ribbonfarm
Sons of the Soil, Migrants, and Civil War,
We read an interesting paper today (ht Sachin Benny with an assist from ChatGPT) in the Yak...
8 months ago
We read an interesting paper today (ht Sachin Benny with an assist from ChatGPT) in the Yak Collective weekly governance study group (Fridays at 9 AM Pacific). Sons of the Soil, Migrants, and Civil War, by James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin (World Development, V 39, No. 2,...
Josh Thompson
Who inspires you, and is still alive?
There are lots of dead people that we look up to. But people that are alive, and not world-wide...
over a year ago
There are lots of dead people that we look up to. But people that are alive, and not world-wide famous are a bit more knowable. Some of them will even reply to tweets you send them!
So, here are a few people that I follow and have received TONS of amazing wisdom from. (I...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Taking Your Time, Angel of Death'
I like plain
speaking when it comes to death. Not needlessly harsh but direct and above all...
a month ago
I like plain
speaking when it comes to death. Not needlessly harsh but direct and above all unvarnished,
no flowers, closer to a coroner’s report than a greeting card. A well-meaning
reader has sent belated condolences for my brother’s death in August without
once using any of...
Anecdotal Evidence
'I Hope This Explanation Is Wrong'
One of life’s
unsolved puzzles, especially for readers and writers: How can certain arrangements
of...
4 months ago
One of life’s
unsolved puzzles, especially for readers and writers: How can certain arrangements
of words encountered in childhood or youth, and revisited regularly for a
lifetime, still inspire delight, while others, in effect, evaporate before we
hear them? In the latter...
The Marginalian
The Universe in Verse Book
"We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and...
8 months ago
"We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other. At the crossing point of the two we may find a way of clarifying our experience and of sanctifying it."
Anecdotal Evidence
'Georgeade as a Summer Drink'
While
looking for something else I blundered on an Anglo-American writer and cartoonist
new to me...
a year ago
While
looking for something else I blundered on an Anglo-American writer and cartoonist
new to me whose name and one-time popularity long ago evaporated: Oliver Herford (1860-1935), author, co-author and illustrator of more than sixty books
for adults and children. There was a...
The Marginalian
How We Become Ourselves: Erik Erikson’s 8 Stages of Human Development
It never ceases to stagger that some stroke of chance in the early history of the universe set into...
3 months ago
It never ceases to stagger that some stroke of chance in the early history of the universe set into motion the Rube Goldberg machine of events that turned atoms born in the first stars into you — into this temporary clump of borrowed stardust that, for the brief interlude between...
The Marginalian
The Paradise Notebooks: A Poet and a Geologist’s Love Letter to Life Lensed Through a Mountain
"Each world bears all the worlds we might find within it. If you understand one outcropping of...
8 months ago
"Each world bears all the worlds we might find within it. If you understand one outcropping of stone, or one wildflower, or one hummingbird — if we see our way along the tracery of cause and effect, the mystery of change and recreation — then we are led to everything we see, and...
The Marginalian
How the Sea Came to Be: An Illustrated Singsong Celebration of the Evolution of Life
“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses,” Rachel Carson wrote in...
a year ago
“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses,” Rachel Carson wrote in the pioneering 1937 essay that invited the human imagination into the science and splendor of the marine world for the first time — a world then more mysterious than the Moon, a...
Escaping Flatland
On having more interesting ideas
“To write well, all you have to do is cultivate your mind and then write what you see.” When I talk...
7 months ago
“To write well, all you have to do is cultivate your mind and then write what you see.” When I talk to people who have worked with their ideas seriously for 10+ years, it feels like I can throw any topic on them and they’ll have an interesting idea, or if not an idea so at least...
Josh Thompson
First pass with Elixir/Phoenix
I’m digging into Elixir and Phoenix. I’m working through this tutorial to cloning Slack.
The...
over a year ago
I’m digging into Elixir and Phoenix. I’m working through this tutorial to cloning Slack.
The tutorial author says
At the time of writing, I have ~1 week experience with Phoenix. Similar to Rubber Ducky Debugging, I am writing this blog post to force myself to think differently...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Personal Affections'
Only
recently have I learned of the entrenched snobbery in certain quarters against anthologies.
It...
2 months ago
Only
recently have I learned of the entrenched snobbery in certain quarters against anthologies.
It seems to be rooted in the conviction that readers ought to read writers in
their original volumes, not someone’s curated selection, or something like
that. In common with most...
ribbonfarm
Ribbonfarm is Retiring
After several years of keeping it going in semi-retired, keep-the-lights-on (KTLO) mode, I’ve...
2 months ago
After several years of keeping it going in semi-retired, keep-the-lights-on (KTLO) mode, I’ve decided to officially fully retire this blog. The ribbonfarm.com domain and all links will remain active, but there will be no new content after November 13th, 2024, which happens to be...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Brief, Dry, Almost Colorless Account '
The Polish
writer Gustaw Herling-Grudziński (1919-2000) --
Gulag survivor, co-founder of Kultura
and...
a year ago
The Polish
writer Gustaw Herling-Grudziński (1919-2000) --
Gulag survivor, co-founder of Kultura
and author of A World Apart: Imprisonment
in a Soviet Labor Camp During World War II (1951) – has sent me back to
Varlam Shalamov and his Kolyma stories. Herling-Grudziński in 1971...
The Marginalian
Kafka’s Creative Block and the Four Psychological Hindrances That Keep the Talented from Manifesting...
The most paradoxical thing about creative work is that it is both a way in and a way out, that it...
2 months ago
The most paradoxical thing about creative work is that it is both a way in and a way out, that it plunges you into the depths of your being and at the same time takes you out of yourself. Writing is the best instrument I have for metabolizing my experience and clarifying my own...
Anecdotal Evidence
'In Constant Repair'
“In the streets I saw two men meet after a long separation, it
was plain. They came forward with a...
3 months ago
“In the streets I saw two men meet after a long separation, it
was plain. They came forward with a little run and LEAPED at each other’s
hands. You never saw such bright eyes as they both had. It put one in a good
humour to see it.”
