• So many ways to demotivate, so little time. Posters and paraphernalia to culture-jam any imaginable corporate propaganda.

 

  • Brian Dillon at frieze: An established magazine has to “keep reminding your readers of that first flirtatious thrill, even as you settle into something like domestic routine with your faithful subscribers. At which point, in a sense, you’re already sunk: you’ve begun to second-guess your readers’ motives–or worse, to service their whims: their sensible preference for information over style, their taste for gossip, their impatience with illegible typefaces.” (Hat tip to kottke.)

  • Of 12 things Guy Kawasaki wishes he’d learned in school, one is how to give good voicemail: “First, slowly say your telephone number once at the beginning of your message and again at the end. You don’t want to make people play back your message to get your phone number. . . . Second (and this applies to email too), always make progress. Never leave a voicemail or send an e-mail that says, ‘Call me back, and I’ll tell you what time we can meet.’ Just say, ‘Tuesday, 10:00 AM, at your office.'” (Hat tip to Tyler Cowen, who also quotes a list of 10 things never to buy new.)

  • Forty-six kinds of male privilege, including item number 2: “I can be confident that my coworkers won’t think I got my job because of my sex–even though that might be true.” Unlike most employers, symphony orchestras now have blind auditions, in which hiring decisions are made without knowledge of the applicant’s sex. In a 1997 National Bureau of Economic Research paper, Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse gathered data from audition records and found that blind auditioning “increases by 50 percent” a woman’s odds of getting past preliminary auditions, and increases by several times the chance that a woman will win the final round of auditions.

 

  • Chartreuse intervenes on behalf of those born after 1982: “The only thing your parents got right was multiculturalism. Everything else is questionable. . . . I know we’re at war but the world is flat. A Jew hating redneck who lives next door is just that, a Jew hating redneck who lives next door. You probably have more in common with a skateboard-riding, hip-hop-listening kid who lives in India. It’s the values that are important, not the land.” (Hat tip to Abstract Nonsense.)