J. Danielle

Repetition, or scalability, is the enemy of taste, because in time it reveals a latent sameness in what we all like to like

The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play. It seems to describe a life where it’s just fun to be reading, learning, writing, and collaborating on... See more

Sycophancy has a kind of momentum. Like any form of groupthink, it is part conformity, part self-preservation. The first person to grovel is undignified, but each subsequent act of coward­ice allows the next person to acquiesce more easily.

In the West, modern museums evolved from so-called Cabinets of Curiosities, which typically displayed wondrous artifacts of the natural world—shells, fossils, plants and organisms—taken from their context and mounted inside. The natural world is sampled and split apart, studied and displayed.

The essence of positioning is sacrifice. You must be willing to give up something in order to establish that unique position. Nyquil, the nighttime cold medicine, gave up the daytime market. The focus of most marketing operations is just the opposite. They look for ways to broaden their markets by line extension, by size and flavor proliferation,

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