joshuago’s Bookmarks

It has been reported that a full 40% of executives describe themselves as introverts, including Microsoft's Bill Gates, the über-investors Warren Buffett and Charles Schwab, Avon's chief executive, Andrea Jung, and the late publishing giant Katharine Graham. Odds are President Barack Obama is an innie as well. What does that mean? That introverts, not just extroverts, have the right stuff to lead organizations in a go-go, extroverted business culture.

One considerable advantage to building a paywall is that it forces newspapers to think hard about what their customers (as opposed to their advertisers) might really want.

The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” To distinguish toys that are disruptive from toys that will remain just toys, you need to look at products as processes.

In 2010, with talk of restructuring large swaths of our economy back in vogue, Prohibition should also remind us that Congress, scientists and economists seized by the noble desire to achieve some great moral goal may be abysmally wrong.

A tired brain, preoccupied with its problems, is going to struggle to resist what it wants, even when what it wants isn't what we need.

Progress will often require modifying or discarding old ideas, but not because they are old. New ideas are better ones only if they do a better job of explaining the world or improving the circumstances in which we live. The ones that fail those tests need to be set aside, not embraced simply because they were coined more recently.

An overview of the modularity improvements that have gone into Rails 3, from Yehuda Katz.

Yehuda Katz on the work he did with reducing general controller overhead and speeding up the rendering of a collection of partials for Rails 3.

The conservative view fails to acknowledge the social costs of unrestrained economic innovation — costs that have made themselves powerfully apparent in American politics throughout our history. The liberal view, meanwhile, betrays a misunderstanding of the global economic environment.

How it happened and what can be done to reverse it. There are several causes, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself.