Linkpile

• How Luxury Will Survive: “As more individuals in Asia accumulate enough money to satisfy their daily needs and begin to have confidence in their long-term prospects, they’re interested in demonstrating to themselves, their neighbors, and anyone they happen to meet that they, too, have joined the club.” No particular evidence is offered to support this socio-cultural claim. But it might still be correct.
• Book Review — “Curious?” by Todd Kashdan: “Most of us engage in what Kashdan calls passive curiosity. If something odd crosses our path (say, a dog dressed up as a punk rocker), we are interested in learning about it. But there’s novelty everywhere, and it’s very much worth seeking out.”
• Croc Hunting: “Crocs are a symbol for our leisure culture and a symbol of adolescent adults. What is the nature of our current public spaces when we are allowed to and can wear Crocs in them? Crocs are the free plan of footwear. They free the barriers of the floor surface; sand to water to hospital, to home, to kitchen, to 5th Ave. No other shoe can achieve such a diversity of surfaces. They democratize footwear and break gender barriers.”
• Public Image Unlimited: Consumerism and Anonymity’s End: “The main purpose of social networks, once we are coaxed into building them for ourselves, is to guarantee us a place to display our consumption. The point is to discourage online anonymity, to get us invested in the notion of reputational capital.”
• A history of baseball and chewing tobacco.: Interesting.

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