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Dollar Shave Club – I’m a full blown member.
Shave Time. Shave Money.
Sign up here now! No regrets. I’ll get a free month and you’ll get your own fancy link to give to a friend.
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The Missing TED Talk.
Thanks to @peters0n for sending me the missing TED Talk from Nick Hanauer.
National Journal Restoration Roundtable
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David Kelley on Creative Confidence.
Our words and actions have the power to open creative frameworks and the power to stifle creative confidence. Have you lost your creative confidence along the way. Did someone try to take it from you. David Kelley believes we all have creativity that is waiting to be unleashed. Help people take baby steps to achieve creative confidence.
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On Vampires and Presidents.
I strayed away from my reading list in the last two weeks.
Somehow I became intrigued with the undead just long enough to read Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
Good Laawwd. My sincere apologies to all you vampire fiction fans…but this was an extraordinarily boring, choppy and pointless piece of unliterature. I don’t know how you do it. I don’t know how I stuck with it. Perhaps Seth Grahame-Smith will have better luck with the screenplay for the Tim Burton resurrection of Dark Shadows, but I was largely unimpressed with this one.
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The future is finally here. The VW Hover Beetle.
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A seedy idea. Tableware/Birdfeeder.
Another reason to be thankful for creative & smart people.
Have a BBQ. Toss and shatter your plates. Watch as the birds eat it up…
Love.
Original Post at Food Republic.
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Elliot the Architect.
I guess my kids really do get inspired by the books we read together.
I picked up this awesome picture book, Iggy Peck, Architect a few months ago.
I’ve read it aloud a few times recently and then I found the following pictures that Elliot drew. I love how dangerous and creative my son is…
Read books.
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The New Jim Crow
I’m nearing the end of reading “The New Jim Crow,” by Michelle Alexander and it’s reopening my eyes to the modern system of enslavement that we still have in our drug war culture. It’s a mechanized system of mass incarceration that ingests people and spits out the corpse with the brandished label of a “criminal.”
Too often we can create tunnel vision excuses for panoramic systems of injustice because we only analyze a problem based on the top 10% of the iceberg that’s in our face, meanwhile a behemoth lurks beneath the surface unnoticed. Michelle Alexander’s work in this book helps complete the picture. She dives down to get beneath the superficial anecdotes. She relays the history, identifies tipping points along the way and uses broad strokes and individual stories to make the message clear: Slavery may have ended, civil rights may be written into law, but there is a still a purposeful and intentional modern Jim Crow war against communities of color, and African Americans in particular, that can’t be denied.
I strongly suggest if you’re a person of justice or seeking understanding, that you pick up The New Jim Crow.
Here’s an article where Alexander scratches the surface.
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Two fantastic works of historical, biographical narrative.
Great book.
Also a great read.
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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
Just finished reading the Millennium Series by Steig Larsson.
These books are so good. Such strong female characters. Highlights the appalling and yet commonplace global culture of violence against women. Book 1, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is very dark, descriptive and challenging to read through because of the sexual violence subject matter. But, if you can make it through Book 1, the subsequent two books, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest are much less sexually violent and really pull together to make a strong series with a justifiable resolution to the story.
Highly recommend.
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The Joy of Books.
Love this. Thanks Josie.
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One of the founders/designers of Pinterest on Design.
Good design is using reason to make decisions and solve problems.
Good article at Fastco on the practical aspect of design. It’s not all visuals, color palettes and font choices. It’s about “shrinking the gap between what a product does and why it exists.”
We are all designers. We all have an intervention to make in our jobs to help what we do align more fully with why it has to be done. If the thing you’ve made doesn’t achieve the goal, you need to get back in there and redesign.
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Great TED Talk on Storytelling from the writer of WALL-E and Toy Story.
This is such a great TED Talk on how to tell a great story. For anybody who tells stories as part of their job…which, I think we would all benefit from being able to frame our conversations by clearly seeing the end goal and write the narrative of how to get there…
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Human Vending – Grab and Go – Healthy?
What do you think about the idea of Healthy Vending Machines?
And is this stuff really healthy anyway? Kinda seems like in order to truly be healthy, food should look like it came out of the ground, off a tree, or something of that nature. Once it’s all processed, whether with good ingredients or not, isn’t it just nullifying much of what started off healthy?
I guess it’s better than a robot spitting out Mountain Dew and Little Debbies, but the nature of our grab and go culture is what leads us to eat things that are not healthy. We want it faster, in the car, on the way, and without the effort of cooking, preparing or taking up any time. And therein lies the problem with eating healthy. We can do better. Healthy vending machines are a start, but not an end goal.
(And don’t get me wrong, my kids still eat their share of junk on occasion, but we’re making strides, including limiting the snacks we buy. At this point, most of the snacks our kids get, come in the form of whole fruit…)
(original article at inhabitat.
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Reading List – First half of 2012.
So I got this idea from a friend to create an annual reading list. He usually does it retrospectively to take a look back at what he’s read and perhaps evaluate the reads. I thought I’d take a look at the year ahead and use it as a goal to keep up on my reading. I’ll read many of these by audiobook (that counts in my world as a busy dad driving kids around) and of course, the kid novels will be read aloud to my kids.
