David Pierson:

Mike Zhang considered himself serious boyfriend material.

But Zhang, a 28-year-old language tutor and interpreter, couldn't afford an apartment in the capital's scorching property market.

Rather than waste any more time, his girlfriend of more than two years dumped him.

Homeownership has become the ultimate symbol of virility in today's China.

John Bird and John Fortune:

They thought that if they had a bigger mortgage they could get a bigger house. They thought if they had a bigger house, they would be happy. It's pathetic. I've got four houses and I'm not happy.

Nick Timiraos:

A new report estimates that nearly one in five mortgage defaults through the first half of 2009 were "strategic," where borrowers who appeared to have the capacity to pay their mortgages stopped doing so.

One young fish to another:

What the hell is water?

Ruth Simon And James R. Hagerty:

23% of all mortgage borrowers in the US are underwater.

Decius:

Imagine if they all walked.

Ma Nuo, bai jin nu:

I would rather cry in a BMW than smile on the back of my boyfriend's bicycle.

Oliver Laric:

How an incident happens may reflect nothing about the incident itself, but it must reflect something about the person involved in the happening, and supplying the how.

Five people interpret an action, and each interpretation is different, because, in the telling, and in the retelling, the people reveal not the action, but themselves.

David Shields:

The world exists. Why recreate it?

David Shields / William Gibson:

Who owns the words?

Who owns the music and the rest of our culture?

We do -- all of us -- though not all of us know it yet.

Jim Jarmusch:

Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent.

Jean-Luc Godard:

It's not where you take things from -- it's where you take them to.

Versions, 2010

A.J. Jacobs:

Brad Blanton, a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist, says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. Oversharing? No such thing.

I have a theory: I think Blanton devised Radical Honesty partly as a way to pick up women. It's a brilliant strategy. The antithesis of mind games.

Janelane, on Dmitri the stud:

At least he had the courtesy to tell her he was good in bed so she knew what she was missing out on!

"Leonard Nimoy":

It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth?

The answer ... is No.

Paul Graham:

I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

Jacobs:

If you're going to be a schmuck, at least you should find some redeeming quality in it.

One of the best parts of Radical Honesty is that I'm saving a whole lot of time.

Penelope Trunk:

Stop talking about time like you need to save it. You just need to use it better.

Stewart Brand:

In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

I Think You're Fat

David Petraeus:

Mr. President, this isn't double-down. ... This is all-in.

Ryan Crocker:

It's all hard, and it's hard all the time.

Matthew Yglesias:

Petraeus could be just the man to do for Obama what he did for Bush: help reframe the problem and walk away from unrealistic goals while projecting determination and making things better in some small concrete ways.

Timothy Ferriss:

A person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.

Charlie Brooker:

Suddenly there is no stick. There's just you. You are the stick.

Rudy Rucker's classics are now free.

Decius:

I love Rudy Rucker.

Dr. Nanochick:

I dig Rudy Rucker.

Bucy:

Rudy Rucker rules!

Rudy Rucker:

It starts with Software, where rebel robots bring immortality to their human creator by eating his brain. Software won the first Philip K. Dick Award.

In Wetware, the robots decide to start building people -- and people get strung out on an insane new drug called merge. This cyberpunk classic garnered a second Philip K. Dick award.

By Freeware, the robots have evolved into soft plastic slugs called moldies -- and some human "cheeseballs" want to have sex with them. The action redoubles when aliens begin arriving in the form of cosmic rays.

And with Realware, the humans and robots reach a higher plateau.

On the internet:

I just hope the public won't ever be bullied or bamboozled into letting the bosses bottle up the genie. That's something we need to keep an eye on.

On "Infinity and the Mind":

It is in the realm of infinity that mathematics, science, and logic merge with the fantastic. By closely examining the paradoxes that arise from this merging, we can learn a great deal about the human mind, its powers, and its limitations.

On "Mathematicians in Love":

Rucker cleverly pulls off a romantic comedy about mathematicians in love.

On "Frek":

Like every great science fiction novel, "Frek and the Elixir" is really about the present -- about the power of corporations, about media and entertainment, about bioengineering, about quantum mechanics, about your wife or girlfriend, your next-door neighbor, and your boss, and about you, at age twelve, and now.

On "Spaceland":

Spaceland challenges readers to imagine what life might be like in a world with four spatial dimensions.

The Ware Tetralogy

Jon Bruner:

More than 10 million Americans moved from one county to another during 2008. This map visualizes those moves. Click on any county to see comings and goings: black lines indicate net inward movement, red lines net outward movement.

Discover:

There are 260 million people in America, and you are one of them.

Decius:

Paul Graham asks what living in your city tells you. Living in the north Perimeter area for 6 odd years now has told me that everybody makes way, way more money than I do. It's not inspiring so much as it makes you sympathize with class warfare.

Bird and Fortune:

They thought that if they had a bigger mortgage they could get a bigger house. They thought if they had a bigger house, they would be happy. It's pathetic. I've got four houses and I'm not happy.

Louis CK:

Maybe we need some time ... because, everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy ...

Where Americans Are Moving

Tristan Perich:

1-Bit Symphony is an electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip. Though housed in a CD jewel case like his first circuit album (1-Bit Music 2004-05), 1-Bit Symphony is not a recording in the traditional sense; it literally "performs" its music live when turned on. A complete electronic circuit -- programmed by the artist and assembled by hand -- plays the music through a headphone jack mounted into the case itself. The project is set to be released on Cantaloupe Music on August 24, 2010.

David Hajdu:

Guitar Hero and Rock Band involve musicianship in the same sense that chess involves military service. Rocking, like rooking, is the thematic action; but the content is the form, the rules.

Brian Eno:

It couldn't last, and now it's running out. I don't particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate -- history's moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber.

1-Bit Symphony

David Simmons-Duffin:

The snarXiv is a ran­dom high-energy the­ory paper gen­er­a­tor incor­po­rat­ing all the lat­est trends, entropic rea­son­ing, and excit­ing mod­uli spaces. The arXiv is sim­i­lar, but occa­sion­ally less ran­dom.

Marge Simpson:

Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.

Ira Glass:

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

arXiv vs. snarXiv

John Koenig:

The Upper Midwest's third-largest compendium of the outer spatters of the emotional palette. Our mission is to harpoon, bag and tag wild sorrows then release them back into the subconscious.

A sampler:

dry pocket, n. the phantom vibration of a hip whose corresponding pocket is phoneless ...

contact high-five, n. an innocuous touch by someone just doing their job--a barber, yoga instructor or friendly waitress--that you enjoy more than you'd like to admit, a feeling of connection so stupefyingly simple that it cheapens the power of the written word, so that by the year 2025, aspiring novelists would be better off just giving people a hug.

maison d'etre, n. satisfaction with the decisive sounds of arriving home, from surfing the gearshift into park to clacking open the deadbolt, a morse code reminder that your greatest power is to renounce what you most want to hold onto.

Cory Doctorow:

The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression ...

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Paul Graham:

I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

David Foster Wallace:

Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation [...] let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet -- and this was the retrospectively marvelous part -- even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end's attention might be similarly divided.

Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable.

Caterina Fake:

All those people looking for connection, that perennial human desire. It's just insatiable.

David Foster Wallace:

One thing TV does is help us deny that we're lonely. The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

Adam Shand:

It's possible to get accustomed to anything. Make bloody sure you are aware of what you've become accustomed to.

Linda Stone:

Continuous partial attention is neither good nor bad, it just is.

David Meyer:

People aren't aware what's happening to their mental processes, in the same way that people years ago couldn't look into their lungs and see the residual deposits.

The damage will take decades to understand, let alone fix.

Neil Howe:

If you think that things couldn't get any worse, wait till the 2020s.