("JP")

In architecture, fiction will replace function. (“Form follows fiction.”)

— Bernard Tschumi, “Manifestos,” 1978

Not DJ Kool Herc. Not The Sugarhill Gang. Not Crazy Legs. Not even Cornbread. The true father of hip-hop is Moses. The tyrannical, mercilessly efficient head of several New York City public works organizations, Robert Moses, did more in his fifty-year tenure to shape the physical and cultural conditions required for hip-hop’s birth than any other f... See more

Monk’s intimate, exhaustive and poetic improvisations pioneered new languages of modern jazz and helped birth bebop as a seminal art form. “And then there was the silence. There is nothing more daunting and mysterious. We flood silence with chatter, we fill it with noise or notes rather than let it reveal what it knows or just let it be,” wrote mus... See more

The reason I’ve just made you read a thousand words about trees (bet you didn’t think you were going to do that today) is that it illustrates the problems of taking a complex system and applying a simple process to it in order to optimize a single metric.

Which brings us back to business: there are a huge number of complex systems in a business, wh... See more

“We will go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost effective.” -Kurt Vonnegut