December 2011
12 posts
4 tags
The five ways one can change the world
Conversations about the woes - the many woes - of the world often end with a throwing up of the hands, a sigh, and a “it’s just all too difficult”, or perhaps a “nothing’s going to change.”
To that I’ve always had a one-word counter argument. Feminism.
We’re by no means living in a post-sexist world, but one cannot deny that if you look back at...
6 tags
When big ideas come before big money
Emily and I have been talking about where we can take Lane Change. We started Lane Change to kick off our “Winter B-icicle Challenge” but were careful to chose a name that was only vaguely linked to bicycles, thereby giving us the capacity to expand. After all, the two of us are not bike nerds. We’re environmentalists. We’re activists. We believe in change, in a better...
4 tags
The woman from HR with the sparkly face
Evan from work and I are slightly obsessed with the woman from HR. She is the most beautiful woman in the office, and yesterday I was telling Evan about I how bumped into her in the kitchen.
“She turned around in one swoop and all these sparkles and rainbows and flying unicorns were shooting out from her face. It was marvelous.”
Evan tells me that when she speaks Chinese to him...
5 tags
“It’s funny, because when I’ve been in gay bars, I’ve thought: This is my own...”
– Tracy Clark-Flory in Salon.com’s ‘Gay vs. straight: What’s a sexy man?’. So many gems in this piece. Analysis of Ryan Gosling’s sex appeal, contrasting straight woman with gay man perspective, just to name one.
5 tags
WatchThis is the Greenpeace activist coming out in me, but someone should have briefed Christian Bale a little more so that he had a few quotable things to say about Chen Gaungcheng (a blind, self-taught lawyer in rural China). Nonetheless totally bad ass and awesome.
8 tags
8 tags
“There was a time when the inner world of the novelist—Kafka’s private vision and...”
– Don DeLillo in interview from a Fall 1993 edition of the Paris Review. DeLillo was responding to a question about a sentence from his novel Mao II, “The future belongs to crowds.”
6 tags
“We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be...”
– Long and fascinating interview with Don DeLillo from a Fall 1993 edition of Paris Review.
9 tags
Fundamentalism vs. Pragmatism. Should we...
One of our Winter B-icicle Challengers sent in a mainly positive email, but also with this to say:
I love the idea behind your winter cycling drive. More people on more bikes more often! But what is the point of pledging to ride everyday in the winter if you aren’t prepared to ride in the conditions that winter provides?
The reason I feel its important to mention this is because as a...
6 tags
“But, in the end, the point of Occupy Wall Street is not its platform so much as...”
– The origins and future of Occupy Wall Street by Mattathias Schwartz in the New Yorker.
A friend of mine recently asked if it mattered whether people who signed up to our Winter B-icicle Challenge actually bothered riding their bike every day. Wasn’t it more important that they simply signed...
4 tags
Love that silences your imagination
Hello. I really would like to talk to you about love tonight.
I shouldn’t really know what love is. I’ve never had a proper relationship and my parents were very poor examples. (They are bitterly divorced.)
And yet I know what love is. I know what it looks like, I can sense when it is present. I can even imagine what it feels like. And best of all I feel confident that I will...
4 tags
Stepping out of the hipster closet
I’m pretty certain that I was born a hipster. Here is the incontrovertible evidence:
When I was six, I thought it was soooo laaaaame the way all my classmates told our grade 1 teacher they “loved her” and would write message on the board like “I love you Miss Grimes” (yes her name was Grimes, ironic as she was lovely like Miss Honey from Roald Dahl’s...
November 2011
36 posts
3 tags
The Black Millionaires Of Occupy Wall Street →
Nietzsche warns us that it’s painful to discover you’ve become the monster you thought you were battling. But what certainly hurts worse is when, having become a monster, the other monsters won’t even let you into their dark and secret hideouts. As wealthy and powerful as Simmons has become while playing by America’s rules, there are still golf clubs where he can’t be a member, and still...