Yet again I’ve heard the small-minded slur that...
Josh Thompson
Trader Joe's Parking Lot
Hey Trader Joe’s,
This is a bit of an open letter, inspired by a recent visit to the local Trader...
a year ago
Hey Trader Joe’s,
This is a bit of an open letter, inspired by a recent visit to the local Trader Joe’s. I just moved to this part of Denver, and now for the first time am living within like a 3 minute scoot of a Trader Joe’s.
I know that some people like to complain about...
Anecdotal Evidence
Kenneth C. Kurp 1955-2024
My brother died Saturday afternoon in the hospice in Cleveland, Ohio where he spent the last two...
4 months ago
My brother died Saturday afternoon in the hospice in Cleveland, Ohio where he spent the last two weeks of his life. He was age sixty-nine. I was with him as was his son, Abraham Kurp. I watched as his eyes closed and he stopped breathing. There was another sense, too, of a sudden...
Anecdotal Evidence
'There Is Brio Enough Here'
A word I’ve always liked is brio. It sounds like the name of a commercial product, floor wax or
an...
a year ago
A word I’ve always liked is brio. It sounds like the name of a commercial product, floor wax or
an energy drink. We have an Italian restaurant in Houston called Brio. My
Italian dictionary translates it as “zest” and the OED gives “liveliness, vivacity, ‘go.’” It
suggests...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The War Had Won'
“The war had
taken his innocence and replaced it with something else. That something – ‘the
destined...
a year ago
“The war had
taken his innocence and replaced it with something else. That something – ‘the
destined anguish’ - revealed itself gradually and became a presence in his
poetry for the rest of his life.”
Margi
Blunden, speaking in 2014, is remembering her father, the poet and Great...
The Marginalian
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating: An Uncommon Meditation on Presence and the Aperture of Wonder
"Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the...
a year ago
"Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility."
The Marginalian
John Gardner on the Key to Self-Renewal Across Life and the Art of Making Rather Than Finding...
"The potentialities you develop to the full come as the result of an interplay between you and...
7 months ago
"The potentialities you develop to the full come as the result of an interplay between you and life's challenges."
Ben Borgers
Donating forks to the dining hall
7 months ago
The Marginalian
How to Live a Miraculous Life: Brian Doyle on Love, Humility, and the Quiet Grace of the Possible
Suppose we agree that we are here to love anyway — to love even though the work is almost unbearably...
a month ago
Suppose we agree that we are here to love anyway — to love even though the work is almost unbearably difficult, even though we know that everything alive is dying, that everything beautiful is perishable, that everything we love will eventually be taken from us by one form of...
Josh Thompson
2017 In Review & Thoughts on 2018
Note: this “annual review” covers three topics. Click on one to skip to it:
Looking back on...
over a year ago
Note: this “annual review” covers three topics. Click on one to skip to it:
Looking back on 2017
thoughts on going into 2018
book recommendations from the 79 books I read last year
I’ve got mixed feelings on annual reviews. I steadfastly refuse to set New Years’ resolutions, and...
Wuthering...
You drool from it. You are happy. - Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit
Finally, I have finished Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout
de la nuit (1932), known in English...
4 months ago
Finally, I have finished Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout
de la nuit (1932), known in English as Journey to the End of Night. That “end of night” is death. The existence of death makes everything
hateful and nullifies the value of anything else. I gotta say that the...
Ben Borgers
Class Council: “Brutally Honest”
over a year ago
Josh Thompson
Paths In Which I Am Interested
this is still in draft status
this page serves as a placeholder for various paths I’m interested...
6 months ago
this is still in draft status
this page serves as a placeholder for various paths I’m interested in.
I hope to bring attention to “linear parks”, or a park that functions more in size and shape to a street, crossing blocks of distance, but maintaining park vibes throughout.
Path...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Very Quietly, an Aside'
Reporters
and their editors have always fetishized what’s known in the trade as the lede – the...
11 months ago
Reporters
and their editors have always fetishized what’s known in the trade as the lede – the opening sentence or paragraph
of a news story. The idea is to quickly grab the reader’s attention and, with
luck, hold on to it. Subtlety is discouraged in journalism. There’s much...
sbensu
Lieutenants are the limiting reagent
Why don't software companies ship more products? Why do they move more slowly as they grow? What do...
a year ago
Why don't software companies ship more products? Why do they move more slowly as they grow? What do we mean when we say "this company lacks focus"?
This Space
The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard
I began reading The Morning Star without any prior knowledge of the contents, just as I had begun...
over a year ago
I began reading The Morning Star without any prior knowledge of the contents, just as I had begun reading every other book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s since receiving an ARC of the first volume of My Struggle long before he shone above us like the morning star in this novel. This...
The Marginalian
The Shape of Wonder: N.J. Berrill on the Universe, the Deepest Meaning of Beauty, and the Highest...
"We, each of us, you and I, exhibit more of the true nature of the universe than any dead Saturn or...
3 months ago
"We, each of us, you and I, exhibit more of the true nature of the universe than any dead Saturn or Jupiter."
Ben Borgers
College CS Classes Are Tragically Dull
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Not Simply Bad Prose'
“It is not simply
bad prose—a tank is not a badly constructed automobile.”
Gilbert
Highet (1906-78)...
11 months ago
“It is not simply
bad prose—a tank is not a badly constructed automobile.”
Gilbert
Highet (1906-78) was a Scottish-born, Oxford-educated American classicist who
taught at Columbia for thirty-three years and managed to become a bona fide pop-culture
“celebrity.” In 1952 he was...
The Elysian
Can we create a wise & enlightened citizenry?
We'll need to address cognitive biases if we want to reach Plato's ideal.
8 months ago
We'll need to address cognitive biases if we want to reach Plato's ideal.
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Pure Essay'
“A good deal
that he wrote took the form of the ‘pure’ essay, written, as Lord David Cecil
says,...
