Men have a low threshold for distraction. They are delicate. They are made nervous by having to do more than one thing at a time. ...They feel frazzled and angry if they have to answer three phone calls, and have a hard time settling back to work after the trauma. Women, on the other hand, develop the skill of doing many things at once. They tuck the phone in between their shoulders and their ears, hold a baby on one hip, stir a pot on the stove, all the while thinking about an idea for a story. They don't think it's unfair to have to do this. They think it's normal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to ...see you, and you can't go home again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while.... What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all don...e reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The automobile and the telephone are defeated as instruments of individualism by being applied to the needs of a mass society. The... automobile fulfills man's desire to move over the surface of the earth all by himself; but by becoming accessible to everybody, automobiles have paralyzed our streets. Individualism is possible only in plenty of empty space. Similarly, telephones block their own paths of individual communication when everybody is talking: the phone is too often "busy." Private enterprise cannot but strangle itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A woman spent all Christmas Day in a telephone box without ringing anyone. If someone comes to phone, she leaves the box, then res...umes her place afterwards. No one calls her either, but from a window in the street, someone watched her all day, no doubt since they had nothing better to do. The Christmas syndrome.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One difference between humans and computers lies in the relative strengths in their respective abilities to understand symbolic re...lationships and to learn facts. A computer can remember billions of facts with extreme precision, whereas we are hard pressed to remember more than a handful of phone numbers. On the other hand, we can read a novel and understand and manipulate the subtle relationships between the characters--something that computers have yet to demonstrate an ability to do. We often use our ability to understand and recall relationships as an aid in remembering simple things, as when we remember names by means of our past associations with each name and when we remember phone numbers in terms of geometric or numeric patterns they make. We thus use a very complex process to accomplish a very simple task, but it is the only process we have for the job. Computers have been weak in their ability to understand and process information that contains abstractions and complex webs of relationships, but they are improving.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Judge Ginsburg's selection should be a model--chosen on merit and not ideology, despite some naysaying, with little advance public...ity. Her treatment could begin to overturn a terrible precedent: that is, that the most terrifying sentence among the accomplished in America has become, "Honey--the White House is on the phone."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The connection between ad and sale, so direct in classified ads, or between ad and consumer contact, reasonably direct in the Janu...ary white sale ad, is very remote in the national consumer-goods ad. It is indirect in both space and time. The commercial for Coca-Cola or Alka Seltzer does not say how the customer can buy the advertised product; it does not typically announce a phone number to call or a place to shop. It takes for granted the consumer's shopping skills and it assumes the successful distribution of the product to retail stores. In time, it does not presume a quick response of customers to its efforts. It does not presume that the consumers it wants to reach will see any given showing of the ad or, seeing it, quickly respond by buying. It is a general reminder or reinforcer, not an urgent appeal to go out and buy. What the ad says or pictures, then, is obliged to be relatively placeless and relatively timeless. National consumer-goods advertising is highly abstracted and self-contained.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cap off and then what? The brains as... helpless as oysters in a pint container, the nerves like phone wires. God, take care, take infinite care with the tumor lest it spread like grease.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »