I’ve decided to make Unrequired Reading a regular post on Friday mornings. It’ll consist of the same stuff I was posting at random in the past few weeks. Which is to say, thanks to the miracle of RSS feeds, VM goofs around online so you don’t have to.
As my friend Mitch put it, “You know you’ve bottomed out when Bobby Brown says you’re an unfit mother to his children.”
(It’s Mother’s Day, not All Everybody Day!)
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Here’s a slideshow about Jonathan Ive, the design guru at Apple.
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10 Highly Pretentious Musical Instruments
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Firing tons of people — even Japanese people — does not automatically make you a success. I can’t stress this enough. Restructuring by “cutting fat” is fine, but it doesn’t necessarily put a company in the position to succeed in the future. Carlos Ghosn is trying to stay ahead of the game by allying with an American automaker and firing a ton of people.
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A wide-ranging (by my lights) interview with U of Penn Architecture Department Chair Detlef Mertins, author of a book on Mies van der Rohe.
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Paul Wolfowitz is running into trouble as president of the World Bank, due to his policy of not lending money to corrupt regimes.
The funniest souvenir I bought on my trip to the US was a Browns bottle opener. Every time you use it you have to listen to the whole Monday night football theme song. I still think it’s hilarious, but Paul was ready to kill me about two days after I bought it.