Great piece on nytimes.com this morning about Andy Kessler, NYC skateboarding legend, entitled “The End of Falling.”

Such community is why skaters who never met him feel like they’ve lost a friend with whom they used to seek out drained swimming pools. For all of their perceived destructiveness, for all of their purported unthinking and lawless mischief, skateboarders are a creative and compassionate breed. Often, especially when Kessler was nurturing what would become the East Coast scene, the kids who gravitated toward skateboarding were misfits and malcontents, the shy outcasts who’d been intimidated and sullied by the complex pressures of social interaction. Skateboarding gave them an identity and voice, and Kessler, by example, gave them the confidence to declare themselves to society.

What is surprising and beautiful to me too, is that I caught the piece featured on the front page, above the fold, in the upper right corner. Awesome that it was written by the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, a lifelong skateboarder.

I would love it if my child grew up to be a skateboarder one day.

Posted August 14, 2009 | ∞ | File under: link, nytimes, skateboarding

From “After the Great Recession: An Interview with President Obama”:

THE PRESIDENT: We will miss it in the sense that as a consequence of 25-year-olds getting million-dollar bonuses, they were willing to pay $100 for a steak dinner and that waiter was getting the kinds of tips that would make a college professor envious. And so some of the dynamic of the financial sector will have some trickle-down effects, particularly in a place like Manhattan.

But I actually think that there was always an unsustainable feel about what had happened on Wall Street over the last 10, 15 years, and it’s not that different from the unsustainable nature of what was happening during the dot-com boom, where people in Silicon Valley could make enormous sums of money, even though what they were peddling never really had any signs it would ever make a profit.

Posted April 29, 2009 | ∞ | File under: news, nytimes, obama