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Con man Victor Lustig shared a list of commandments written for aspiring con men. Among them:
1. Be a patient listener (it is this, not fast talking, that gets a con-man his coups).
8. Never boast. Just let your importance be quietly obvious.
Fast Company recently interviewed Martin Scorsese and jotted down all 85 movies he mentioned.
The Player: “In the years before this movie, the age of the director who had a free hand came to an end. And yet Altman kept experimenting with different kinds of actor, different approaches to narrative, different equipment, until finally he hit it with this movie, which took him off onto a whole other level.”
Buzzfeed has a collection of every World Press Photo Contest winner from 1955 to the present. Some amazing photos but in general they do not paint a very kind picture of humanity.
The Society for News Design recently posted their picks for the best designed newspapers in the world.
From Henry Miller on Writing, his 11 commandments:
1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it — but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
(via lists of note)
What jobs did people do in medieval Europe? Here’s a list, broken down by category. Criminals had jobs too:
silk-snatcher - one who steals bonnets
stewsman - probably a brothel keeper - “since the words stew and stewholder both mean a bawd, I’m guessing that a stewsman would be a brothel-keeper as well. Whether bawdry counts as a criminal activity varies at different times and places.”
thimblerigger - a professional sharper who runs a thimblerig (a game in which a pea is ostensibly hidden under a thimble and players guess which thimble it is under)
(via @zachklein)
From MUBI notebook, a selection of great movies posters from 2011, including Chris Ware’s lovely one for Uncle Boonmee.
(via dooce)
Typographica shares their favorite typefaces of 2011.
The idea is simple: I invite a group of writers, educators, type makers and type users to look back at 2011 and pick the release that excited them most.
(via ★essl)
Quentin Tarantino released a list of his favorite films of last year. His number one choice? Midnight in Paris. Here’s his top five…click through for his other choices:
1. Midnight In Paris
2. Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
3. Moneyball
4. The Skin I Live In
5. X-Men: First Class
(via moviefone)
Still cleaning out some tabs from over the break…this list of the best “best of 2011” lists is worth looking at, even if you’ve got list fatigue. It includes lists like “10 Films Hypothetically Starring Ryan Gosling”, “Top 10 Classical Performances”, and “Top 10 Films of John Waters”.
The Morning News got a bunch of writers and thinkers to name the most important event of 2011.
While they may not yet have a common name, and their causes overlap but are hardly identical, the worldwide protests that began in December 2010 in Tunisia and swept through Egypt, the Middle East, Spain, Greece, the United Kingdom, every state in the U.S then thousands of worldwide cities — these, collectively, are the single most important event of 2011. It was so significant that the year itself may be the only possible name for these people’s revolutions and protests: the same way we talk about 1968 or Sept. 11 or Feb. 15, 2003: perhaps just “2011.”
As Joanne McNeil noted, hindsight provides clarity with questions like this. Events that are invisible at the time become important five or ten years later. Take 1993 for instance. At the time, the European Community eliminating customs barriers or Bill Clinton’s swearing-in or the first bombing of the WTC might have seemed most significant, but with hindsight, Tim Berners-Lee’s quiet invention of the World Wide Web in an office at CERN is clearly the year’s most significant and far-reaching happening.
Update: TBL invented the WWW in 1991, not 1993. ‘91 was a bit busier news-wise, what with the first Iraq war and Gorbachev’s resignation, but the Web’s invention ranks right up there in hindsight. (thx, sean)
From New Scientist, a list of eight different ways to lose weight that actually work. Because science!
If your idea of a holiday workout is lifting glasses of beer late into the night, then it’s not just the extra calories you need to worry about. Randy Nelson and his team at Ohio State University in Columbus found that mice exposed to light at night weighed 10 per cent more at the end of the eight-week study than mice that had experienced a standard light/dark cycle, even though they ate the same total number of calories and did the same amount of exercise.
(via @daveg)
The Millions presents their annual A Year in Reading for 2011, where they ask a bunch of people their favorite reads of the year.
With this in mind, for an eighth year, we asked some of our favorite writers, thinkers, and readers to look back, reflect, and share. Their charge was to name, from all the books they read this year, the one(s) that meant the most to them, regardless of publication date. Grouped together, these ruminations, cheers, squibs, and essays will be a chronicle of reading and good books from every era. We hope you find in them seeds that will help make your year in reading in 2012 a fruitful one.
Contributors include Duff McKagan, Mayim Bialik, Jennifer Egan, Colum McCann, and Rosecrans Baldwin.
These are from the Longreads Tumblr. You’ll never want for 3000-word reading material ever again.
Load up yer Instapaper for the holidays: Give Me Something To Read’s favorite longreads of 2011.
From Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance, a list of facts and very strong opinions about the nature of time.
4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious - clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds.
