Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
The claim was empty bluster, however. Mike Moritz, of Sequoia Capital, peeled back the truth with mordant detachment: “One of the dirty little secrets of the Valley is that all the jobs-creation we like to talk about is probably less than the Big Three automakers have laid off in the last decade. One of the best ways to have a nice Silicon Valley c
... See moreRandall E. Stross • eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work
The Ape Inside Us
Richard Powers • The Overstory: Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
There was Thomas Wolfe, wearing a black slouch hat, advancing in his long mountaineer’s stride, with his billowing black raincoat, chanting, “I wrote ten thousand words today—I wrote ten thousand words today.”
A. Scott Berg • Max Perkins: Editor of Genius
“If you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming,” he told himself, “just ask for Wild Bob.”
Kurt Vonnegut • Slaughterhouse-Five
Galveston sank. Houston rose. Less than a year later, in January of 1901, the gusher came. On Spindletop Hill, oil shot out of the ground. The soil in most of Houston is black gumbo, dark heavy clay. When it gets wet, it stays wet. And it’s hard to work for farming. But something farther below yielded more. Eons ago, living beings—algae, plankton,
... See moreImani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
There aren’t any buildings, isn’t any faculty. Everybody’s in it and nobody’s in it. It’s like a cloud that everybody has given a little puff of mist to, and then the cloud does all the heavy thinking for everybody. I don’t mean there’s really a cloud. I just mean it’s something like that. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, Skip, there
... See moreKurt Vonnegut • The Sirens of Titan
New titles might not have increased his influence. By the start of the 1960s Baker was engaged in a willfully obscure second career, much like the one Mervin Kelly had formerly conducted, a career that ran not sequentially like some men’s—a stint in government following a stint in business, or vice versa—but simultaneously, so that Baker’s various
... See moreJon Gertner • The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
By the 1890s, Texas was settled into the fabric of the nation, or mostly anyway. A Jim Crow industrialist class ruled. Texas wealth was concentrated in the port city of Galveston. But in 1900, Galveston suffered the deadliest natural disaster in US history, a hurricane that left somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 people dead, a fourth of the people
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