From Dahlia Lithwick’s excel­lent d’var torah arti­cle, “The Fifth Passover Question: Who’s going to lead the Seder?”

Passover is really the only Jewish hol­i­day in which most house­holds tap some layper­son to be pro­fes­sional clergy for a night, and—as my friend Lisa observed yesterday—it’s thus apt that this hol­i­day cel­e­brates one of the most reluc­tant lead­ers in all of bib­li­cal his­tory. Here is poor Moses, beg­ging to be relieved of the respon­si­bil­ity of Sherpa-ing his peo­ple from one dusty place to another—pleading unfit­ness, a speech imped­i­ment, and the absence of mean­ing­ful lead­er­ship qual­i­ties. And here we all are, thou­sands of years later, plead­ing unfit­ness, per­for­mance anx­i­ety, and the absence of mean­ing­ful lead­er­ship qualities.

Stop me if this is start­ing to sound familiar.

Maybe the real les­son of Passover is that nobody—in any generation—feels fit to lead a bunch of other peo­ple, but they do it any­way, because in the end some­body has to. Maybe it’s not just the story of the Exodus we are pass­ing down from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion, but the trick of lead­ing, when all you ever wanted to do was follow.

Hmm.

Dear flight attendant,

It’s called a “mixed drink” because it’s sup­posed to be served mixed. If I wanted bloody mary mix with a vodka floater, I would have ordered it that way.

Sincerely,

- josh

(cross-posted to my mostly-neglected upgrd​.com blog)

…since before it was cool to be a Mac guy:

This is what we believe.
Technology alone is not enough.
Faster, thin­ner, lighter…
Those are all good things.
But when tech­nol­ogy gets out of the way,
Everything becomes more delight­ful,
Even mag­i­cal.
That’s when you leap for­ward.
That’s when you end up with some­thing…
Like this.

That’s an even bet­ter man­i­festo than this one.

Update: There’s more.

If you ask a par­ent,
They might call it intu­itive.
If you ask a musi­cian,
They might call it inspir­ing.
To a doc­tor,
It’s ground­break­ing.
To a CEO,
It’s pow­er­ful.
To a teacher,
It’s the future.
If you ask a child,
She might call it magic.
And if you asked us…
We’d say it’s just get­ting started.