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Zitat des Tages von Virginia Postrel:

The profusion of fonts is one more product of the digital revolution. Beginning in the mid-'80s and accelerating in the 1990s, type design weathered the sort of radical, technology-driven transformation that other creative industries, including music, publishing, and movies, now face.

Americans hate their cable companies - for bumbling installers, on-again-off-again transmissions, peculiar channel selections, and indifferent customer service. The only thing cable subscribers hate more than the cable company is not being able to get what it delivers: multichannel selection and good reception.

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With its fluctuating forms and needless decoration, fashion epitomizes the supposedly unproductive waste that inspired 20th-century technocrats to dream of central planning. It exists for no good reason. But that's practically a definition of art.

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The glamour of twentieth-century air travel helped to persuade once-fearful travelers to take to the skies and encouraged parochial Americans to go out and see the world.

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Glamour is a beautiful illusion - the word 'glamour' originally meant a literal magic spell - that promises to transcend ordinary life and make the ideal real. It depends on a special combination of mystery and grace. Too much information breaks the spell.

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The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.

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'The Matrix' is a movie that is all about glamour. I could do a whole talk on 'The Matrix' and glamour. It was criticized for glamorizing violence, because, look - sunglasses and those long coats, and, of course, they could walk up walls and do all these kinds of things that are impossible in the real world.

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Abundant choice doesn't force us to look for the absolute best of everything. It allows us to find the extremes in those things we really care about, whether that means great coffee, jeans cut wide across the hips, or a spouse who shares your zeal for mountaineering, Zen meditation, and science fiction.

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Americans born since World War II have grown up in a media-saturated environment. From childhood, we have developed a sort of advertising literacy, which combines appreciation for technique with skepticism about motives. We respond to ads with at least as much rhetorical intelligence as we apply to any other form of persuasion.

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Chains do more than bargain down prices from suppliers or divide fixed costs across a lot of units. They rapidly spread economic discovery - the scarce and costly knowledge of what retail concepts and operational innovations actually work.

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The profusion of fonts is one more product of the digital revolution. Beginning in the mid-'80s and accelerating in the 1990s, type design weathered the sort of radical, technology-driven transformation that other creative industries, including music, publishing, and movies, now face.

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Wars without military objectives have a tendency to go on forever.

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Society needs both parents and nonparents, both the work party and the home party. While raising children is the most important work most people will do, not everyone is cut out for parenthood. And, as many a childless teacher has proved, raising kids is not the only important contribution a person can make to their future.

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Like Disneyland, luxury retailers have long had to figure out how to overcome customers' natural inertia. Unlike less pricey stores, they tend not to attract idle browsers who make impulse purchases.

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Storage problems make neon signs the most ephemeral of commercial arts.

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When Baby Boomer women started choosing hotel-like birthing centers over hospital delivery rooms, hospitals quickly wised up. Now even rural hospitals offer well-designed labor-delivery-recovery suites.

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By binding image and desire, glamour gives us pleasure, even as it heightens our yearning. It leads us to feel that the life we dream of exists, and to desire it even more.

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We are material creatures who spend much of our lives on material pursuits (even building a cathedral or writing a novel requires stone and mortar or paper and ink).

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Some of the higher price of L.A. real estate does reflect the intrinsic pleasure of living there, as I'm reminded every time I walk out my door into the perfect weather.

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Traditional PCs face competition from specialty products like Palm Pilots and from the servers that provide the nodes in computer networks. Microsoft's Windows CE hasn't done too well in the specialty-device market, and its Windows NT faces strong competition for server customers.

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The growth of medical expenditures in the U.S. is not caused by administrative costs but by increases in the technical intensity of care over time - a.k.a. medical progress.

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Grassroots techies - the mostly unknown people who write code and start companies that don't make the headlines - hate, loathe, and despise Microsoft. At technology conferences, it is the devil, or the guaranteed laugh line. Its products are mocked, its business practices booed.

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Like John Kennedy in 1960, Obama combines youth, vigor, and good looks with the promise of political change. Like Kennedy, he grew up in unusual circumstances that distance him from ordinary American life.

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Though designed as a mere convenience, clothing sizes establish an unintended norm, an ideal from which deviations seem like flaws. There's nothing like a trip to the dressing room to convince a woman - fat, thin, or in between - that she's a freak.

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The Taliban outlawed wearing polish in the late 1990s, punishing some offenders by amputating a fingertip. Importing polish was banned only in July 2001, which suggests that women were still wearing painted nails within the safety of their homes.

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Our eyes and brains pretty consistently like some human forms better than others. Shown photos of strangers, even babies look longer at the faces adults rank the best-looking.

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What makes a loft authentic isn't its layout or its history but its ability to give people a true home - a dwelling that reflects their personalities and aspirations, including their dreams of urbanity.

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Barack Obama has brought glamour back to American politics - not the faux glamour-by-association of campaigning with movie stars or sailing with the Kennedys, but the real thing. The candidate himself is glamorous. Audiences project onto him the personal qualities and political positions they want in a president.

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European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches. The experience changed the way people referred to the glamour of battle; they treated it no longer as a positive quality but as a dangerous illusion.

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The impulse for personal adornment is hard to stamp out.

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The innovative process is a fragile one, dependent on a complex, often messy interplay of imagination, competition, and exchange. Curbing new ideas hurts not only individual creators but the audience for which they create and the posterity that inherits their legacy.

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As borrowers, we may feel guilty about running up debt, anxious about making payments, and resentful of the constraints that old obligations (and old credit records) impose on our current choices. We may find it too easy to buy things we may later regret.

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As a general rule, durable-goods production tends to be the most volatile sector of the economy. Since people usually have a stock of durables in use, when times get tight, they put off new purchases. What seem like small cutbacks to the end buyer translate into big swings for the producer.

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Bill Clinton has done some incredibly reckless, irresponsible things as president. But his campaign to expand Medicare entitlements has to rank among the worst.

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In 'The Future and Its Enemies,' I argue that individual creativity and enterprise are not only personally satisfying but socially good, producing progress and happiness. For celebrating creativity and happiness, I have been called a fascist by critics on both coasts.

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We know we need bosses and deadlines to help us get work done. But sometimes we can also use an external push to make us have a good time. In both cases, our future self will appreciate the help.

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By reshaping or decorating our outer selves, we express our inner sense of self: 'I like that' becomes 'I'm like that.'

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