Björn Jeffery

I’ve become strangely fascinated by The Bling Ring. It’s not a new story, but it’s one that illustrates how celebrity culture can get the best of people – even the ones in the periphery. And how meta it quickly becomes when the people admiring and trying to imitate the celebs, become just this through the process.  If you haven’t heard about it, this is a very brief summary: A bunch of teenagers want to live […]

What is unhappiness? Your intuition might be that it is simply the opposite of happiness, just as darkness is the absence of light. That is not correct. Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites. (…) And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this […]

“About a year and a half ago, Haig began working on an ingenious device called the Mineblock. A physical object powered by the credit card-sized Raspberry Pi computer and not much larger than your hand, the Mineblock does just one thing: run a private Minecraft server.” (via Mineblock envisions a troll-free Minecraft universe – Kill Screen – Videogame Arts & Culture.)

My newborn daughter, Miranda Vox Elisabeth Jeffery.

This production manager Arno I mentioned,” Freeman says, “he was the second barista I ever hired and he was a German literature major, and Goethe was a big thing for him. And I remember reading some of Doctor Faustus a while ago—you know, to get to know Arno better—and there is a great, great metaphor in it that I’ve been thinking about so much. It’s the prevailing metaphor of my last 18 months. In the […]

The appeal of Maier’s designs is similarly aided by clubbiness and artificial scarcity. With the Cabat, small production runs insure that it is not seen everywhere and thus retains what Steele calls its “stealth luxury” appeal. “One of the most interesting aspects of fashion in the past ten years has been how much of it has been like a secret Masonic handshake,” she told me. “Only people in the know will recognize what you have, […]

oh-totoro: STUDIO GHIBLI ANNOUNCES CLOSURE Toshio Suzuki has announced the closure of Studio Ghibli. Here’s a translated version of the news article: “Just moments ago, Toshio Suzuki, Studio Ghibli producer, announced on the TV show of the MBS Jounetsu Tairiku chain effectively as announced as sources close to the studio, Studio Ghibli will close and production studio anime, leaving himself only as a company that will manage its trademarks. As stated in the program’s producer, […]

So how should advertisers be re-looking at their relationships with media houses? – I think it’s pretty tough, because the media houses are clueless. The average media company in the world is in pretty poor shape. A few will survive. A few newspapers will make the transition from a print product to an electronic product as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have done. And the Financial Times, which is perhaps the […]

The fear about [kids] safety is the least rational. Despite the impression you get from watching crime dramas, children in rich countries are mind-bogglingly safe, so long as they look both ways before crossing the road. Kids in the 1950s—that golden era so often evoked by conservative politicians—were in fact five times likelier to die before the age of five. Yet their parents thought nothing of letting them roam free. In those days, most American […]

They easy way out is to look to the greener grass and aspire to run on it. New hires, new money and new partners can be very enticing. Sometimes, in fact dare I say most times, they may even be the best option. However, all too often (myself included), this option is taken too soon or too easily. What if your current employees, your current partners, your current investors and your current co-founders can become […]