7 months ago
“A good deal
that he wrote took the form of the ‘pure’ essay, written, as Lord David Cecil
says, ‘not to instruct or edify but only to produce aesthetic satisfaction.’ I
do not know why it should be so, but today the ‘pure’ essay is a literary genre
to which no reader under sixty...
Josh Thompson
Things You Can't Do from Behind a Computer, pt. 1
Meet people.
Over the last nine or ten months, I can clearly remember a handful of conversations I...
over a year ago
Meet people.
Over the last nine or ten months, I can clearly remember a handful of conversations I had. I initiated each conversation with someone that I wanted to learn from. Most I had some prior relationship with (I.E. I had met them, or I knew someone who knew them). This was...
Wuthering...
What has happened to me may well be a good thing - the death of Socrates
Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo,
the extended version of the death of Socrates.
These texts,...
a year ago
Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo,
the extended version of the death of Socrates.
These texts, especially the last three, are a large part of the fame of
Socrates, the reason he is an exemplar of the wise man to this day. He asked annoying questions, he rejected
material...
The Marginalian
Louise Erdrich on the Deepest Meaning of Resistance
"Resist loss of the miraculous by lowering your standards for what constitutes a miracle. It is all...
a month ago
"Resist loss of the miraculous by lowering your standards for what constitutes a miracle. It is all a fucking miracle."
The Marginalian
Marie Howe’s Stunning Hymn of Humanity, Animated
"It began as an almost inaudible hum..."
9 months ago
"It began as an almost inaudible hum..."
Anecdotal Evidence
'Crisply, Pithily, and, Very Often, Cruelly'
Tom Disch on
Turner Cassity: “A poet so
consistently epigrammatic can be dismissed, by those...
6 months ago
Tom Disch on
Turner Cassity: “A poet so
consistently epigrammatic can be dismissed, by those incapable themselves of
wit, as unserious, as though to be serious one must always be in a fog. Cassity
never writes a poem without knowing exactly what he means to say—crisply,
pithily,...
The American Scholar
“I Have Had My Vision”
Three prompts
The post “I Have Had My Vision” appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
Three prompts
The post “I Have Had My Vision” appeared first on The American Scholar.
Escaping Flatland
A greeting
They think it was a monk at the Monastery of St Alban in Trier, present-day Germany. On Christmas...
a year ago
They think it was a monk at the Monastery of St Alban in Trier, present-day Germany. On Christmas day, sometime in the 1570s, he was out walking when he came upon a rose that had, in the blistering cold, put forth a flower. It was a hellebore, a winter rose. Moved by the...
Steven Scrawls
Stone Hands Reaching
Stone Hands Reaching
I’m told the statue is right in front of me, so I reach out and find
myself...
6 months ago
Stone Hands Reaching
I’m told the statue is right in front of me, so I reach out and find
myself touching a stone forearm. It’s cold, of course, and it’s coarser
than skin, but tracing along the arms is enough to bring back memories
of being comforted, of being held, when I was a...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Last of the Anglo-Saxon Poets'
“Hooray for
Christmas, as Bessie Smith calls rather cautiously on one of her tracks, and if
all...
a year ago
“Hooray for
Christmas, as Bessie Smith calls rather cautiously on one of her tracks, and if
all you’re your friends like jazz it will present no problem.”
It’s
December 14, 1963, and Philip Larkin is reviewing an assortment of releases for
the Daily Telegraph in time for...
Anecdotal Evidence
'At Least When Practised By a Master'
I know
several industrious readers who read nothing but novels, not even short stories
and certainly...
a year ago
I know
several industrious readers who read nothing but novels, not even short stories
and certainly not biographies, poetry or other forms of nonfiction. Some are
devoted to genre fiction – mysteries, science fiction – and at least one sticks
to the “classics” -- Austen and...
Ben Borgers
Doubly Parasocial Relationships
over a year ago
Josh Thompson
Setting up for 'SQL Queries for Mere Mortals'
This tweet is from… a while ago. Turns out I didn’t dig into this book, because the pace at Turing...
over a year ago
This tweet is from… a while ago. Turns out I didn’t dig into this book, because the pace at Turing didn’t allow for a few weeks of thinking just about SQL.
yes, I'm digging into sql to better my AR skills, and ultimately whatever I need to use next. pic.twitter.com/UhjyGKv1FQ
—...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Hallmark of What Is Truly Priceless'
“. . . what
literature is really about: our very survival as human beings.”
A bit melodramatic,
no?...
10 months ago
“. . . what
literature is really about: our very survival as human beings.”
A bit melodramatic,
no? Grandiose? Perhaps expressed by a writer worried about sales or a reader boosting
his self-esteem? Could be. But there’s something to it. Maybe it amounts to
more than...
The Marginalian
The Work of Wonder: Phillip Glass on Art, Science, and the Most Important Quality of a Visionary
Epoch after epoch, we humans have tried to raise ourselves above other animals with distinctions...
a year ago
Epoch after epoch, we humans have tried to raise ourselves above other animals with distinctions that have turned out false — consciousness is not ours alone, nor is grief, nor is play. If there is anything singular about us, it is our capacity to be wonder-smitten by the world...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Daring to His Own Disadvantage'
“The words
poetic and fatuous ought not to be synonyms; and to encounter a mind which is
against...
5 months ago
“The words
poetic and fatuous ought not to be synonyms; and to encounter a mind which is
against mock society, mock poetry, mock justice, mock spirituality—against any form of enslavement—is a benefit.”
Marianne
Moore could be a soft touch when it came to reviewing. She could...
Josh Thompson
Accomplishments and Achievements
We’re encouraged to accomplish and achieve, yes? From birth, we pass milestones. Generally these...
over a year ago
We’re encouraged to accomplish and achieve, yes? From birth, we pass milestones. Generally these milestones grow in complexity as we add to our abilities - it’s been a while since I’ve been rewarded for not wetting myself - but they are usually on par with our abilities.
For...
The Marginalian
The Sunflower and the Soul: Wendell Berry on the Collaborative Nature of the Universe and the Cure...