5. Your memory isn’t as good as you think. When you remember an event in the past, your brain uses a very similar technique to imagining the future. The process is less like “replaying a video” than “putting on a play from a script.” If the script is wrong for whatever reason, you can have a false memory that is just as vivid as a true one. Eyewitness testimony, it turns out, is one of the least reliable forms of evidence allowed into courtrooms.
Jonathan Liu over at GeekDad compiled a list of the five best toys of all time.
2. Box
Another toy that is quite versatile, Box also comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. Need proof? Depending on the number and size you have, Boxes can be turned into furniture or a kitchen playset. You can turn your kids into cardboard robots or create elaborate Star Wars costumes. A large Box can be used as a fort or house and the smaller Box can be used to hide away a special treasure. Got a Stick? Use it as an oar and Box becomes a boat. One particularly famous kid has used the Box as a key component of a time machine, a duplicator and a transmogrifier, among other things.
Love it. (via @jsnell)
Lists of travel tips usually suck (get to the aiport early! make sure your passport is up to date!) but this list contains a number of good ideas that I haven’t really seen before.
13. Buy your own fruit. It sounds simple. It is simple. Just do it. You’ll love it. And I don’t mean, if there happens to be a fruit stand outside your hotel door you should buy some, because you need to have 9 servings a day. What I mean is, find fruit and buy it. Make it a daily task that you’re going to track down a fruit stand, a farmers’ market (they’re not just in San Francisco) and get some good fresh fruit. The entire process will expose you to elements of daily life you would have otherwise ignored. Trust me: You’ll have memories from your trips to buy fresh fruit.
Mental Floss has a collection of clips of familar sounds from 20-30 years ago that are no longer around, including the TV channel selector clunk-clunk, manual typewriter clicking, and one of my favorite sounds: that of the rotary telephone dial. One I would have added: the manual credit card imprinter.
From Quora, some good answers to the question What are some cultural faux pas in New York?
This one is absolutely vital — don’t interfere with others’ privacy. New York is a very crowded place. The way people deal with it is to create their own space. Thus, what outsiders often see as aloofness and isolation is, in fact, a sign of community; there is a shared ethos that everyone respects others’ privacy and expects others to respect his own. This is chiefly communicated through eye contact. If you stare at someone on the subway: if you linger in looking out your window into someone else’s bedroom; if you react to or interrupt a celebrity; or if you seem to be intentionally listening in to another’s conversation, you are violating one of New York’s most sacred unwritten rules. Keep yourself to yourself, buddy, and let others do the same.
Well, I don’t know about that, but as an analogy enthusiast, I did enjoy reading through this list. Some favorites:
Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
That first one…I can’t decide if it’s bad or the best analogy ever.
A few things you might learn about photography by following Henri Cartier-Bresson’s example.
4. Stick to one lens
Although Henri Cartier-Bresson shot with several different lenses while on-assignment working for Magnum, he would only shoot with a 50mm if he was shooting for himself. By being faithful to that lens for decades, the camera truly became “an extension of his eye”.
Update: That link is having some trouble so here’s the cached copy from Google.
Current TV has compiled a list of the fifty contemporary documentaries that you must see before you die. Lots of familiar names on the list…here are my personal favorites:
The Kid Stays in the Picture
When We Were Kings
Dogtown and Z-Boys
Man on Wire
Capturing the Friedmans
Touching the Void
The Fog of War
Grizzly Man
The Thin Blue Line
Hoop Dreams
Rafe Colburn revisited Wired’s June 1997 cover story on 101 Ways to Save Apple.
A lot of the suggestions were to be more like Microsoft and embrace the Windows platform. Apple, obviously, rejected that path and has benefitted greatly from doing so. It’s hard to remember now, but many people thought that Apple should drop their operating system and instead turn to making high end Windows PCs. I think we’re all glad they never went that route.
(via @anildash)
A great question over at Quora: What were the biggest tactical mistakes that Stringer made in Seasons 2 and 3? Why did he make these mistakes?
5. Not using a knowledgeable intermediary to deal with Sen. Clay Davis. He was clearly out of his league with Davis and had he used an attorney with the correct political connections, he could have likely gained all that he sought with fewer complications than he did.
A site that provides the best introductory books for dozens of topics. (thx, david)
Myth #5 - Introverts don’t like to go out in public.
Nonsense. Introverts just don’t like to go out in public FOR AS LONG. They also like to avoid the complications that are involved in public activities. They take in data and experiences very quickly, and as a result, don’t need to be there for long to “get it.” They’re ready to go home, recharge, and process it all. In fact, recharging is absolutely crucial for Introverts.
Today’s service journalism: here’s a simple one-page list of outdoor movie screenings in NYC this summer. The lineup includes Rosemary’s Baby, Airplane!, and Spiderman. (thx, matthew)
The Guardian compiles their list of the 100 best non-fiction books ever written.
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