Song Hia

But a funny thing has happened since the rise of professionalism. The tenets it embraced—that some people are more qualified than others, that training and apprenticeship have value, that not everyone can or should (or needs to) gain admission into the club—have become unfashionable.

They record CD’s that become “keepers”, the mainstay of your collection, though they may go “out of style” someday…when their cover of “Come On Eileen” came on. I think I came. Great music that won’t be soon forgotten by anyone who’s heard them.

Storytelling is still important, but it’s not enough. The best question I think you can ask is, “What do our customers hate about our category, and can we use digital tools to fix it?

No medium has ever survived the indifference of 25 year olds.

The United States faces a daunting challenge in creating jobs: at current rates, it will take until 2016 to replace the 7 million of them lost during the 2008–09 recession. To regain full employment—finding work for the unemployed and accommodating the 15 million Americans expected to enter the labor force this decade—the US economy must create 21 million jobs by 2020.

The US Postal Service story is not a unique situation. It is the situation. And we are going to be living with this situation for many years to come. We are crossing a huge chasm from an industrial society to an information society. And there is immense pain in that transformation. Obama can’t solve the problem nor can any of his opponents. Time will solve this problem as new industries get built, people learn new skills and new jobs, and we dismantle entitlement systems that are not sustainable.

Sally Cameron earned her master’s degree from Yale in 1980. The Washington Post story that described her struggles was published in 1982. For going on four decades, the press has been raising alarms that college degrees may no longer be a sound investment. Two things about these stories have remained constant: They always feature an over-educated bartender, and they are always wrong.

Our ancestors didn’t concern themselves with what is the appropriate age to have “the talk” with their children. When homes were small, children grew up with parents who had sex in the same room in which they were sleeping. Our preoccupation with “protecting” our children from sexual knowledge is directly related to the size of our homes. As we have grown wealthier we have managed to prolong our children’s ignorance regarding human sexuality, and as a result open dialogue around sexuality has become taboo.

The age of consent in Italy is fourteen…

According to the World Economic Forum’s 2010 Global Gender Gap Report, Italy ranks seventy-fourth in women’s rights, between the Dominican Republic and Gambia…

Correction, June 28, 2011: The original article erroneously stated that 95% of Italian men had never operated a washing machine.

The implications of the propriety vision were not good. In Gates and Ellison’s minds, the corporations who owned the Information Super Highway would tax every transaction by charging a “vigorish” as Microsoft’s then Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold referred to it at the time. It’s difficult to overstate the momentum that the proprietary Information Super Highway carried. After Mosaic, even Marc and his co-founder Jim Clark originally planned a business for video distribution to run on top of the proprietary Information Super Highway, not the Internet. It wasn’t until deep into the planning process that they decided that by improving the browser by making it secure, more functional and easier to use, they could make the Internet the network of the future. Marc and Jim called the first Netscape browser Mozilla—meaning Mosaic Killer—to emphasize the mission to replace Mosaic and its importance. Today, if you type about:Mozilla into a Firefox browser (the Netscape derivative browser project), you still see the religious zealotry with which the team pursued the mission. On the modern Internet, we all benefit from that passion and commitment. Had Netscape not succeeded so quickly and forced Microsoft into the browser war and out of their proprietary network agenda, the world likely would be quite different. Even if the Internet had eventually won, it would have taken much longer and the world would have lost years of important innovation. And we all would have paid many vigorishes in the meanwhile.