics, he wrote, paradoxically took his mind off of his own state and the frightening unpredictability of [epileptic] fits. 'For although there are some who rave and howl a great deal, there is much true friendship here. They say that we must tolerate each other so others may tolerate us ... and we understand each other very well.' In between attacks then, van Gogh seemed possessed by clarity and strength. So the phenomenal sequence of paintings achieved at the Arles hospital, and especially at St Rémy, with their convulsive bucklings and writhings, the cartwheeling stars, rocks heaving in sinuous arabesques, the cyclonic rush of brushstrokes through the quaking cypresses, should not read as documents of descent into lunacy."

- Simon Schama, Power of Art, p. 334

The decision

US Presidents

A ranking of US Presidents by wealth and job performance here.

500

Oxford University, founded 1096

"Of the 85 institutions that are still around from 500 years ago, 70 are universities."
- John Sexton, New York University

when it becomes something else

Venetian Canal, 1913

"The smartest painter follows his brush."
- Artist George Gallo [born 1956] quoting John Singer Sargent [1856-1925]

humans wasting their lives

Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools, [1490-1500]

Ralph Lauren's daughter sells candy

break

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929

blitzkrieg

"Germany in 1940, as New York University professor Clay Shirky points out in his provocative book Here Comes Everybody, was not the invincible power 'etched in communal memory.' Germany teetered near bankruptcy; its army was smaller and its tanks inferior to France's. So why did the German blitzkrieg succeed? Because its tanks were equipped with technology the French tanks lacked: radios. These radios allowed Panzer commanders to share intelligence and make quick decisions, leaving French commanders standing still and guessing while German tanks moved in concert. Even if the French had radios, Shirky writes, the Germans held another advantage: 'The French regarded tanks as a mobile platform for accompanying foot soldiers. The Germans, on the other hand, understood that the tank allowed for a new kind of fighting, a rapid style of attack ...' The technology advantaged Germany, but so did a superior strategy that allowed Germany to prevail."
- Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, p.295

Picasso

A Met interview here.

last words

James Madison's last words were: "I always talk better lying down." He drank a pint of whiskey daily and died at the age of 85.

under the influence

B.J.: What do we drink to this time?
Hawkeye: How about to inactivity? The mother of inebriation.

keep your watermelon cool

Read about it here.

stuck rigorously to what optic nerve reported

The Music Lesson [1662-65], Royal Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, by Jan Vermeer [1632-1675]

the Internet records everything and forgets nothing

The digital age is facing its first existential crisis: the impossibility of erasing your posted past and moving on.

10%

Just 10% of Napoleon's forces survived the Russian campaign.

dystopia

Aldous Huxley

"Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no big brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppressors, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think ... Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism."
- Neil Postman cited in Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, pp. 267-268

expand your vision

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-1882]

sumasshedshy

"What are we saying when we say someone has ‘gone out of their mind’? The thing about going out of your mind is that the mind is still there; you can go back. You haven’t lost your mind. You’ve just gone out of it. The Russians use the same phrase. The Russian adjective meaning ‘crazy’, which is the same as the noun for ‘insane person’, is sumasshedshy, literally ‘who was going out of their mind’. Sofia Andreyevna Tolstoy, wife of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, did go out of her mind at the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana in 1910. She didn’t lose her mind. She went back to it later, and lived another nine years. But she did lose her husband, who ran away from her and died of pneumonia in a rural stationmaster’s house a few days later."

Read the complete London Review of Books article here.

failure

"Al Gore who has had a ringside seat at the management of both Apple and Google, said that he deeply admires the founders of each company, but 'a genius' like Steve [Jobs] comes along only once in several generations. Jobs has demonstrated his genius over a longer period of time than [Larry] Page and [Sergey] Brin, he believes, and has also benefited from something the Google founders lack: 'Steve has the great if painful experience of failing, and coming back.' The wisdom that comes from failure has not yet punched Page and Brin."
- Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of The World as We Know It, p. 219

artists

Collaborate on projects and get paid: www.hitrecord.org

gold

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s picture of the rush to retrieve gold from a Shanghai bank on the eve of the communist takeover in 1948.

Ferrari Bike

workload

Hank Azaria earns $400,000 per episode of The Simpsons, which involves a total per episode time commitment of about six hours.

frozen peas

'I write like'

Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.

Any text in English will do: your latest blog post, journal entry, comment, chapter of your unfinished book, etc. For reliable results paste at least a few paragraphs (not tweets):

http://iwl.me/