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Suffering from Comparison [Placement Archives]

By Placement

Originally published – MAY 25, 2005 Now grossly over-magnified, marketing is pivotal in exaggerating choice in western culture. It’s a tired refrain to remind that branders and advertisers gorge you on implausible and improbable variants of things you already own or likely never needed — a buffet of attrition culminating…

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Making Light [Placement Archives]

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Originally published – June 13, 2005 Though you can draw a diagram for the different axis’s that humor works on, you can’t really sit down and tell somebody what “funny” is. Humor is contextual, inexplicable and personal. Bob Mankoff has been working on a research project with the University of…

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Entre Nous [Placement Archives]

By Placement

Originally published – MARCH 28, 2005 A book I’ve recently started reading discusses the role of the sidewalk in relationship to neighborhood crime, or further to the point : the way that good neighborhoods patrol themselves in a way that city planning and police action cannot. When I stopped writing…

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