Riding Around Baltimore With the Repo Man From Bill Shaw at American Consequences: An alarm sounded… It was different from the last one. “Live hit!” the driver gasped. He sped around the corner and killed the headlights. “Stay here. × Subscribe to Crux I reached over and locked the doors. The driver returned with a grin and pumped his fist. Last year on a Sunday evening, I spent four hours riding shotgun with a repo man in Baltimore, Maryland. Continue reading at American Consequences.
Be Good to Yourself: 10 Powerful Ways to Practice Self-Love “Self-love, self-respect, self-worth: There’s a reason they all start with ‘self.’ You can’t find them in anyone else.” ~Unknown It was one of those nights. I was in a busy New York bar, having fun and enjoying myself. Within a few seconds my fun, happy, playful side vanished and in entered a girl full of doubts and insecurity. The truth was… I had no freaking idea about what I was doing! That question stripped me down to feeling naked and exposed. I’ve always been pretty confident. So, I never had a problem saying yes to things, such as taking job offers abroad and accepting challenging positions and demanding projects. Until that moment in the bar, I had (unconsciously, of course) proved my worth through my achievements. But, when I left my job and other external things fell apart, so did my value. In short, I had confused self-confidence with self-esteem. Here’s what I mean by this: Self-confidence is about trusting yourself and your abilities. Yeah, until you don’t. So, I got to work.
How to work with galleries and collectors as an emerging artist Showing work in a gallery exhibition. A gallery has offered to include your work in a group or solo exhibition—what can you expect? What do you need to make sure everything is in order before the exhibition opens? Use a consignment agreement First things first, never send a gallery your work without receiving a consignment agreement. A standard agreement sets out the terms for the sale of the work, your payment (should the work sell), how the work will be shipped, how the work will be photographed/documented, and the length of time that the gallery will have exclusive access to sell the work. Pricing your work You should work with the gallery to decide the right price point for your work. Typically you can expect a 50/50 split on all sales. Some agreements will also ask for the discretion of a shared 20% discount to be offered to museums, since selling a work to a museum ensures the long-term care for your piece and the potential for exhibition, making the discount worth it. Payment terms
Mathematical Model Reveals the Patterns of How Innovations Arise This approach has had limited success, however. The rate at which innovations appear and disappear has been carefully measured. It follows a set of well-characterized patterns that scientists observe in many different circumstances. And yet, nobody has been able to explain how this pattern arises or why it governs innovation. Today, all that changes thanks to the work of Vittorio Loreto at Sapienza University of Rome in Italy and a few pals, who have created the first mathematical model that accurately reproduces the patterns that innovations follow. The notion that innovation arises from the interplay between the actual and the possible was first formalized by the complexity theorist Stuart Kauffmann. The adjacent possible is all those things—ideas, words, songs, molecules, genomes, technologies and so on—that are one step away from what actually exists. But this idea is hard to model for an important reason. What’s more, each innovation changes the landscape of future possibilities.
Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you | Dylan Curran Want to freak yourself out? I’m going to show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it. Google knows where you’ve been Google stores your location (if you have location tracking turned on) every time you turn on your phone. You can see a timeline of where you’ve been from the very first day you started using Google on your phone. Click on this link to see your own data: google.com/maps/timeline? Here is every place I have been in the last 12 months in Ireland. Google knows everything you’ve ever searched – and deleted Google stores search history across all your devices. Click on this link to see your own data: myactivity.google.com/myactivity Google has an advertisement profile of you Google creates an advertisement profile based on your information, including your location, gender, age, hobbies, career, interests, relationship status, possible weight (need to lose 10lb in one day?) Google knows all the apps you use
American Giant hoodie: This is the greatest sweatshirt known to man. Courtesy American Giant. Early in October, I got a call from Bayard Winthrop, an entrepreneur who claimed to have created the world’s best hooded sweatshirt. Because I found this claim amusing—who sets out to make the world’s best hoodie?—I agreed to chat with him about the sweatshirt and his company, a San Francisco-based apparel startup called American Giant. I thought it would be a polite interview that would go nowhere, but I quickly found American Giant’s story irresistible. But few companies make sweatshirts—or any clothes, really—like that today. American Giant has found a loophole in the process. American Giant doesn’t maintain a storefront, and it doesn’t deal with middlemen. But there is really no comparison between American Giant’s hoodie and the competition. Why is this hoodie so amazing? But the result is worth the effort, because heavyweight cotton is the ideal material for a sweatshirt. There are many other such tiny, thoughtful details.
NYC Space/Time Directory Tristan Harris on how Facebook and Twitter bring out the worst in us In 2011, Tristan Harris’s company, Apture, was acquired by Google. Inside Google, he became unnerved by how the company worked. There was all this energy going into making the products better, more addicting, more delightful. Harris wrote up his worries in a slide deck manifesto. Harris, who recently co-founded the Center for Humane Technology, has become the most influential critic of how Silicon Valley designs products to addict us. I interviewed Harris recently for my podcast. Ezra Klein Why do you think this topic has blown up so much in recent months? Tristan Harris I think the election woke a lot of people up to the power of social media and I don’t mean just the outcome. I had Jaron Lanier on this podcast a couple months ago, and he said something I’ve been thinking about since then. Oh, absolutely. When you open up the blue Facebook icon, you’re activating the AI, which tries to figure out the perfect thing it can show you that’ll engage you. This the key to everything. Ezra Klein