./emilychang eBot

"The most critical part of the story is the organization Obama built. Though conservatives are still arguing that Obama has little executive experience, nothing could be further from the truth.

Barack Obama is one of the most radical management innovators in the world today. Obama’s team built something truly world-changing: a new kind of political organization for the 21st century. It differs from yesterday’s political organizations as much as Google and Threadless differ from yesterday’s corporations: all are a tiny handful of truly new, 21st century institutions in the world today.”

“Most of what we learn shows that the problem is with the perception, not with the woman,” he said, “and that it is not the problem of an individual, it’s a problem of a corporation.”

Design guru Naoto Fukasawa’s philosophy of sleek simplicity and user-friendliness has influenced many top design firms with blue chip technology clients

“He is quite passionate about the seamless integration between industrial design and interaction design, and the idea of simplicity and magic,” says Ziba’s Middleton. “He focuses on creating objects that are in harmony with the environment around them. His overarching effect on design is really about shifting design from being object-centric to an approach of creating dialogue with object and user.”

New York from the 34th floor overlooking Central Park
The soundtrack for a film set in New York – circa 1970
by Michelangelo Antonioni

There is a constant murmur, hollow and deep: the traffic. And another sound, intermittent: the wind. It comes in gusts, and in the pauses I can hear it sighing, far away, against other skyscrapers. Here, on the thirty-fourth floor, I can feel the vibration of every gust. It gives me a strange feeling as if, for a few moments, my brain freezes. A faint, short-lived siren comes and goes. The noise of two car-horns. A rumble that approaches but is impatiently eclipsed by a sudden buffet of the wind. A tram car.

I sat down with Naomi Klein to talk about her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. This revelatory work belongs in that rarefied air with A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn and Witness to a Century by George Seldes.

These women are poised to be the next generation of leaders in their fields—whether it\’s sports, business, finance, politics or the arts. In their own words, they tell how they got where they are and where they hope to go next.

Advertising remains an extremely inefficient and wasteful way for sellers to find buyers. I’m not saying advertising isn’t effective, by the way; just that massive inefficiency and waste have always been involved, and that this fact constitutes a problem we’ve long been waiting to solve, whether we know it or not.

The Post-9/11 Era Has Caught Up With William Gibson’s Vision

“Every hair is being numbered—eBay has every grain of sand. EBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It’s like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement.

“Every toy I had as a child that haunted me, I’ve been able to see on eBay. The soft squeezy rubber frog with red shorts that made ‘eek eek’ noise until that part fell out. I found Froggy after some effort on eBay, and I found out that Froggy was made in 1948 and where he was made and what he was made of. I saw his box, which I’d long forgotten. I didn’t have to buy Froggy, but I saved the jpegs. So I’ve got Froggy in my computer.

“This is new. People in really small towns can become world-class connoisseurs of something via eBay and Google. This didn’t used to be possible. If you are sufficiently obsessive and diligent, you can be a little kid in some town in the backwoods of Tennessee and the world’s premier info-monster about some tiny obscure area of stuff. That used to require a city. It no longer does.”

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"Zero is the new black.” - Seth Godin

"I’m a big believer in what I call the “culture of generosity.” I think that a lot of what you see out on the Web and on the Internet and what made me love the Web in the first place is that people are building, creating, sharing things all the time. Whether that is essays they wrote, discographies of their favorite bands or a little place to hang out with friends in Second Life. The Internet is such a wonderful place because of so many millions of people contributing to it...”