"We are not the authors of ourselves. That we are not is a religious perception, but it is also a...
6 months ago
"We are not the authors of ourselves. That we are not is a religious perception, but it is also a biological and a social one. Each of us has had many authors, and each of us is engaged, for better or worse, in that same authorship. We could say that the human race is a great...
The Marginalian
Sentimentality and Being Mortal: Poet Mark Doty on the Passionate Fragility of Our Attachments
How beautiful and unbearable that only one of each exists — each lover, each child, each dog; that...
11 months ago
How beautiful and unbearable that only one of each exists — each lover, each child, each dog; that this particular chance-constellation of atoms has never before existed and will never again recur in the history of the universe. The fact of each such singularity is a wonder...
Astral Codex Ten
Indulge Your Internet Addiction By Reading About Internet Addiction
...
4 weeks ago
Escaping Flatland
Thoughts on agency
If anyone is in the mood for a video call, I would like to get a few of you together on Saturday at...
6 months ago
If anyone is in the mood for a video call, I would like to get a few of you together on Saturday at 6 pm CET (9 am PST). Like last time, I’ll prepare a few questions (probably relating to today’s post since that is top of mind) but mostly we’ll just talk about whatever comes up....
The Marginalian
How to Be a Living Poem: Lucille Clifton on the Balance of Intellect and Intuition in Creative Work...
"I didn’t graduate from college, which isn’t necessary to be a poet. It is only necessary to be...
a year ago
"I didn’t graduate from college, which isn’t necessary to be a poet. It is only necessary to be interested in humans and to be in touch with yourself as a human."
Josh Thompson
Learning Spanish: Conversation connectors
I’m learning Spanish right now,
as I’ve mentioned. The bad news is I’ve been in some state...
over a year ago
I’m learning Spanish right now,
as I’ve mentioned. The bad news is I’ve been in some state of
learning spanish for the better part of the last 15 years. My mom’s parents came here from Paraguay, and so she and her siblings are all native Spanish speakers, plus their spouses....
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Magnetism, an Ardor, a Refusal to Be False'
“It’s
against his nature to be a critic—he is too grateful.”
That’s from one
of Elias Canetti’s...
2 months ago
“It’s
against his nature to be a critic—he is too grateful.”
That’s from one
of Elias Canetti’s notebooks, collected in Notes
from Hampstead (trans. John Hargraves, 1998). While I admire the work of a
handful of critics – Dryden, Johnson, Winters, Cunningham, a few others –...
Josh Thompson
Mentors and Attitude
Having a mentor is equal parts “having a mentor” and “being one who can be mentored”. If I am too...
over a year ago
Having a mentor is equal parts “having a mentor” and “being one who can be mentored”. If I am too thick-headed to evaluate things that someone tells me and figure out how to apply that to my life, both of us are wasting our time.
Having a mentor is life-changing because you have...
sbensu
Pricing APIs
Lessons from AWS S3 and others on how to price APIs.
11 months ago
Lessons from AWS S3 and others on how to price APIs.
The American Scholar
In the Mushroom
True foraging isn’t the domain of the weekend warrior; it’s serious, serious business
The post In...
a month ago
True foraging isn’t the domain of the weekend warrior; it’s serious, serious business
The post In the Mushroom appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
Island Royalty
A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary
The post Island Royalty appeared first on The American...
a month ago
A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary
The post Island Royalty appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Neither Angels Nor Devils'
A favorite
story about Dr. Johnson reminded me of something the late critic John Simon had
written...
10 months ago
A favorite
story about Dr. Johnson reminded me of something the late critic John Simon had
written on his blog five years ago. In a post titled “Curse Words,” abbreviated
by Simon throughout as “CW,” he reviews profanity as used in various settings
and languages, including Croat,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'What Is Called an Amateur'
I recently encountered
a choice example of academic snobbery, the lording of a tenured professor...
a year ago
I recently encountered
a choice example of academic snobbery, the lording of a tenured professor over lecturers,
adjuncts and even “mere assistant professors.” Normally the perpetrator tries
to disguise his snottiness or treat it as a joke but in this case the prima
donna was...
Anecdotal Evidence
'We Find It Hard to Read Great Books at All'
A young reader
tells me he is unable to read most books written before “about the middle of the
60s....
8 months ago
A young reader
tells me he is unable to read most books written before “about the middle of the
60s. I like Vonnegut. A lot of the stuff before that is like a foreign language
to me.” I’m reminded of an English professor who told me more than half a century ago that
most of her...
Anecdotal Evidence
'I Am Thinking This May Be My Last Summer'
I never
encountered the name Keith Douglas in school. We knew some of the English poets
of the first...
7 months ago
I never
encountered the name Keith Douglas in school. We knew some of the English poets
of the first war – Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon – but the
second seemed a blank. On my own, I learned of the Americans – Karl Shapiro,
Anthony Hecht, Howard Nemerov. Only...
Ben Borgers
Half a Slice of Apple Pie
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Smart Dinner Jacket and Patent Leather Pumps'
I was never
strictly a crime reporter but several times I covered the cops-and-courts beat,
which...
a year ago
I was never
strictly a crime reporter but several times I covered the cops-and-courts beat,
which was more genteel and less interesting than it sounds. Reading the police
blotter each morning or scanning new filings in the county clerk’s office left this
reporter feeling less...
The American Scholar
A Story for Christmas
The post A Story for Christmas appeared first on The American Scholar.
a week ago
The post A Story for Christmas appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
The Other Significant Others: Living and Loving Outside the Confines of Conventional Friendship and...
"While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by...
10 months ago
"While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them."
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Top Thing of the World'
John Keats’
meditation on a reader’s paradise:
“I had an
idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant...
2 months ago
John Keats’
meditation on a reader’s paradise:
“I had an
idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner. Let him on a
certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him
wander with it, and muse upon it and reflect from it, and dream...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Still to Suruiue in My Immortall Song'
Many of the best
things in life, so long as they persist, are accompanied by a shadow of...
a week ago
Many of the best
things in life, so long as they persist, are accompanied by a shadow of their
disappearance. If fortunate, we learn this lesson early. Their transitoriness
becomes part of their charm, whether a cat, a garden or a brother. We are
grateful and enjoy them...
