Saturday, February 8, 2025
It is interesting to build a sculpture that attempts to create an atmosphere of awe. Small works are said to do this but it is not my experience. Immense, architecturally sized sculpture creates both the object and the atmosphere. Awe is a state of mind equivalent to religious experience, I think if people feel commitment they feel something has been transcended.
— Michael Heizer via @diaartfoundation
Friday, February 7, 2025
Your workspace will be cleared and any personal items discarded. Your file, including any and all professional interactions and personal relations, will be purged and destroyed. It will be as if you, Irving B., never even existed nor drew a single breath upon this earth.
— Mr. Milchick, "Woe's Hollow," Severeance
Thursday, February 6, 2025
As she left off outlining and began to write, work proved slow and grueling. Although she had mastered her storyline, finding the proper nuances of style and an emotional vocabulary that fit her theme took more time and energy than she expected.
— Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made
Wednesday, February 5, 2025
To the scholar these rubbings taken from the bindings of early printed books provide greater detail on binders' tools than one might be able to see with the naked eye. They are also a way to capture a copy of a small detail without the changes in scale that photography creates. To the amateur they show off the beautiful and intricate designs stamped into these leather bindings.
These penicil rubbings are from the papers of legendary incunabulist Lotte Hellinga, which she donated to the Grolier Club late in 2024. These papers reveal the detailed, painstaking work that goes into the study of the fine details of early printing and will be available for researchers in Spring of 2025.
— @grolierclub
Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Today, Google announced that it is overhauling the principles governing how it uses artificial intelligence and other advanced technology. The company removed language promising not to pursue "technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm," "weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people," "technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms," and "technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights."
— @wired
Monday, February 3, 2025
His furnature, especially, is easy to grasp, but his buildings are meant to be seen not in photos or drawings but IRL. Way too late (or just in time), I had that experience, and it was seismic.
— @biberarchitects, "03 February, Alvar Aalto," The Architect and Designer Birthday Book
Sunday, February 2, 2025
A few years ago I started collecting interesting and mechanically-unusual timepieces as a way to become better friends with time. I had asked my friend Xylor's advice on how to do this and one of her suggestions was to "buy clocks you like and display them prominently".
— Tauba Auerbach, "The Familiar Stranger," via @sonelbreslav
Saturday, February 1, 2025
Instead of buying Things
photograph them.
— "An old typewriter work," @patrick_pound
Friday, January 31, 2025
Everything is digital to them. They are, at the end of the day, transhumanist. And what is transhumanist? Transhumanist is somebody who sees Homo sapien here and Homo sapien plus on the other side of what they call the singularity.
And that’s why they’re all rushing — whether it’s artificial intelligence, regenerative robotics, quantum computing, advanced chip design, CRISPR, biotech, all of it — to come to this point of which the oligarchs are going to lead that revolution. And why are they going to do it? No. 1, when you get to know them and see where they’re spending the money, it’s because they want eternal life.
You know why? Because they’re complete atheistic 11-year-old boys that are kind of science fiction “Dungeons & Dragons” guys, and we’ve turned the nation over to that. And yes, I’m going to fight it every fucking step of the way. This is taking us back a millennium to feudalism.
— Steve Bannon, "Steve Bannon on 'Broligarchs' vs. Populism," The New York Times
Thursday, January 30, 2025
When during the final week of February 1917, history galloped past its gatekeepers to a point of no return.
— Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
But now I felt besieged by an unwelcome comparison of the ultimate value of my life with his.
— Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight
Tuesday, January 28, 2025
Sorry you can't afford to own a home, we had to beat China in the race to develop a better plagiarism app
— @kenklippenstein via @ivanberko
Monday, January 27, 2025
The basic gamble is that the returns to best-in-class A.I. will be so enormous that they will justify whatever it takes to cross that threshold — in terms of energy demand and water use, in terms of intellectual property and, particularly and most mercenarily, in terms of sheer spend.
— David Wallace-Wells, "DeepSeek’s Two Seismic Possibilities for American A.I.," The New York Times
Sunday, January 26, 2025
For years, Israeli security services have discouraged and often broken up family events celebrating the release of Palestinian militants, saying that the gatherings provoke unrest, lionize terrorists and inspire support for violence. Critics say the interventions increase Palestinian antipathy for Israel, prolonging a cycle of violence.
— Patrick Kingsley, "Israeli Army Raids Home of Freed Hamas Member Amid Tensions Over Hostage Deal," The New York Times
Saturday, January 25, 2025
Richard Nickel was killed on April 13, 1972, while attempting to salvage more architectural items when a portion of the old Chicago Stock Exchange building collapsed on him. His body went unnoticed for some four weeks, until it was uncovered by demolition workers on May 9. He is buried in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery, not far from Louis Sullivan.
— Wikipedia, "Richard Nickel"
Friday, January 24, 2025
When we became discouraged after a fruitless search, we would reassure ourselves by computing how many thousands of arrowheads must have been left behind by a tribe that had lived there for perhaps a hundred years, even if they lost only one arrow each day.
— Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight
Thursday, January 23, 2025
My motorcycle.
— CF*
Wednesday, January 22, 2025
Destroy by building.
— Amos Kennedy Jr.
Tuesday, January 21, 2025
What marks the beginning of something palpable, and where is the memory of it?
— Werner Herzog, The Twilight World
Monday, January 20, 2025
Time outside their lives seems to have the quality of a spasm, even though it can't shake the imperturbable universe. Onoda's war is of no meaning for the cosmos, for history, for the course of the war. Onoda's war is formed from the union of an imaginary nothing and a dream, but Onoda's war, sired by nothing, is nevertheless overwhelming, an event extorted from eternity.
— Werner Herzog, The Twilight World