flâneur

Michelle Fang

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on the atlas — 22

highlights — 20

  • When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first. It's an exciting place. So it took me quite a while to realize I just wasn't like the people there. I kept searching for the Cambridge of New York.
    Cities and Ambition
  • I tried living in Florence when I was 25, thinking it would be an art center, but it turned out I was 450 years too late.
    Cities and Ambition
  • It's in these more chaotic fields that it helps most to be in a great city: you need the encouragement of feeling that people around you care about the kind of work you do, and since you have to find peers for yourself, you need the much larger intake mechanism of a great city.
    Cities and Ambition
  • But factories can take years to construct, and corporate ties between the countries remain strong. China is a major market for chips
    Chips Make It Tough for the U.S. to Quit China - The New York Times
  • The semiconductor industry has become ground zero for the technology rivalry between Washington and Beijing, with new restrictions and punitive measures imposed by both sides.
    Chips Make It Tough for the U.S. to Quit China - The New York Times
  • There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray when you're trying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness, fashion, fear, money, politics, other people's wishes, eminent frauds. But if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you'll be proof against all of them. If you're interested, you're not astray.
    How to Do Great Work
  • What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.
    How to Do Great Work
  • The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all. The big prize is to discover a new fractal bud. You notice a crack in the surface of knowledge, pry it open, and there's a whole world inside.
    How to Do Great Work
  • There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and the rudder of great work. It will not only drive you, but if you let it have its way, will also show you what to work on. What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own. It may be within some bigger project, but you'll be driving your part of it.
    How to Do Great Work
  • With the Communist takeover of mainland China in 1949, that country switched from a close friend of the U.S. to a bitter enemy—the two powers were at war in Korea by 1950. Critics blamed Acheson for what they called the "loss of China" and launched several years of organized opposition to Acheson's tenure; Acheson ridiculed his opponents and called this period in his outspoken memoirs "The Attack of the Primitives". Although he maintained his role as a firm anti-communist, he was attacked by various anti-communists for not taking a more active role in attacking communism abroad and domesticall…
    Dean Acheson
  • In the digital world we don’t have tools to help us pull together and anchor a holistic picture of all our identity contexts so we can manage them differently in different contexts and have autonomy, integrity and dignity as a person.
    Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
  • Just like cameras do violence to the richness of sight, today’s identity systems do great violence to the richness of who we are, something we are reminded of and annoyed by every time we use them.
    Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
  • Transparency can unquestionably mitigate these defects of process and outcome, providing opportunities for good-faith stakeholders to contribute positive ideas and tough love. But the idea that these positive effects will outweigh negative ones seems to assume that good-faith observers pay closer attention than bad-faith observers. Every flaw in an institution’s operation that transparency reveals is a two-way street: a pathway for friends to help and for enemies to exploit. It therefore seems important to consider whether stakeholders or opponents will more carefully review the revealed infor…
    Why Should Institutions Be Transparent - RadicalxChange
  • You can measure your earned success in any currency you choose. You can count it in dollars, sure — or in kids taught to read, habitats protected or souls saved. When I taught graduate students, I noticed that social entrepreneurs who pursued nonprofit careers were some of my happiest graduates. They made less money than many of their classmates, but were no less certain that they were earning their success. They defined that success in nonmonetary terms and delighted in it.
    Opinion | A Formula for Happiness - The New York Times
  • Work can bring happiness by marrying our passions to our skills, empowering us to create value in our lives and in the lives of others. Franklin D. Roosevelt had it right: “Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.”
    Opinion | A Formula for Happiness - The New York Times
  • It turns out that choosing to pursue four basic values of faith, family, community and work is the surest path to happiness, given that a certain percentage is genetic and not under our control in any way.
    Opinion | A Formula for Happiness - The New York Times
  • And studies suggest that isolated events do control a big fraction of our happiness — up to 40 percent at any given time.
    Opinion | A Formula for Happiness - The New York Times
  • Polis is a real-time system for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words, enabled by advanced statistics and machine learning. Polis has been used all over the world by governments, academics, independent media and citizens, and is completely open source. The development of novel methods for gathering voice, and the development of the platform were a response to communication challenges within large scale decentralized movements evidenced in Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring.
    https://colinmegill.com
  • On 11 lists James Baldwin – Notes of a Native Son (1955) On 6 lists George Orwell – Shooting an Elephant (1936) E.B. White – Once More to the Lake (1941) Joan Didion – Goodbye To All That (1968)
    Best Essays of All Time – Ranked | Make Lists, Not War