"Like the Pied Piper, he called hundreds of young children to take their chances with cricket. Parents felt that they might as well try their luck, inspired by him. Perhaps Rahul Dravid with his determined work ethic and dogged persistence would have been a better practice model than Tendulkar, but tell a child that you have to practice 10 hours a day and he might run the other way. Tendulkar made you feel that you could."
sachin
"Genesis stories tend to take on an outsize significance in Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College, traveled the world, dated Joan Baez and helped create a revolutionary computing company. Mark Zuckerberg wrote the initial code for Facebook while ranking the attractiveness of girls in his Harvard dorm room. In the Valley, these tales are called “the Creation Myth” because, while based on a true story, they exclude all the turmoil and occasional back stabbing that comes with founding a tech company. And while all origin stories contain some exaggerations, Twitter’s is cobbled together from an uncommon number of them."
twitter-story
"What, then, is the future of New York, or really of any number of big urban centers, in this new Gilded Age? Does culture have a role to play? If we look at the city as it is now, then we would have to say that it looks a lot like the divided city that presumptive mayor Bill de Blasio has been harping about: most of Manhattan and many parts of Brooklyn are virtual walled communities, pleasure domes for the rich (which, full disclosure, includes me), and aside from those of us who managed years ago to find our niche and some means of income, there is no room for fresh creative types."
David-byrne
"For a band of four people that makes a 15% royalty from Spotify streams, it would take 236,549,020 streams for each person to earn a minimum wage of $15,080 (£9,435) a year. For perspective, Daft Punk's song of the summer, "Get Lucky", reached 104,760,000 Spotify streams by the end of August: the two Daft Punk guys stand to make somewhere around $13,000 each."
"And if on those mornings you don’t pick up the phone, then the ceremony continues regardless. Other prizes may warn you weeks in advance, but not the Nobels. At 9.30amSwedish time on those days the entire Academy, comprising almost 500 fellows, votes on what the specialist subject committees advise. Then comes the phone call at around 11.15am. Whatever your response, the public announcement comes at noon. If, like Saul Perlmutter (physics, 2011), you live in California and that window opens in the middle of the night, then it could well be the dawn chorus of television news vans outside that alerts you."
nobel-call
“The thing is to be happy,” he said. “No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you’re just there, going along easy in the world.”
Alice-Munroe
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