I only bring this up because I’m fascinated by the degree to which brains have evolved to become more powerful than guns. Society’s founding geniuses engineered a social system that encourages the young people who have guns to shoot at each other instead of robbing old people. Forgive me for calling that awesome. Arguably, the most important function of human language is to protect the smart from the strong. Humans use words to create sentences, and sentences to create concepts, such as our notions of duty and honor. Powerful concepts control behavior. Without our language and concepts, the strong would kill the smart, and humans wouldn’t evolve to be any smarter. I think you could say that human evolution is being guided at least partly by the power of ideas.

And this post shall be tagged: “We know we want to be famous. We don’t even know why anymore.

Do you spend too much on unnecessary household purchases? Blame your television set.

For the digitally excluded, the route to the world wide web is via the heart, not the brainbox. We just need to work out what they love. Then show them how to find it

There’s too much news on the web; and way too little explanation.

You’ve got to want to create. It will start when you see the joys of accomplishing something rather than absorbing others’ creations.

Actually it’s very easy, I don’t have to put on a tie!

Distilling my personality provided surprising focus, making feel stripped to my essence. It forced me, for instance, to pinpoint the dominant feeling as I sat outside with my daughter listening to E.B. White. Was it my joy at being a mother? Nostalgia for my own childhood summers? The pleasures of listening to the author’s quirky, underinflected voice? Each put a different spin on the occasion, of who I was within it. Yet the final decision (“Listening to E.B. White’s ‘Trumpet of the Swan’ with Daisy. Slow and sweet.”) was not really about my own impressions: it was about how I imagined — and wanted — others to react to them. That gave me pause. How much, I began to wonder, was I shaping my Twitter feed, and how much was Twitter shaping me?

If you have the choice to invest more time/money into your user experience or some branding campaign, choose the user experience every time.

Hey, well, as far as I’m concerned, progress peaked with frozen pizza.