12 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2023
    1. WHILE REAGAN was governor, I will never forget his taking time out of his schedule after a television taping to show me—a 15-year-old high school student—how he could instantly arrange his packs of anecdote-filled index cards into a speech tailor-made for almost any audience. I still use a variation of Reagan’s system to construct my own speeches.

      John H. Fund wrote that while he was a a 15-year old high school student, Reagan taught him how he arranged his index card-based notes to tailor-make a speech for almost any audience. In 2011, Fund said he still used a variation of Reagan's system for his own speeches.

    1. Anecdotes’, he concluded, ‘havetheir historic value, if properly tested’ – reflecting both his interest in details and also theneed to ascertain whether they were true (Deutsch, 1905b).
  2. Apr 2022
  3. Mar 2022
    1. Niles Niami, the mansion developer who built The One, and described his aesthetic, simply, as “badass”, had floated increasingly desperate plans to avoid auctioning it off, the Los Angeles Times reported, including turning it into an events space for boxing matches and holographic appearances of dead celebrities such as Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston, and making a cryptocurrency called “The One Coin” backed by the value of the property.
  4. Dec 2021
    1. Cox, a classically trained British stage actor, has a “turn it on, turn it off” approach to acting, and his relationship with Strong recalls a famous story about Laurence Olivier working with Dustin Hoffman on the 1976 film “Marathon Man.” On learning that Hoffman had stayed up partying for three nights before a scene in which he had to appear sleep-deprived, Olivier said, “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?”

      Brian Cox

  5. Aug 2021
    1. I would have seen memory palaces as a simplified version of songlines, but my Indigenous colleague has now pointed out that sometimes songlines are taught before the person goes on Country - that’s how they navigated: teach the songlines and you can then travel knowing where food sources and waterholes are. So my theory is falling down already. But the songline always involves movement (not always dance), song, narrative and a mesh of genres of information.

      Verification of the anecdotal evidence I mentioned before. Teaching of songlines without actually being on Country.

  6. Jun 2021
    1. I was recently reminded of a story about Evelyn Waugh, who had behaved particularly rudely to a young French intellectual at a dinner party. Waugh was asked by the host, Nancy Mitford, how he could act so meanly and yet consider himself a believing and practicing Catholic. “You have no idea,” Waugh is said to have responded, “how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic.”
  7. Mar 2020
    1. Un aneddoto della vita di Jules Verne narra che lui, da ragazzino, si volesse imbarcare come mozzo su una nave diretta nelle Indie. Bloccato dal padre pronunciò le fatidiche parole “D’ora in poi viaggerò solo con la fantasia!” E così fece.
  8. May 2017
    1. Listerine, for example, started life on the shelf as an antiseptic, sold as both floor cleaner and a treatment for gonorrhoea. But it wasn't a runaway success until it was marketed as a treatment for bad breath. 

      Interesting use-case

  9. Mar 2016
    1. scienceWhen the actor Michael J. Fox was in the initial stages of creating his foundation forresearch on Parkinson’s Disease, he came to recognize the negative impact thatcompetition among scientific groups has on the overall progress of research on thedisease. The director of one group actually said to him, ‘‘Well, if you don’t help us,then, at least, don’t help them’’ [1, p. 236]. Such was his introduction to thecompetitive world of U.S. science.

      Anecdote about how Michael J. Fox discovered scientific competition when he set up his foundation for Parkinson's disease.