Josh Thompson
Do Not Work in Isolation
I fear criticism. I don’t have nightmares about it, and I’m not (too) crippled by a desire to avoid...
over a year ago
I fear criticism. I don’t have nightmares about it, and I’m not (too) crippled by a desire to avoid it, but I absolutely don’t like criticism, or being disappointing, or any of those things.
If my ego were making all decisions, I would move even slower than I do today into “new”...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Although Too Many Readers Have Forgotten'
My education
continues. Here is “Artillery” (Hazards,
1930) by the English poet Wilfrid Wilson...
a month ago
My education
continues. Here is “Artillery” (Hazards,
1930) by the English poet Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, previously unknown to me:
“All night I
sat beside the bed
And watched
that senseless moaning head
Backwards
and forwards toss and toss,
When
suddenly he sat upright
And...
Josh Thompson
The advantage of low friction goals
If you have a project, make it easy to take small steps.
I’m trying to publish something every day...
over a year ago
If you have a project, make it easy to take small steps.
I’m trying to publish something every day for a month.
Normally, I would sit down at my computer, open a text editor, write
something, the copy it into Squarespace, and customize the post from there.
“Customization”...
Escaping Flatland
A summary of what I wrote in 2024
A man sets out to draw the world.
3 weeks ago
A man sets out to draw the world.
The Marginalian
Make Yourself a Seer: The Teenage Arthur Rimbaud on How to Be a Poet and a Prophet of Possibility
"The day of a single universal language will dawn!... This language will be of the soul, for the...
a year ago
"The day of a single universal language will dawn!... This language will be of the soul, for the soul, encompassing everything, scents, sounds, colors, one thought mounting another."
Anecdotal Evidence
'Half the Pleasure of Reading New Books'
“[M]ost
American boys are hurried into active life so early, that even the few who have
the...
a year ago
“[M]ost
American boys are hurried into active life so early, that even the few who have
the possibility of developing literary taste have scarcely time to do so. Unless
they read the great English classics in high school and in college, they never
find time to read them.”
In...
Anecdotal Evidence
'To Express It As Nearly As I Can'
Over the
weekend I remembered a blog I visited fairly often during my early ventures
into the...
a month ago
Over the
weekend I remembered a blog I visited fairly often during my early ventures
into the blogosphere. This would be around 2006, the year I launched Anecdotal
Evidence. The proprietor and I exchanged a few emails. He was a reader though
his blog was not exclusively devoted...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Tomorrow I Propose to Regulate My Room'
A reader in Columbus,
Ohio reports a “Samuel Johnson sighting in Ogden Nash.” In the December...
2 weeks ago
A reader in Columbus,
Ohio reports a “Samuel Johnson sighting in Ogden Nash.” In the December 21,
1968 issue of The New Yorker he found
the poem “Is There a Dr. Johnson in the House.” It’s a typical irregularly lined,
jokily rhymed production by Nash that begins:
“Do you...
This Space
Kafka's great fire
The centenary of Kafka's death was marked twelve years late. His diary records it in September...
6 months ago
The centenary of Kafka's death was marked twelve years late. His diary records it in September 1912:
This story, The Judgment, I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd-23rd, from ten o'clock at night to six o'clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Dead Wall or a Thick Mist'
Reading occasionally reveals a pleasing convergence of thought between one writer, separated by...
a year ago
Reading occasionally reveals a pleasing convergence of thought between one writer, separated by centuries
and continents, and another. The happy reader is their ambassador and beneficiary.
I was again reading Nabokov’s brief, death-haunted novel from 1972, Transparent Things. Its...
The Marginalian
The Galapagos and the Meaning of Life: A Young Woman’s Bittersweet Experiment in Inner Freedom
“We may think we are domesticated but we are not,” Jay Griffiths wrote in her homily on not wasting...
2 months ago
“We may think we are domesticated but we are not,” Jay Griffiths wrote in her homily on not wasting our wildness, insisting on the “primal allegiance” the human spirit has to the wild. A decade after artist Rockwell Kent headed to a remote Alaskan island “to stand face to face...
Josh Thompson
The Complete Guide to Rails Performance: basic setup
You know the feeling.
You are excited to start a guide or a tutorial. You buy it, crack it open, and...
over a year ago
You know the feeling.
You are excited to start a guide or a tutorial. You buy it, crack it open, and start working through the environment setup.
Then… something goes wrong. Next thing you know, you’ve spent two three too many hours debugging random crap, and you’re not even done...
The American Scholar
The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend
How a classic paean to the honest virtues of a Maine fisherman obscured several ugly truths
The...
a month ago
How a classic paean to the honest virtues of a Maine fisherman obscured several ugly truths
The post The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend appeared first on The American Scholar.
Ben Borgers
I want to use all of my ridiculously many meal swipes
over a year ago
sbensu
The Perfectionists (book)
A great book that covers the ideas and people behind modern industry.
5 months ago
A great book that covers the ideas and people behind modern industry.
The Elysian
My TEDx talk about the future of fiction
And publishing.
6 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Things That Pass'
Among the
books and magazines for sale in our neighborhood library I found the Winter 1985 issue of...
8 months ago
Among the
books and magazines for sale in our neighborhood library I found the Winter 1985 issue of The American Scholar, which
I bought for a quarter. Joseph Epstein was still the editor. On Page 97 is a
poem, “Old
Man Sitting in a Shopping Mall,” by a writer whose name was...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Kind of Masochism Afoot in Modern Aesthetics'
“Is there a
kind of masochism afoot in modern aesthetics whereby the leaden and the dull
acquire...
5 months ago
“Is there a
kind of masochism afoot in modern aesthetics whereby the leaden and the dull
acquire significance simply because the beaten spirit would seem to claim more
seriousness than a more robust struggle with the exigencies of things?”
This
elegantly crafted question, at...
Escaping Flatland
Pseudonyms lets you practice agency
I don’t think I would have become a writer if it wasn’t for the internet forums of the early 2000s.
4 months ago
I don’t think I would have become a writer if it wasn’t for the internet forums of the early 2000s.
This Space
39 Books in one
For anyone interested (you there in the phone box), here's a PDF of the 39 Books series.
39 Books:...
7 months ago
For anyone interested (you there in the phone box), here's a PDF of the 39 Books series.
39 Books: PDF
As the introduction explained, the books were chosen from those on my books-read lists that I hadn't written about before. I thought it might be instructive to contrast the...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Sacrifice and Doom'
Scholars of
Russian literature tell us the edition of Anton Chekhov’s letters published
between 1944...
2 months ago
Scholars of
Russian literature tell us the edition of Anton Chekhov’s letters published
between 1944 and 1951 was heavily censored by Soviet editors, filled with
ellipses that signify an excised word, phrase or sentence. Nothing surprising
here. Censorship is an obligatory tool...
The American Scholar
Part of the Parade
The post Part of the Parade appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 months ago
The post Part of the Parade appeared first on The American Scholar.
sbensu
Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union
Notes from reading the book by Zubok
10 months ago
Notes from reading the book by Zubok
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Matter of Nobody’s Style But Her Own'
“It is not
only the pianos that have vanished (the sound of the pianos along the streets
in spring...
11 months ago
“It is not
only the pianos that have vanished (the sound of the pianos along the streets
in spring evenings when the windows were opened) but the world in which they
sounded, and the young ears they sounded for. I shall never forget how
beautiful they were or what they meant to...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Remarkable Literary Judgment'
She was
twelve or thirteen, a girl in a hooded sweatshirt seated beside a woman I
assume was her...
4 months ago
She was
twelve or thirteen, a girl in a hooded sweatshirt seated beside a woman I
assume was her mother. She sat on the aisle two rows ahead of me. The cabin of
the plane glowed with screens while she was reading Andrew R. MacAndrew’s 1961 translation
of Dead Souls, the Signet...
This Space
39 Books: 2021
I lived in Brighton for 30 years. One of the many painful aspects of leaving in 2021 was losing the...
7 months ago
I lived in Brighton for 30 years. One of the many painful aspects of leaving in 2021 was losing the many second-hand bookshops, all within walking distance. Many have closed over the years, such as Sandpiper, a remaindered bookshop in Kensington Gardens. It had a backroom in...
Anecdotal Evidence
'I Suppose Age Brings Context'
An old
friend and former blogger in England has been reading Anthony Hecht and detects
what he calls...
3 months ago
An old
friend and former blogger in England has been reading Anthony Hecht and detects
what he calls “a very faint ghost of Hart Crane at times.” It’s not a
connection I have ever made but I recognize a certain lushness of diction in
both of them.
“[I]t's a
similar sense of...
Anecdotal Evidence
'He Worked His Weaponed Wit'
A reader is
displeased: “Oh my aren’t you witty?” He/she was offended by something I had written a...
a year ago
A reader is
displeased: “Oh my aren’t you witty?” He/she was offended by something I had written a long time ago about Robert Bly. Granted, criticizing Bly is like
shooting fish in the bathtub with a bazooka. I was a little ashamed of myself
but that passed. My consolation is...
This Space
39 Books: 1995
Looking over the list of books read over a decade, it becomes clear that each book came too early or...
8 months ago
Looking over the list of books read over a decade, it becomes clear that each book came too early or too late, or not at all; unless, of course, not yet. Untimely medications. Of the first, Robert Pinget's Be Brave applies. Again, lightness rather than heaviness, when there was...
Josh Thompson
Persistence
Persistence. It’s worth far more than any finite sum of money. Actually, it’s worth more than an...
over a year ago
Persistence. It’s worth far more than any finite sum of money. Actually, it’s worth more than an unlimited amount of money, because an unlimited amount of money would complicate my life (and probably yours) far more than we can possibly imagine.
Persistence. I keep trying to...
The Marginalian
Center of the Universe: Non-Speaking Autistic Poet Hannah Emerson’s Extraordinary Poem About How to...
"Please try to go to hell frequently because you will find the light there."
a year ago
"Please try to go to hell frequently because you will find the light there."
Josh Thompson
How To Procfile: Run Just a Single Process
Lets say you’ve got something like this in your Procfile:
web: PORT=3000...
over a year ago
Lets say you’ve got something like this in your Procfile:
web: PORT=3000 RAILS_ENV=development bundle exec puma -C ./config/puma_development.rb -e development
devlog: tail -f ./log/development.log
mailcatcher: ruby -rbundler/setup -e...
Wuthering...
it’s right about here that there would normally be a gap - Peter Adamson's Classical Philosophy, the...
Peter Adamson is an English philosopher with a long-running podcast, History of Philosophy without...
a year ago
Peter Adamson is an English philosopher with a long-running podcast, History of Philosophy without Any Gaps. What can that mean, without any gaps?
We’ve finished Aristotle, and it’s right about here that
there would normally be a gap. In an
undergraduate philosophy course you...
The American Scholar
Snow!
The post Snow! appeared first on The American Scholar.
8 months ago
The post Snow! appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
How the Octopus Came to Earth: Stunning 19th-Century French Chromolithographs of Cephalopods
The art-science that captured the wonder of some of "the most brilliant productions of Nature."
a year ago
The art-science that captured the wonder of some of "the most brilliant productions of Nature."
Ben Borgers
Your Feelings Are Not Unique
over a year ago
The American Scholar
“water sign woman” by Lucille Clifton
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “water sign woman” by Lucille Clifton appeared first on The...
2 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “water sign woman” by Lucille Clifton appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Curiosity'
Someone is
forever rediscovering the novels of Dawn Powell. Just this week I reread My Home Is Far...
yesterday
Someone is
forever rediscovering the novels of Dawn Powell. Just this week I reread My Home Is Far Away (1944), one of her “Ohio
novels.” Here she describes children out after dark in the winter in a small
town. I choose it because it is typical of Powell’s prose, not a...
Escaping Flatland
Living 80 years, you can have 8 lives
Highlights from the cutting room floor, pt. 2
a month ago
Highlights from the cutting room floor, pt. 2
Josh Thompson
A Five-Hour Experiment
Josh Kaufman wrote an excellent book called
The First 20 Hours.
In it, he carefully plots out a...
over a year ago
Josh Kaufman wrote an excellent book called
The First 20 Hours.
In it, he carefully plots out a handful of experiments to acquire a reasonable amount of skill in a new thing in twenty hours.
He studied yoga, windsurfing, programming,
Colemak typing,
a form of Chinese chess...
The Elysian
Week 5: Write one (pitchable) think piece
9 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Off to Welter and Waste'
The
Russian-Jewish poet Boris Slutsky (1919-86) was thirty-three years old on the
Night of the...
a year ago
The
Russian-Jewish poet Boris Slutsky (1919-86) was thirty-three years old on the
Night of the Murdered Poets, and he wasn’t among them. In the final stanza of his
poem “About the Jews” (trans. G.S. Smith), dating from the 1950s, Slutsky
writes:
“From the
war I came back safe
So...
The American Scholar
A Forgotten Turner Classic
Who was George Eyser, the one-legged German-American gymnast who astounded at the Olympic Games?
The...
7 months ago
Who was George Eyser, the one-legged German-American gymnast who astounded at the Olympic Games?
The post A Forgotten Turner Classic appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
An Ecology of Intimacies
At its best, an intimate relationship is a symbiote of mutual nourishment — a portable ecosystem of...
9 months ago
At its best, an intimate relationship is a symbiote of mutual nourishment — a portable ecosystem of interdependent growth, undergirded by a mycelial web of trust and tenderness. One is profoundly changed by it and yet becomes more purely oneself as projections give way to...
Anecdotal Evidence
'We Are So Lucky Having English'
“We are
lucky that English is our language because it’s better than, say, French for
poetry. All...
a year ago
“We are
lucky that English is our language because it’s better than, say, French for
poetry. All those millions of words and all those different ways of saying the
same, or similar, things. And new words all the time.”
It’s
fashionable in some quarters to distrust language, to...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Songful, Tuneful Land'
"None
can care for literature in itself who do not take a special pleasure in the
sound of names;...
12 months ago
"None
can care for literature in itself who do not take a special pleasure in the
sound of names; and there is no part of the world where nomenclature is so rich,
poetical, humorous, and picturesque as the United States of America.”
Robert Louis
Stevenson means place names. He’s...
Blog -...
Book Review - Zen in the Art of Archery
Zen in the Art of Archery is described by John Stevens in his book Zen Bow,
Zen Arrow as likely...
over a year ago
Zen in the Art of Archery is described by John Stevens in his book Zen Bow,
Zen Arrow as likely being the most popular book about Japanese culture and
martial arts ever. This is a bold statement I cannot contest, having read
only three other books about Zen: the...
Josh Thompson
Back in the saddle (of writing)
Background
It’s been a hell of a year. I’ve got about 10,000 things I’ve wanted to write about, and...
over a year ago
Background
It’s been a hell of a year. I’ve got about 10,000 things I’ve wanted to write about, and have not gotten around to any of them. Here’s my various top-level reasons for not writing:
what I want to write about feels too complicated to express easily/coherently
I feel...
The American Scholar
Good Intentions
The post Good Intentions appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 months ago
The post Good Intentions appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Elysian
I’d rather have an investor than a publishing contract
In pursuit of a better book deal (and record deal and podcast deal...)
7 months ago
In pursuit of a better book deal (and record deal and podcast deal...)
Anecdotal Evidence
'Maintaining a Stable and Orderly Civilization'
On the same
day I removed all the books from one of the bookcases, dusted the shelves...
7 months ago
On the same
day I removed all the books from one of the bookcases, dusted the shelves and
reorganized the volumes, one of our cats leaped into an open cupboard in the
kitchen. One of the four pegs supporting the middle shelf was missing and Trane’s
weight tipped it enough so a...
This Space
39 Books: 2016
I love it when people announce that "if Shakespeare was alive today, he'd be writing Eastenders", or...
7 months ago
I love it when people announce that "if Shakespeare was alive today, he'd be writing Eastenders", or Game of Thrones or crime fiction, according to one and another variation. The innocence of the claim is charming, giving voice to the desperation to give weight to ephemera. But I...
The American Scholar
In the Endless Arctic Light
A journey to the far north of Norway means confronting our changing climate
The post In the Endless...
a month ago
A journey to the far north of Norway means confronting our changing climate
The post In the Endless Arctic Light appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
2020 Annual Review
please note: i’m publishing this far after it was drafted, which was in January 2021. It’s being...
over a year ago
please note: i’m publishing this far after it was drafted, which was in January 2021. It’s being published in June 2022 - I’m trying to back-fill ‘annual reviews’, I never finished this one or published it, until now.
Is it even possible to mention a 2020 review without somehow...
The Marginalian
The Experience Machine: Cognitive Philosopher Andy Clark on the Power of Expectation and How the...
"We are never simply seeing what’s 'really there,' stripped bare of our own anticipations or...
a year ago
"We are never simply seeing what’s 'really there,' stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions."
Anecdotal Evidence
"The Saint’s Strange Way to Practice Death"
Among the road
kill I’ve tallied on Houston streets, the most common casualty is the...
9 months ago
Among the road
kill I’ve tallied on Houston streets, the most common casualty is the strangely
spelled opossum (from the Powhatan). The least common, incidentally, is the
armadillo, with two KIAs sighted in twenty years, both being pecked at by
crows. Natives here seem uncommonly...
Anecdotal Evidence
'He Learned to Love Books'
“Though most
of the teachers followed Erasmus in seeking to make learning palatable,
Montaigne...
