My broth

Overthinking It

The “Baby” Project (a series of covers of the Justin Bieber song “Baby” across genres) is on hiatus, but Bieber Fever still burns strong here at Overthinking It, in spite of the conspicuous absence of new material from him over the past few months. What’s going on?

Puberty. The kid’s voice finally changed at the late age of 16, and he spent much of 2011 working with a vocal coach to manage the t...

Steve Fogg: Clear & Simple

I remember when I brought my first iPhone. I was the first person to buy one at my work. I remember giving it to my IT guy to set up my email. He did it within a minute. He was very impressed. Word soon spread that it was easy to get email set up on these new phones called iPhones. Before the iPhone connecting to our work email through the different mobile devices was difficult. The iPhone...

What's Best Next

Absolutely true. Amen.

Here’s the research:

Related posts:

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• What Makes a Place the Right Place to Work?
• Spurgeon: Grace Makes us Unworldly, Not Unearthly

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Overthinking It

The distribution graph for the IMDb Top 250 Movies list as of 10/3/2011

It’s October, which means it’s time to subject the IMDB Top 250 Movies list to a level of quantitative scrutiny it probably doesn’t deserve. For those of you who are new to this series, here’s a quick recap: I’m four years into an effort to analyze changing movie tastes through lists of top movies.

In 2008, I compared the...

Overthinking It

When I learned that Steve Jobs had died, my thoughts went immediately to Charles Shultz. Like Jobs, he was a workaholic (Shultz took only one vacation in 50 years, to celebrate his 75th birthday). Like Jobs, Shultz had an obsession with details (he refused to hire an inker or a letterer, until Parkinson’s made his handwriting too shaky). And Shultz died on February 12, 2000, the day before his ...

Boing Boing

Today's XKCD proposes a strangely optimal strategy for reviewing the hotels you love, provided you don't mind being a jerk. He calls it the "tragedy of you're a dick."

davidould.net

You may have (but probably, and thankfully, haven't) seen the recent tizz in the States over another of the shock-flock pastors (see, I just coined a phrase) Perry Noble.

Perry, it seems, thought it would be helpful to play ACDC's "Highway to Hell" [wiki] on Easter Sunday in order to confront those stuffy traditionalists who need to be shaken out of their traditionalism. Or...

Freakonomics

This is a cross-post from James Altucher‘s blog Altucher Confidential. His previous appearances on the Freakonomics blog can be found here.

(iStockphoto)

If I stood in the center of Times Square and said something like “Moses didn’t really part the Red Sea,” or “Jesus never existed,” people would probably keep walking around me, ignoring what I said.

But if I stood there and said, “Going to...

Things Findo Thinks

There’s a been a little bit of a flutter on a few of the blogs I read about ‘angry calvinists’. It’s sprung out of Justin Taylor’s ‘ask a calvinist‘ spot on Rachel Held Evan’s blog; more specifically, some of the comments on Justin’s post about it. (It’s well worth reading his most recent post on the issue: The Problem of Angry Calvinists).

I’ve been in my fair share of ugly debates about the...

Justin Taylor

There’s a part of me that’s hesitant to keep banging the drum on the issue of “angry Calvinists.”

I’m an evangelical Calvinist—but I’m not mad about it, and my friends and role models in these theological circles aren’t mean-spirited or angry. So on the one hand it feels something like a stereotype. If 10,000 people read a blog and two cranky Calvinists write a number of comments, some will...

Goannatree

So, I’ve made no bones about my suspicion of  the label “christian books” to describe any books, especially novels; mainly because it speaks to a set of assumptions about a moral code that may or may not be what the book is about or may lead a reader to overstretch and read into a text in a way that strips a narrative of its simplicity or complexity. I’m also cautious about the way authors of “...

xkcd.com

Communicate Jesus

“Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.” Galatians 6:10

My sister and her husband are living in Canada, and noticed the People for Good campaign that’s currently in operation.

I love the tagline:

“Go ahead. Make someone’s day.”

Here’s the extended version:

“…our goal is to make the world a better place, one good...

kottke.org

Using a chalkboard and a simple graphical axis, watch as Kurt Vonnegut explains the different shapes that stories can take.

(via @coudal)

Update: This is part of a longer talk that Vonnegut gave...a transcript is here.

I want to share with you something I've learned. I'll draw it on the blackboard behind me so you can follow more easily [draws a vertical line on the blackboard]. This is the G-I...