TS Perspective

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You don’t need to be an economist to sense that the US economy is sort of f’ed right now.  However the breakdowns and failures of our financial institutions are complex and hard to wrap my head around.

In trying to read up on what the hell happened, I’ve run into a few sources which have actually done a good job trying to explain the situation in fairly straightforward and layman’s terms.

The fist is a bit old and perhaps surprising.  This American Life’s episode back in May entitled ‘The Giant Pool Of Money’ traces the path of the mortgage crisis and brilliantly presents the perspective from people along all links in the chain, from CEO’s to broke citizens.  You can listen to a free truncated version of this show here, and, for only 95 cents, you can download the hour long show from here, and, for only 95 cents, you can download the hour long show from iTunes here.

Secondly, the Freakonomics blog on NYTimes.com has been keeping a close eye on wall st. and has provided some really thoughtful commentary on what’s going on.

The last (and perhaps best) is the super simple Money Meltdown site, which curates the best voices from across the web to tell us the background, key facts, and what’s next.

The new sign that you’ve arrived: Kor One Hydration Vessel.  It has a good design story behind it (three years of reseach), but the website feels a bit salesy.  

Can it do for water bottles what Dyson did for vacuum cleaners?  We’ll see.    

From Garr at Presentation Zen.

Watch this for a bit…

Then get the story behind it, ignite style (20 slides, 15 seconds per slide):

Rejoice, Google Transit has finally added NYC to it’s database.

Aaron Sorkin weighs in on Obama’s dilemma in the form of Maureen Dowd’s op-ed article.

My favorite lines:

OBAMA I didn’t expect you to answer the door yourself.

BARTLET I didn’t expect you to be getting beat by John McCain and a Lancôme rep who thinks “The Flintstones” was based on a true story, so let’s call it even.

BARTLET Have you tried doing a two-hour special or a really good Christmas show?

OBAMA Sir —

BARTLET Hang on. Home run. Right here. Is there any chance you could get Michelle pregnant before the fall sweeps?

OBAMA So what about hope? Chuck it for outrage and put-downs?

BARTLET No. You’re elite, you can do both. Four weeks ago you had the best week of your campaign, followed — granted, inexplicably — by the worst week of your campaign. And you’re still in a statistical dead heat. You’re a 47-year-old black man with a foreign-sounding name who went to Harvard and thinks devotion to your country and lapel pins aren’t the same thing and you’re in a statistical tie with a war hero and a Cinemax heroine. To these aged eyes, Senator, that’s what progress looks like. You guys got four debates. Get out of my house and go back to work.

I woke up to the horrible news that David Forster Wallace committed suicide yesterday. I’ve recently wrote about him here.

Ironically, I’m in the midst of my second attempt to get through Infinite Jest and this news will inevitably re-frame the reading experience. I’ll definitely post a review if I get around to finishing it.

NYT has a write up on his carreer and legacy.  Also, the Onion nails it: Girlfriend stops reading breakup letter at page 20.

9/11 will always be a surreal day in NYC. For some reason I like to hear people’s stories of where they were and how their day unfolded.  I find these stories unifying as help provide context and texture to a day  that was marked by such exaggerated uncertainty.

Today I heard about a series of taxi cabs pulled over to the side of 5th avenue with their radios turned up and what the view looked like all the way from New Brunswick NJ.

Complementing these stories has been some good content online, one of which I wanted to share.

It’s a chilling article in Esquire (written by Tom Junod and originally published in ‘03) about Richard Drew’s famous Falling Man photograph taken at 9:41AM on 9/11.

The article chronicles the history of the photograph and the attempts to uncover the falling man’s identity. But what I found beautiful, intense and devastating was this eloquent introduction:

In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity’s divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet….There is something almost rebellious in the man’s posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end. He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.

So I’m digging Google Chrome so far.  At first glance it seems a bit quicker than other browsers and I like the minimalist aesthetic.

I even read the comic book release it came with which (even though it was too long and proved Google doesn’t quite know where Denmark is) was a really intersting and fresh way to get people to understand the Chrome Project.

One of my initial fears was that it wouldn’t know my passwords that are stored for a litany of site across the web, but as with my bookmarks, these were seamlessly imported from Firefox

But it wasn’t till I read my good friend Paul’s take on what makes Google Chrome remarkable from a branding standpoint that I fully appreciated it.   It’s the first browser with a built in brand personality.

Really smart stuff.