• "Often, on a Friday or Saturday night in the cottage on the tiny Orkney island where I lived alone for two winters, I wanted to be on a crowded dance floor in small clothes with sweat running down my back. I felt like an old woman before my time, beside the fire with a blanket over my knees, and missed the throb of the city and of nightlife. Lately, I’ve learned the German word “Fernweh” (literally, “distance pain”) which describes the feeling of wanting to be somewhere else, like a reverse homesickness (“Heimweh”), a longing for a place that isn’t where you are. I was struck by the word because I know how it is to be uneasy and never quite at home." Amy Liptrot, in Berghain.
  • "…your equivalent to a computer looking up data from a chip is remembering a fact from your own brain. Your equivalent to a computer looking up data from a disk is fetching that fact from Pluto. Computers live in a world of commonplace interactions not the size of a house, like us, but the Solar System. On their own terms, they are long, long lived, and vast."
  • "It's funny, but from the 1890s and until the First World War, photographers prized lenses for their unsharpness: when artists found the lenses that gave them just the right degree and quality of unsharpness, they treasured them like jewels. This attitude survived until the 1940s among portrait photographers. The unsharpness of their lenses of choice was considered by many portraitists an indivisible part of their aesthetic signature." Mike Johnston on the taste for sharpness of portrait lenses.