Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
First place in 1997 went to the eminent critic Fredric Jameson for the opening sentence of his book on film criticism: The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere
... See moreSteven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
Particular media environments promote particular sorts of societies.
Douglas Rushkoff • Team Human
oday George Melies is renowned as the originator of special effects for films, the creator of a new kind of magic for a new medium, but we've forgotten that he did it through his own vocabulary of a Victorian magic show.
Teller Jim Steinmeyer • Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear
ready-made characters of popular culture provide a shared set of references for discussing common experiences and feelings with others with whom one may never have enjoyed face-to-face contact.
Henry Jenkins • Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture
Adam Keesling • Substack Rhymes With Medium
“[T]he fate of information in the typically American world is to become something which can be bought or sold”; most people, he observed, “cannot conceive of a piece of information without an owner.”
John Brockman • Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
Television, from the surface on down, is about desire. And, fiction-wise, desire is the sugar in human food.
David Foster Wallace • A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
That’s what Marilyn did; she gave her body to the post–World War II archetypes of sport, art, and politics. She was the lover of—at least for—classic greatness. Pam’s in the same position, but she has to be the lover of postmodern greatness. That’s why we all had to watch her give a blow job to the drummer from Mötley Crüe.