Word: things
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Chamberlain, who died last week at the age of 63, not only dominated basketball, his presence clarified the character of the game. If sports were poems, baseball would be a sonnet, basketball free verse; the thing finds its form according to who is doing it. Chamberlain was responsible for major rule changes that altered basketball's structure--all delimiting the ability of giants to operate in the sky over a 10-ft.-high basket. By his athleticism, he proved that basketball required the world's best athletes, not simply the tallest. And, in a way, he also showed...
Clark went on to found Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon, creating three multibillion-dollar companies. (So far.) I learned about Veblen--and loads about Clark--in Michael Lewis' new book, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (Norton; $25.95). It's a superb book and explains how engineers are the greatest creators of wealth in history and why Silicon Valley is the center of the universe (and how Clark came to be the center of the Valley). I tend to dislike most nonfiction, since so many writers approach their work as if they were doing the reader a favor...
...spent 10 years failing at various academic careers and a couple of marriages before reinventing himself and heading off to Stanford. There, he and his students designed a microchip he called the Geometry Engine, which allowed computers to visualize objects in 3-D. Fruitlessly, he tried to license the thing to IBM, DEC and Hewlett-Packard, before starting Silicon Graphics to sell workstations with the chip. That's where Clark honed his distaste for venture capitalists, whom he saw as stealing his enterprise and putting it in the hands of managers. Clark never let that happen again, keeping control when...
...only gripe: a writer's first duty should be to his readers, not his subject. Sometimes I got the feeling that Lewis so reveres his protagonist that he became his apologist. Clark, we're told, is restlessly obsessed with finding the next new thing--which is, apparently, a good quality. But another interpretation might be that Clark is simply driven by the pursuit of filthy lucre. There has to be a higher purpose to life than making yourself rich. During the '80s, we knew that the people making their fortune on Wall Street were hardly role models; yuppie...
...know, I'm all over the dang thing. It's vhME1...