Tomorrow I woke up to a steady stream of email and tweets coming into my Blackberry about my first column appearing today in The StarPhoenix. It’s an introductory column so there wasn’t a lot of original research put into it (I knew the topic pretty well). While today the column appeared on A3, it is [...]
Steven Johnson
The city as idea incubator
Steven Johnson on why New York has become a growing hub for technology startup companies. As a diverse city that supports countless industries and maverick interests, New York excels at creating those eclectic networks. Subcultures and small businesses generate ideas and skills that inevitably diffuse through society, influencing other groups. As the sociologist Claude Fischer [...]
2009 in Review
This is late but we all need to deal with disappointment in our lives. Memorable events for 2009: Heading to Chicago Thanksgiving weekend freezing at the lake Freezing at the cabin in late April with snow on the ground Favorite books I read in 2009: The BLDGBlog Book The War by Ken Burns The Kennedys [...]
Christmas Gift Ideas for the Emotionally Distant Father
A friend of mine/arch-nemesis has drawn her father and father-in-law for this year’s Christmas celebration and demanded a Christmas gift guide for them. While I am generally compliant towards requests from friends who have incriminating stories about me, this one is a hard one as I don’t have a relationship with my dad * and [...]
What did you read this summer?
I never read much this summer (compared to other summers at least) but I did get some reading done. Here is the list. The Kennedys by Peter Collier & David Horowitz :: Quite good as it followed the family after RFK’s assassination and the tragedy that kept following even the next generation of Kennedys. The [...]
Bill Kinnon on writing
Bill has a wonderful post on writing. The entire thing is worth reading but this one got me thinking In 2004, Nielsen BookScan tracked the sales of 1.2 million books and found that nine hundred and fifty thousand of them sold fewer than ninety-nine copies. So we are looking at author royalties of a couple [...]
The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson
I finally finished The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson last weekend. I was 20 pages into it when it got left up at the cabin for a couple of weeks. The book is centered on the life of Joseph Priestley, the 18th-century British natural philosopher (or amateur scientist) who most people know as the [...]