So with that, I’m looking at a healthy mix of history, memoir, fiction and spirituality and wizarding. Willing to change up the list for good suggestions. Love to hear your thoughts.
Here’s my reading list for the first half of 2012:
Bringing up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting – Pamela Druckerman. (Read in Feb)
Folks, This Ain’t Normal – Joel Salatin. (Joel Salatin is crazy in a good way.) (Read in Jan)
The Destiny of the Republic – Candice Millard. (about the converging stories of a madman, an inventor, the assassination of President James Garfield and the effort to save his life) Just finished and it was excellent. (Read as my President’s Day Weekend reading in Feb)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – JK Rowling. (We’re almost done wit this one. I love these books as much as my son Elliot does.) (Read in Feb)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – JK Rowling.
The Millennium Trilogy (Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.) – Steig Larsson. (Finished this series in March. So good. Some of the best fiction I’ve read. Excited to see the movie)
How to be Black – Baratunde Thurston. (Hilarious Highly recommend the audiobook read by the author. (Read in Feb)
River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey – Candice Millard. (This book comes recommended and if it is as good as the Destiny of the Republic, it will be really good.)(Finished in April. Fantastic. I liked Destiny of the Republic more, because the character building was stronger, but this was fantastic too.)
The New Jim Crow – Michelle Alexander. (finished in May. This is a must read. I wrote a brief post about it.)
The Mysterious Benedict Society – Trenton Lee Stewart. (3 books, looks like an interesting kid series)
Journey to the Common Good – Walter Brueggemann.
From Wild Man to Wise Man – Richard Rohr.
Breaking Night: My Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard – Liz Murray. (I love a good memoir. Finished this in early March. A great story of triumph and journey.)
The Table Comes First – Adam Gopnik. (Really interesting, but only for the biggest of food nerds.) (Read in Jan)
Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit – Barry Estabrook.
American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Biggest Slave Revolt – Daniel Rasmussen.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog – Muriel Barbery. (tried and failed to get through this. I have no doubt it has literary and philosophical merit, and I may have just not been in the mood for it, but I couldn’t choke it down initially. I thought the author was trying way to hard to prover her philosophical superiority.)
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The success of a child ~ the number of books she has access to.
We’re slightly obsessive about books in our house.
My wife is a teacher with a MA. Ed in Literacy training in an Urban Context…also now working on a specialized Reading Licensure. I “rediscovered” reading as an 18 year old ner-do-well and though I have less time for reading than I used to, I consume a few audio books each month during my commute.
A few years ago, I read a study that indicated that the strongest measure of a child’s success in life, even more than the success of his/her parents, is the number of books in the house. The more books, the greater the self-efficacy of that grown up child, the greater the financial success, and a host of correlating “societal measures of success.”
So we literally have thousands of books in our house. And the kids consume them daily. My oldest son, Elliot, is like a book vacuum, sucking up volumes at a staggering pace. And I love it. We’re currently reading the Harry Potter Series together and getting set to take a break from Potter for the Mysterious Benedict Society Collection.
I also love to read picture books to the kids, and here’s a few of recent favorites:
Stuck by Oliver Jeffers.
This guy is such a unique artist and tells a great story with quirky illustrations and characters.
So we literally have thousands of books in our house.
The Great Paper Caper, also by Oliver Jeffers.
The Runaway Dinner by Allen Ahlberg.
This book is essentially one very long run on sentence about an average day when a boy’s dinner decides to runaway before he can eat it. The boys love this one.
Have you read any great kids’ books lately?
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The Page Turner.
I’m thankful for iPads, Computers and news on my iPhone. It used to be so complicated to read the news.
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I can’t specialize.
What I realized recently is that I can’t specialize.
There are a lot of things that I’m interested in, care about, pursue, practice, create, love, learn about…But I can’t specialize. My interests are too broad. I launched a blog about food a couple of months ago, and now it sits dormant…Why? Because some other shiny object was dangled in my face. Life got busy. I got invested in other projects.
I still love to cook and more than cook, experiment in the kitchen, but I can’t specialize.
“Wise people” always say to find the one thing that you love and devote yourself to it.
But you know, I don’t want to be great at one thing. I want to kick ass at a multitude of things. I want to cook, and travel, and read to my kids, and date my wife, and shoot pictures, and design, and study, and build, and program, and solve. And to be honest, I think I’ve been created capable of doing all of that really well.
I can’t specialize.
I’m not going to be a great designer, but I will be really good.
I’m not going to be a great writer, but I will be really good.
I’m not going to be a great cook, but I will be really good.
I’m not going to be a great many things, but I will do really good things.
All props and power to the specialists, but I’m not like you.
- – - – - -
All that being said, I’m resurrecting this little blog. This will once again house my interests. Dropping the specialty sites. Bringing it all under one umbrella. Screw the narrow branding, the SEO, the unified story.
I am who I am and I’ll say what I say to whoever is listening on this channel.
REDESIGN COMING SOON.
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Everyone loves letterpress these days. And I too…
Upside Down, Left To Right: A Letterpress Film from Danny Cooke on Vimeo.
Saw this on the Fastcodesign blog…
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Quack Shelf
Source: inhabitots.com via Jeremy on Pinterest
