Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino 2:11pm on August 18, 2018A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino 2:10pm on August 18, 2018The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino 2:10pm on August 18, 2018Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully.
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang 2:08pm on August 18, 2018One day when my husband dropped him off, he heard a little girl stand up to a naysayer and shout, “Boys can like beautiful things, too!”
Imagining a Better Boyhood – The Atlantic 5:09pm on July 11, 2018In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.
There is no gulf between the stuff of daily life and the stuff of poetry, save that one is the raw material of the other…
Austin Kleon — There is no gulf between the stuff of daily life… 5:23pm on March 24, 2018How does a city wish to be? Look to the library. A library is the gift a city gives to itself.
The Good Room – Frank Chimero 5:03pm on February 16, 2018A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.
The best thing ever written about “work-life balance” 5:32pm on January 26, 2018It has always been curious to me that the first rule of improvisation is that you have to agree and the first rule of playwriting is that your characters have to disagree…
Austin Kleon — Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To… 7:46pm on January 23, 2018Instead, we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.
bag of moons on Twitter: “This is Cherríe Moraga, writing in *1979*! How have we not done better?! https://t.co/BX4alio2Zp” 5:08pm on January 18, 2018Fights about artistic tastes are nearly always about submerged social hostilities — putting down the audiences as much as the artists.
Why Rupi Kaur and Her Peers Are the Most Popular Poets in the World – The New York Times 10:15pm on December 23, 2017Billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk assume that a superintelligent AI will stop at nothing to achieve its goals because that’s the attitude they adopted.
Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear 10:06pm on December 23, 2017If you’ve ever watched a television cartoon, you know that kids don’t appreciate subtlety, though perhaps that’s because they’re not often offered it.
How Children Change the Way We See | The New Yorker 10:21am on December 3, 2017The website of Zaha Hadid Architects brags that the buildings for a new project are “iconic in both their scale and ambition… creating a unique twisted, intertwined silhouette that punctures the skyline.” But architects should not want to create things that are “iconic in scale” or to “puncture the skyline.” This is precisely the wrong thing to care about; it suggests the architect simply craves attention rather than the creation of perfect beauty and comfort. You’re not supposed to be puncturing! You’re supposed to be adding another delicate and perfect note to the skyline’s gorgeous symphony.
Current Affairs | Culture & Politics 8:58pm on November 2, 2017A shared egalitarian social undertaking, ideally, ought to be one of joy as well as struggle: in these desperate times, there are certainly more overwhelming imperatives than making the world beautiful to look at, but to decline to make the world more beautiful when it’s in your power to so, or to destroy some beautiful thing without need, is a grotesque perversion of the cooperative ideal.
Current Affairs | Culture & Politics 6:21pm on November 2, 2017To anyone who has spent time with an animal, the notion that they have no interior lives seems so counterintuitive, such an obdurate denial of the empathetically self-evident, as to be almost psychotic. I suspect that some of those same psychological mechanisms must have allowed people to rationalize owning other people.
A Man and His Cat – The New York Times 8:37pm on October 28, 2017In the end, the “Before” series embraces what we’d rather forget: every true love story is a story of bad timing.
Moment To Moment | The New Yorker 3:25pm on October 22, 2017Creative naturalism is the beautiful revenge of people who feel they’re being outrun by time and human opportunity: the real thing speeds past you, impervious, so you reconjure it on the screen, where you and everybody else can live in it forever.
Moment To Moment | The New Yorker 3:22pm on October 22, 2017