Last night Philip Glass told this story about how John Cage once emptied the house during a performance. Cage had gotten it into his head to do a spoken performance where he made a cut-up poem out of syllables or something? Man, it sounds like the worst thing ever, just being trapped in a room with John Cage endlessly making vowel noises at you, and so he achieved a 100% audience walkout. Glass' point was that there has to be a place to try and make things and achieve failure along the way (typical Buddhist!) and he was telling this story because this was at the 40th anniversary dinner for The Kitchen, which to its great credit still provides a space for young creative people in New York City to experience flop sweats. Then Sina Najafi, the editor of Cabinet magazine, told me a related story about Mierle Ukeles, which is at this point, with me telling you, really is something of a game of telephone and may range in accuracy anywhere from "apocryphal" to "entirely accurate," the failures being mine. READ MORE

I used to write for a tech blog that got a hundred pitches for no-name apps and companies every day. Sure, some of these emails would start with "Dear Sir/Madam" and continue: "We developed an innovative concept: a set of two connected lamps called Ping!" But most of the pitches I saw were from tech entrepreneurs pitching all the wonderful social networks, web sites and productivity tools you've never heard of. Some even sounded interesting, even if the sender was usually either insecure and desperate (“It would great if you could give us some exposure, because we don’t have any investors”) or delusional and PUMPED (“KillerStartups.com called us ‘Twitter meets Groupon!’”) The thing would vanish regardless of whether we wrote about it, so you can scratch “insufficient enthusiasm in tech blogosphere?” off that sticky note you stuck to the mirror during your post-failure introspection. So why do so many startups fail so hard? Students of failure, I have found the answers, exquisite in detail, right here on the Internet! READ MORE

"The Las Vegas Monorail Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Wednesday." Oh noes, why? It has only been in business since 2004! "Because the train's popularity was overestimated, the company has not paid off the $650 million in construction and start-up costs.... Monorail representatives told the state they anticipated about 20 million passengers a year who would pay a fee of $2.50 per trip. The monorail's Web site says it has carried 27 million passengers in five years." MONORAIL!

So late last week, I learned that I failed the bar exam. I don't remember a ton from those two days in July. Which isn't too surprising, because apparently (we now know) I wasn't remembering much during those days either. I do remember, however, that at lunchtime thousands of future lawyers poured out of the Buffalo Convention Center and onto Niagara Square. There were more people outside in downtown Buffalo those two days than I could ever before remember. And they were from downstate too, and they were eating outside in the summertime just like they do in New York City. Even though I was failing a bar exam at the time, I do remember thinking that it was kind of neat that we were all gathered this way. READ MORE