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Brief Interruptions

Brynn Shepherd is a Product Designer at Facebook. This is a place for some of the interesting things she finds on the Internet.

May 30

“ Much of what we look for as tourists is not simply that which can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: The hyperreal. In this way, the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that we have encountered before in some other medium.

— Rolf Potts, “Tourist Snapshots”

May 03

Repetition

May 01

“ What ends up happening in the world, on a very, very large level, has a lot to do with what people believe will happen. Because these things are self-fulfilling — when enough people start to believe in a certain future outcome, their subconscious ends up acting on their behaviors, and that outcome ends up kind of happening. And so I think it’s so important to put forth beautiful, and also believable, visions of how things can be in the future, because then many people will believe in these things, and then those things will begin to come true.

— Jonathan Harris

Apr 26

“ This is one of the great enigmas of modern life: why the representation of a thing can fascinate those who would ignore the original. Perhaps it is the skill, the medium, the technique, the promise of resolution, or perhaps it is merely that someone has already decided to pay attention to a subject, and the representation invites you to commune with this attention as well as its subject.

— Rebecca Solnit, from River of Shadows: Eadweard Murbridge and the Technological Wild West

“ Imagined grids and lines are the latitude and longitude lines by which mentality orders the world.

— Helen Vendler

Apr 22

“ Don’t ignore your dreams; don’t work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.

— Paul Graham, “The Top of My To-Do List”

Apr 02

“ the flip-flop (n.): the process of pushing a work of art or craft from the physical world to the digital world and back again—maybe more than once

— Robin Sloan

Mar 30

A Month Of… by Leanne Shapton

“ The only way to be creative over time — to not be undone by our expertise — is to experiment with ignorance, to stare at things we don’t fully understand.

— Jonah Lehrer

Mar 27

“ In the end, what we pay the most attention to defines us.

— Diane Ackerman, “The Brain on Love”