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Your Human-Size Life

June 5, 2016
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Your Human-Size Life:

One of the biggest mistakes rich people make is to try to live larger than a single human being can. A mathematical impossibility. You can buy a big house, but you can only sleep in one bedroom at a time. You can own twenty fantastic cars, airplanes and yachts, but you can only be in one at a time. You can own an NBA team and a MLB team, and you get to sit in the nicest seat in the house at games, but you still can only sit in one seat. In other words, your humanity doesn’t increase just because your wealth did. You don’t get bigger.

via Phil and just about everyone else.

How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained

March 23, 2016
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How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained:

If you were to go to southern Italy, you wouldn’t find people saying “gabagool.” But some of the old quirks of the old languages survived into the accents of Standard Italian used there. In Sicily or Calabria, you might indeed find someone ordering “mutzadell.” In their own weird way, Jersey (and New York and Rhode Island and Philadelphia) Italians are keeping the flame of their languages alive even better than Italian-Italians. There’s something both a little silly and a little wonderful about someone who doesn’t even speak the language putting on an antiquated accent for a dead sub-language to order some cheese.

Slack, I’m Breaking Up with You

February 29, 2016
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Slack, I’m Breaking Up with You:

I think you and I can both agree that meetings are kind of the worst. And, on the surface, you do totally obviate the need for a ton of them. I can definitely think of many times in which a quick Slack whip-around has saved me from all kinds of interpersonal tedium. So thank you for that.

However, I’m wondering what the cost of it is. Specifically, I wonder if conducting business in an asynchronish environment simply turns every minute into an opportunity for conversation, essentially “meeting-izing” the entire workday.

tl;dr:

Where Don Draper ends, D.B. Cooper begins

April 6, 2015
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Where Don Draper ends, D.B. Cooper begins:

I missed this when it originally made the rounds: Lindsey Green suggests that Mad Men’s conclusion may mimic the real-life story of D.B. Cooper, a Draper-esque gentleman who hijacked a plane in 1971 for $200k ransom, and then parachuted out never to be seen again (or even be definitively identified, for that matter).

It’s a fun read, and would make a fitting ending for Don as a character—except, I don’t think he’s motivated enough by money to do it for ransom, and there are less conspicuous ways to disappear (which he’s been able to do once already, by the way).