Jimmy Cerone

“Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted.

The web hasn’t had its artisanal moment. Right now, giant, ad-based networks created by six men that everyone begrudgingly uses with diminishing emotional returns, control the vast majority of the web.

The continued march of direct deposit and earned wage access products keeps more of the wage pie in the pockets of workers, even those in diminished circumstances.

Heating and air conditioning account for half of residential consumption, which is why the single best thing we could do for the energy budget is to keep the heat

When making internal decisions about e.g. salary bands, individual exceptions to formal policy, etc, ask each other … if this decision were to leak, could we justify our reasoning with head held high? If you would feel ashamed, or if you really don’t want people to find out about it, it’s probably the wrong decision.

Freezers, as my Smeg taught me, provoke strong emotions. They are fundamentally for forgetting, the place where we put food we don’t want to think about right now, or want to save for some unspecified later date. They hold our memories, aspirations, and regrets, and in this strange way they tell us who we are.

“So it’s not the beauty itself we admire. It’s not the force of intellect. It’s not invention, aesthetics, or capacity itself. The greatest talent that we think a man can have?” He plucked one final string. “Seems to me that it must be nothing more than novelty.”