David Pennington

he stories you can tell in a film are a fraction of what you can do in a book. What's irritating is that you then do these things, and films have their own kind of structure. The thing dictates certain paces, no matter what you do. That's only because we're trying to make a film that reaches people; I mean I don't try to make a film for me -- I can... See more

Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper . Allen points out that “people often start diaries in times of upheaval,”

The happiness that someone like Mark misses is unreal and unhealthy. He needs to learn to want a different type of relative happiness – that is, a state of reasonable contentment, with intermittent joy and pain, which, unlike the myth of a permanent bliss, can potentially be achieved. Switching from one goal to the other will involve a process of a... See more

In a world of perpetual data overload, [curation] implies information design and selectivity: the channeling, filtering, and organization into intelligible and usable information; the digging up of new or long ignored cultural corpora. Most of these corpora are simply sitting in storage: less than 1% of the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent colle... See more

“Brands as Libraries” proposes that brands should think like cultural institutions in order to deepen their connection to the public – and create their own. Often lofty and frequently loved, these cultural institutions offer a new approach for how brands can interact with their audiences: by stepping back, providing space and facilitating the cultu... See more

Perhaps the immutable error of parenthood is that we give our children what we wanted, whether they want it or not.”

Which brings us back to the question of traditionalism and dynamism, and their potential interaction: if you have had a cultural revolution that cleared too much ground, razed too many bastions and led to a kind of cultural debasement and forgetting, you probably need to go backward, or least turn that way for recollection, before you can hope to g... See more