Internal Monologue

The real Mark Zuckerberg on what The Social Network got wrong: ...It's such a big disconnect [...] the way that people make movies think about what we do in Silicon Valley - building stuff - [...] they just can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things . I think this is true: I think ambitious nerds are ambitious nerds because they are nerdy and ambitious, not because they got dumped. We all like a love story, but some stories aren't love stories. Like Lord of the Rings . That ain't a love story. And I found it annoying when a love story was shoe-horned in there. Apparently, the founding of Facebook wasn't a love story either: Zuckerberg has had the same girlfriend since before Facebook's founding. But I actually liked the (failed) love story in The Social Network . I thought it worked. I thought it provided a nice contrast to the Sean Parker character, who no longer thought about the crush that (

Someone has created an index of all of Ta-Nehisi Coates' American Civil War writing . If you want to see what got me on my recent Civil War kick, here it is.

Attach an HD camera to a weather balloon, use an iPhone to track it via GPS, add some hand warmers to keep the camera batteries from freezing, and a parachute to cushion the landing, and off you go! So many geek points. Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo .

This sentence, from Daniel Indiviglio's article on the Fed's plans to combat unemployment, jumped out at me and punched me in the face: [Bernanke] also mentions the possibility of the Fed providing additional communication on its plans to influence expectations. OK, let me get this straight: The Fed Chair mentions that it is possible the Fed might provide some communication on what it is planning to do to influence events? No, that would be too direct! The plan that it is possible they might provide some communication about would only be to influence people's expectations about events. How many steps removed from actually doing anything is this? Look, I understand that the Fed must be somewhat ambiguous in its statements because so much hangs on their decisions. But this is getting ridiculous.

A Sullivan reader : The recession isn't over; it's killing us. What's worse is that it appears to me that the American Dream isn't just, as punk rocker Ben Weasel put it, "an ugly fucking lie." The American Dream is nonexistent. When I see those who contribute nothing to society getting further and further ahead while my parents, whom I have seen work their asses off my whole life, drift further and further behind, I find that belief in the American Dream is like a belief in Santa Claus – a story told to kids to keep them in line. But as Margaret says at the end of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , we can make that lie come true. Indeed, one could define progressivism as a political effort to reduce the bullshit to truth ratio of the American Dream. I would say the story of America is the story of a nation struggling to live up to its own noble rhetoric. Right now, I'd say our political class is failing us in trying to make this vision of broad and increasin

From the " cool but very creepy and potentially dystopian " file: Since Dec. 4, 2009, Google has been personalized for everyone. So when I had two friends this spring Google "BP," one of them got a set of links that was about investment opportunities in BP. The other one got information about the oil spill. Presumably that was based on the kinds of searches that they had done in the past. If you have Google doing that, and you have Yahoo doing that, and you have Facebook doing that, and you have all of the top sites on the Web customizing themselves to you, then your information environment starts to look very different from anyone else's. And that's what I'm calling the "filter bubble": that personal ecosystem of information that's been catered by these algorithms to who they think you are. 

Classical music as the audio version of a gated community : As a classical music lover, I’d like to believe that my favourite music has some kind of magical effect on people – that it soothes the savage breast in some unique way. I’d like to think that classical music somehow inspires nobler aspirations in the mind of the purse-snatcher, causing him to abandon his line of work for something more upstanding and socially beneficial. But I know better. The hard, cold truth is that classical music in public places is often deliberately intended to make certain kinds of people feel unwelcome. Its use has been described as “musical bug spray,” and as the “weaponization” of classical music. Am I a very bad person for being fine with this? After all, numerous bars and trendy stores directed at young people play music that's designed to keep old fogies like me out. Whenever I walk by an Abercrombie & Fitch, I feel like the music is basically telling me: "Fuck off