Jay Matthews

Take, for instance, the dream-world in which time does not flow but sticks, adhering each town to a particular point in history and each person to a particular point in life. There is no shared stream of present in this world — only islands of neighboring solitudes, each suspended in a different moment of a different past: "The tragedy of this... See more

"If stories are linked with regularly repeated spatial practices, they become mutually supportive, and when a story becomes sedimented into the landscape, the story and the place dialectically help to construct and reproduce each other. Places help to recall stories that are associated with them, and places only exist (as named locales) by virtue... See more

I believe the best way to describe this shift is as a shift from legible ambition to illegible ambition. The reason so many people cling to default metrics of success is that other people understand them. Legible ambition is a story that your parents can tell their friends. We fear that not having such legible ambition means we will be cast out of... See more

“ For love is not about merging. I t’s a noble calling for the individual to ripen, to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another.”

5. repair as above, or allow to decay

Uses Perez's Technological Surge Cycles, somewhere between financial bubble expanding and persisting before pops.

On beauty in science: “He’s a very intuitive person,” says Niemi. “He sees the equations, but he sees beyond the equation. He thinks immediately, does this make sense in a wider context? … He smells the equation, if it smells good or not. Or if it has the beauty.”

The Response Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource.

People call too many meetings when they want to feel more in control; those meetings often make you worse at completing whatever task or project you’re struggling to complete, in part because they’re conducted in a mononchronic way, reinscribing systems of authority, obsessed with (inactionable) action plans, and never actually building any sort of... See more