Justin Lai

“Pay attention to the world”

In other words, a novel is the creation not simply of a voice but of a world. It mimics the essential structures by which we experience ourselves as living in time, and inhabiting a world, and attempting to make sense of our experience. But it does what lives (the lives that are lived) cannot offer, except after they are over. It confers – and withdraws – meaning or sense upon a life. This is possible because narration is possible, because there are norms of narration that are as constitutive of thinking and feeling and experiencing as are, in the Kantian account, the mental categories of space and time.

“A Fling and a Prayer”

After two tense minutes of twists and turns and heroics in last year’s title game, Butler forward Gordon Hayward heaved a buzzer beater that had a chance to be the greatest shot in college basketball history.

“Ahem! Are You Talking to Me? (Or Texting?)”

Every meal out with friends or colleagues represents a negotiation between connectedness to the grid and interaction with those on hand. “Last year, for my friend’s birthday, my gift to her was to stay off my phone at her birthday dinner,” said Molly McAleer, who blogs and sends Twitter messages under the name Molls. “How embarrassing.”

“The Problem with Design Education”

In the universities, we train specialists, hire specialists, and we promote faculty if they are the very best at whatever they do. In order to be the very best, people have to be very deep, which also tends to make people narrow. The university scorns the generalist—they say, “Ugh. In any given area, you don’t know very much, do you?” This is what worries me. Engineers and MBAs are really good at solving problems. People who create products and services have to be generalists. Good designers do not rush to a solution. First they ask, “Is this the correct problem to solve?” They need to know something about everything, enough so they know how to consult the world’s specialists, enough so they can combine and create across the narrow specialties, putting together novel, exciting new products and services.

Links are posted already on Twitter. A passage is quoted here on a Linked List post.

“How to Write a Book: Get Yourself A Calendar”

Creating any long work of art is all about time management. Any goal you want to accomplish: get yourself a calendar. Break the task down into little bits of time. Make it a game.

“Uncommon Cures for the Common Cold”

This trend has a lot in common with the rise in prominence of design over the past decade or two; it’s intimately linked with our increasing interest in consuming things that are more sophisticated and more elitist. I think we have to recognize that in large part design is about enabling more conspicuous, self-congratulatory forms of consumption, and while sophisticated foods are not strictly a form of design, they are complementary to the designed lifestyle that many of us aspire to, and that many of us promote.

“Tweeting and Writing and Deflating Like a Balloon”

Writing is chasing a question—an inquiry of the mind. Forward is better than every direction at once. It’s not really writing until you feel something; until you choke up at a thought, until you start fidgeting in your seat in excitement, until you feel the twinge of pain that happens when a thorn is pulled out of your side. Go back. Delete everything before you started fidgeting or crying or deflating like a balloon. Then, write some more.

“Amy Chua Is a Wimp”

Chua would do better to see the classroom as a cognitive break from the truly arduous tests of childhood. Where do they learn how to manage people? Where do they learn to construct and manipulate metaphors? Where do they learn to perceive details of a scene the way a hunter reads a landscape? Where do they learn how to detect their own shortcomings? Where do they learn how to put themselves in others’ minds and anticipate others’ reactions?

“What Bill Gates Could Learn from Chris Rock”

We are given very little opportunity, for instance, to perform our own original experiments, and there is also little or no margin for failure or mistakes. We are judged primarily on getting answers right. There is much less emphasis on developing our creative thinking abilities, our abilities to let our minds run imaginatively and to discover things on our own.

Hello. Stuff is on the way. But for now, this is live.