The first line of my new single, "The Mailman," came from a John Prine interview. He had been a mailman for six years before being discovered. Someone asked if he read peoples' mail. He said, "If it wasn't in an envelope, I read everything."
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danpallotta
@danpallotta
Husband, dad, brother, son, gay, charity defender, philanthropy futurist, songwriter, author, TED talker, Hauser Center Leader at Harvard Kennedy School
danpallotta’s Tweets
Since 1970, the share of aggregate income going to the middle class has fallen from 62% to 42%. (Middle class defined as income from 2/3 to double the median). Meanwhile, high-income share has increased from 29% to 50%. No wonder so many supposedly middle-class families feel like… Show more
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Blackberry CEO: “You’ve heard the saying that ‘perfect is the enemy of good’?” Engineer: “Yah, but good enough is the enemy of humanity.” — from the new movie about BlackBerry.
If you like “Nebraska” if you like Flannery O’Connor, you will also love, “Doghouse Roses,”which is a collection of sublime short stories by Steve Earle.
The candy bar companies should be very worried. “Baltimore joined a number of cities who say Hyundai and Kia created a public nuisance by making cars that can be easily stolen.” - The Baltimore Banner
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If you are a songwriter, an artist, definitely if you are a Springsteen fan—you will love this new book by “Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska”
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“I’ve actually not read any books on time management.”
| Elon Musk
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If you are not being laughed at you are not thinking big enough.
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Joseph Lister, the man who first thought that surgeons could prevent infecting their patients by washing and disinfecting their hands with carbolic acid. This idea initially earned him ridicule, but he's now remembered as the father of antiseptic surgery buff.ly/2RglFFF
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Absorbed By Light (2018). Installation by Gali May Lucas and Karoline Hinz for the Amsterdam Light Festival #WomensArt
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I’m loving this guy.
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Great article with intro by @mtaibbi on the censorship-industrial complex. What we are facing isn’t frowning Soviet-style censors stamping “nyet” onto news articles. It is an incredibly sophisticated system of information control, that sees public opinion as a theater of war, and… Show more
"What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can't be apolitical. It will come and get you. It's not that you shouldn't be neutral. It's that you won't be able to stay neutral."
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Oh oh, finance your purchase for as low as 3.99% 🤩
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BREAKING: @Tesla has increased Model S and Model X prices in the US by $1,000.
Tesla also now says on the order page: "Finance your purchase for as low as 3.99%"
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An expert is someone who can tell you exactly why something cannot ever happen.
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An article published by The New York Times dated December 8th, 1903
9 days later the Wright Brothers had their first flight.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Their flight was not 9 days later, it was 69 days later.
The New York Times opinion piece was published on October 9, 1903: nytimes.com/1903/10/09/arc…
The Wright brothers first flight occurred on December 17, 1903: airandspace.si.edu/collection-obj…
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"Vocation to Solitude. To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landsccape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert, to sit still while the sun comes up over the land and fills its silences with light."
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And vice versa, why do we underpay those working on our most precious endeavors?
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#Teachers are often treated like #nonprofit workers, going above and beyond at rock-bottom salaries. Why do we always entrust our most precious endeavors to the very people we underpay? #TeacherAppreciationWeek2023 #uncharitablemovie
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Frank was not exactly full of empathy.
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“If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.”
― Frank Zappa
Yesterday we shared the big news about my new book with Oprah, "Build the Life you Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier" - thanks for the coverage!
#ArthurCBrooks #LiveBetterBeHappier #happiness #happier #AssociatedPress
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Maybe America is depressed because we are all analyzing how much older we are looking on that big zoom screen 6 hours a day.
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Using two telescopes and over 280,000 individual photos, I captured my most detailed image of our moon. The full size is over a gigapixel. Trust me, you’ll want to zoom in on this one.
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"Solitary men : Some men are so accustomed to being alone with themselves that they do not compare themselves with others at all but spin out their life of monologue in a calm and cheerful mood, conversing and indeed laughing with themselves alone."
Friedrich Nietzsche
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ICE cars are 19x more likely to catch fire than EVs, argues the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, which has compiled the statistics for car fires in 2022.
In 2022, 24 electric or plug-in hybrid cars caught fire in Sweden, which accounts for approximately 0.004% of all electric… Show more
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#Today in 1894, "wireless" was born when Guglielmo Marconi successfully transmitted a radio wave three-quarters of a mile, having constructed his own “invisible wave”-generating equipment at his family’s estate in Pontecchio, Italy. He was 20
[read more: buff.ly/3NRC6q5]
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"The modern mental illness is anxiety.
The symptom is inability to fall asleep.
The evidence is pills, meditation apps, opioids, and sleep trackers.
The causes are oversocialization and overstimulation."
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"The more seriously you take yourself, the unhappier you’re going to be."
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“A nearby field, a ray of sunlight,
a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread,
not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist,
not to demand anything from others,
and not to have others demand anything from me.”
― Fernando Pessoa
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Ph. Yuriy Kulik
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A metaphor up for grabs.
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Tumbleweeds start out as tiny seedlings; by summer the plant has a round shape. They grow flowers and fruits. By fall they dry and detach from their roots, so they spread their seeds
[source: buff.ly/3PEUYWt]
[video: buff.ly/3GYXgwE]
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In my house, we watch the Television news not to learn the truth but to understand the official narrative.
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Walt Whitman
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As a Senator, Joe Biden voted for the Assassination Records Act of 1992, requiring that all documents related to the killing of JFK be released by 2017. But President Biden is still keeping thousands of pages heavily redacted, including 44 pages related to a shadowy CIA agent and… Show more
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Here is a picture of me with my uncle, whose wisdom affected me profoundly. Today, these words of his are especially relevant: “A nation that is afraid to let its people judge truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
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“If you’re going to try something innovative then you’re in unexplored territory, so the odds that something will go wrong are pretty high. It’s only if you try to do something that is well-understood that there’s little chance of failure.”
| Elon Musk
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The moment when an idea becomes sacred is the moment where freedom of thought becomes impossible.
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In 1965, a single-wage earner with a high school diploma could support an entire family and even put away some savings. Today two wage earners can barely make ends meet. Why? Partly it is because endless war and health care costs have drained our wealth. But a large part is also… Show more
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“A lot of people think I’m a fan of disruption, but I’m not really a fan of disruption. I am just a fan of things being better.”
| Elon Musk
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