If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.

Eric Schmidt’s career advice to Sheryl Sandberg

“I’m totally numb,“ Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys said bluntly, in his only interview following the death on May 4th of his bandmate Adam Yauch. Sitting in the New York office of the Beasties’ publicist, only 10 days after Yauch’s passing, Horovitz fondly recalled their lifetime together in punk, hip-hop and hijinks. He also struggled to describe his feelings after his friend’s death and admitted that healing was slow in coming. "My wife is like, ‘I want to make sure you’re getting it out.’ But then I’m walking the dog and I’ll start crying on the street.” Horovitz shook his head wearily. “It’s pretty fucking crazy.”

An idea worth at least 40 nanoKardashians of your attention

An idea worth at least 40 nanoKardashians of your attention

Steve Jobs On The Payoff Of A Great Employee

Steve Jobs On The Payoff Of A Great Employee

U.S. Fares Badly in Early Births in Global Study

From The New York Times:

Although American hospitals excel at saving premature infants, the United States is similar to developing countries in the percentage of mothers who give birth before their children are due, the study’s chief author noted. It does worse than any Western European country and considerably worse than Japan or the Scandinavian countries.

You hear a lot of people, especially on the right, say that the United States has the best health care in the world. I think they’re often confusing having the best doctors and hospitals, which we do have, with the best health care, which we most definitely do not.

But for a few brief years, Lyndon Johnson, once a fairly conventional Southern Democrat, constrained by his constituents and his overriding hunger for power, rose above his political past and personal limitations, to embrace and promote his boyhood dreams of opportunity and equality for all Americans. After all the years of striving for power, once he had it, he said to the American people, “I’ll let you in on a secret — I mean to use it.” And use it he did to pass the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the open housing law, the antipoverty legislation, Medicare and Medicaid, Head Start and much more.

He knew what the presidency was for: to get to people — to members of Congress, often with tricks up his sleeve; to the American people, by wearing his heart on his sleeve.

Even when we parted company over the Vietnam War, I never hated L.B.J. the way many young people of my generation came to. I couldn’t. What he did to advance civil rights and equal opportunity was too important. I remain grateful to him. L.B.J. got to me, and after all these years, he still does. With this fascinating and meticulous account of how and why he did it, Robert Caro has once again done America a great service.

Bill Clinton, reviewing The Passage of Power, the next volume in Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson.