We fear that, if we actually could explain our dissertation and book projects to others in simple, but still precise, ways, we might face that most troubling question—“So what?”—without being able to come up with a remotely plausible answer.
The Accidental Elitist | Maximillian Alvarez 9:46am on March 5, 2017I reread my favorite books to make sure they’re still perfect, but rereading them wears away at their perfection.
The Big Short | New Republic 10:01pm on March 2, 2017The new division in politics is those who favor the current global hegemony and those who are against it. Right and left have been competing to become this new radical anti-status quo party. And so far, in both Europe and America, the right has won.
4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump – Medium 8:24am on March 1, 2017As for my writing voice in general, well, you get old and your language gets like your shoes or your kitchen gear—you don’t need fancy stuff any more. You’ve learned how to just say it.
Paris Review – Ursula K. Le Guin, The Art of Fiction No. 221 1:16pm on February 24, 2017A very good book tells me things I didn’t know I knew, yet I recognize them— yes, I see, yes, this is how the world is.
Paris Review – Ursula K. Le Guin, The Art of Fiction No. 221 1:14pm on February 24, 2017Take it. take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary.
Get out now 3:14pm on February 17, 2017The artist transcends the immediate. Transcends the here and now. Transcends the madness of the world. Transcends terrorism and war. The artist thinks, acts, performs music, and writes outside the framework that society has created. The artist may do no more than give us beauty, laughter, passion, surprise, and drama.
Howard Zinn — Artists in Times of War 10:54am on February 12, 2017What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it’s not Orwell, he warned, it’s Brave New World | Media | The Guardian 10:25pm on February 10, 2017It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of their lives. They should know about the formative events in human history, including the blunders we can hope not to repeat. They should understand the principles behind democratic governance and the rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of fiction and art as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on the human condition.
On top of this knowledge, a liberal education should make certain habits of rationality second nature. Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing and speech. They should appreciate that objective knowledge is a precious commodity, and know how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and unexamined conventional wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and statistically, avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human mind is vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence. They should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not stupid or evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery.
Steven Pinker on What a Broad Education Should Entail 9:22pm on February 8, 2017Remember that a large number of people become certified or degreed by furnishing other people’s answers to other people’s questions.
Self-University: The Price of Tuition Is the Desire to Learn: Your Degree Is a Better Life: Charles D. Hayes: 9780962197901: Amazon.com: Books 2:06pm on February 6, 2017A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.
Robert Frost Quote — Jeet Heer 10:05pm on February 2, 2017I shared the geography but not the world
It seemed they were establishing
With such unfussy self-possession, nor
The novels they were writing secretly
That somehow turned to ‘Mum’s old stuff’.
What we mourn for the dead is the loss of their hopes.
When John Berger Looked at Death – The New Yorker 1:03pm on January 18, 2017All paintings, Berger writes in “Brief as Photos,” “are prophecies of themselves being looked at”—they anticipate the viewers who will stand before them, long after they were made. That anticipation collapses distinct moments into one another, defying the absences that time creates.
When John Berger Looked at Death – The New Yorker 1:02pm on January 18, 2017I opened the front door, and rain was falling. I stood for a few minutes, lost in the beauty of it. Rain has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws a coloured blanket over previously invisible things; instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily falling rain creates continuity of acoustic experience.
This is an experience of great beauty. I feel as if the world, which is veiled until I touch it, has suddenly disclosed itself to me. I feel that the rain is gracious, that it has granted a gift to me, the gift of the world. I am no longer isolated, preoccupied with my thoughts, concentrating upon what I must do next. Instead of having to worry about where my body will be and what it will meet, I am presented with a totality, a world which speaks to me.
Touching the Rock: an Experience of Blindness — John M Hull 12:59pm on January 18, 2017Personal productivity presents itself as an antidote to busyness when it might better be understood as yet another form of busyness. And as such, it serves the same psychological role that busyness has always served: to keep us sufficiently distracted that we don’t have to ask ourselves potentially terrifying questions about how we are spending our days.
Why time management is ruining our lives | Oliver Burkeman | Technology | The Guardian 8:53pm on January 11, 2017It isn’t compulsory to earn more money, achieve more goals, realise our potential on every dimension, or fit more in. In a quiet moment in Seattle, Robert Levine, a social psychologist from California, quoted the environmentalist Edward Abbey: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Why time management is ruining our lives | Oliver Burkeman | Technology | The Guardian 8:43pm on January 11, 2017The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied… but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which as beggar is a reminder of nothing.
robertogreco 8:39pm on January 10, 2017Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.
Quote by Wendell Berry: “Do unto those downstream as you would have thos…” 6:54pm on January 10, 2017The human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we are good at it; we don’t need to be shown how or made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it.
Austin Kleon — The human animal is a learning animal; we like to… 10:07pm on January 7, 2017