4 months ago
“Though most
of the teachers followed Erasmus in seeking to make learning palatable,
Montaigne considers himself fortunate to have avoided getting 'nothing out of
school but a hatred of books, as do nearly all our noblemen,’” writes Donald
Frame in his 1965 biography of the...
The American Scholar
Acting Out
One tortuous journey from stage to screen
The post Acting Out appeared first on The American...
7 months ago
One tortuous journey from stage to screen
The post Acting Out appeared first on The American Scholar.
Blog -...
Book Review - Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant
In the book Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant, author Roland Lazenby
meticulously shares the...
over a year ago
In the book Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant, author Roland Lazenby
meticulously shares the journey of Kobe Bryant, from ancestral influences
up through his final game in the NBA. He is a clear fan of Kobe’s
inarguable work ethic, but he allows readers to reinforce their...
Anecdotal Evidence
'For Grief and Lost Belief'
In the U.S.,
Memorial Day is observed on the final Monday in May – this year, May 27....
7 months ago
In the U.S.,
Memorial Day is observed on the final Monday in May – this year, May 27. Formerly
called Decoration Day, it started after the Civil War as commemoration of the
nation’s war dead. The meaning and observance of holidays tend to dilute with
time. When I was a boy, the...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Shadow Cabinet of Writers'
“All of us,
probably, have some favorite unfashionable author. Occasionally a minority
taste can be...
3 months ago
“All of us,
probably, have some favorite unfashionable author. Occasionally a minority
taste can be powerful enough to make for some isolated masterpiece a small niche
in literary history -- Henry Green’s Loving
and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Mr. Fortune's Maggot have both...
Josh Thompson
Don't Focus on the Present
If you accept the premise that training
cycles are the method by which you will improve your...
over a year ago
If you accept the premise that training
cycles are the method by which you will improve your climbing, you
should be able to focus less on the day-by-day fluctuation in your performance.
At least, I should be able to, since I accept that premise. Yet I still struggle to not be...
Ben Borgers
The Code That Keeps Me Alive
over a year ago
The American Scholar
Reborn in the City of Light
At a time when Paris was an incubator of modernism, a group of bold American women arrived to make...
4 months ago
At a time when Paris was an incubator of modernism, a group of bold American women arrived to make art out of their lives
The post Reborn in the City of Light appeared first on The American Scholar.
sbensu
How to avoid breaking APIs
The main trick is to design them with extension in mind so that you won't have to break them later.
a year ago
The main trick is to design them with extension in mind so that you won't have to break them later.
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Twitter of Inconsequent Vitality'
This week I
will interview a professor of chemical engineering who is retiring after
forty-four...
8 months ago
This week I
will interview a professor of chemical engineering who is retiring after
forty-four years on the faculty. He came to the university straight from
earning his Ph.D. He’s neither flashy nor hungry for publicity, and I was
surprised he agreed to speak with me. He has a...
Ben Borgers
Read the Dang Thing Out Loud
over a year ago
The Marginalian
An Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of the Art of...
"We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for...
a year ago
"We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship."
The American Scholar
“The Cucumber ” by Nâzim Hikmet
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “The Cucumber ” by Nâzim Hikmet appeared first on The...
4 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “The Cucumber ” by Nâzim Hikmet appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
The Unphotographable: Richard Adams on the Singular Magic of Autumn
There is a lovely liminality to autumn — this threshold time between the centripetal exuberance of...
2 months ago
There is a lovely liminality to autumn — this threshold time between the centripetal exuberance of summer and the season for tending to the inner garden, as Rilke wrote of winter. Autumn is a living metaphor for the necessary losses that shape our human lives: What falls away...
The Marginalian
Awakened Cosmos: Poetry as Spiritual Practice
"Poetry is the cosmos awakened to itself."
9 months ago
"Poetry is the cosmos awakened to itself."
Josh Thompson
Redefining Success
It’s been pretty quiet around here lately. It’s been almost a month since my last entry. I thought...
over a year ago
It’s been pretty quiet around here lately. It’s been almost a month since my last entry. I thought about writing something here almost every day, but here is why I didn’t:
I want to produce “content” that is helpful and relevant to those who might read it.
I felt like nothing I...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Whole Time Reading, Reading, Reading'
“I’m not
doing any work, just reading or pacing up and down. However, I don’t really
mind having the...
a week ago
“I’m not
doing any work, just reading or pacing up and down. However, I don’t really
mind having the time to read. It’s more enjoyable than writing. I feel that if
I could live another forty years and spend the whole time reading, reading,
reading, and learning how to write with...
The Marginalian
A Lighthouse for Dark Times
This is the elemental speaking: It is during phase transition — when the temperature and pressure of...
a month ago
This is the elemental speaking: It is during phase transition — when the temperature and pressure of a system go beyond what the system can withstand and matter changes from one state to another — that the system is most pliant, most possible. This chaos of particles that...
Anecdotal Evidence
'We Take Measure of the Loss'
The youngest
poet included by Yvor Winters and Kenneth Fields in Quest for Reality: An Anthology of...
11 months ago
The youngest
poet included by Yvor Winters and Kenneth Fields in Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969)
was M. Scott Momaday, a former Winters graduate student at Stanford who was
then thirty-five years old. Winters, who died in 1968, also considered...
Ben Borgers
My Stress is an Inside Job
over a year ago
sbensu
High Variance Management
How should you manage a team that is trying to achieve results out of the ordinary?
a year ago
How should you manage a team that is trying to achieve results out of the ordinary?
Anecdotal Evidence
'To Soften, Not to Wound My Heart'
It may seem
unfair to reduce a poet to a single poem but consider the thousands who never
wrote even...
a year ago
It may seem
unfair to reduce a poet to a single poem but consider the thousands who never
wrote even one memorable line. Take Thomas Gray. His reputation, if any,
amounts to “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751). Generations of school
children once recited the poem and...
Wuthering...
Books I read in March 2024 - Literature was a game of pillaging, and this book showed it.
A nice little run at Persian literature this month. And I am reading in Portuguese again,...
8 months ago
A nice little run at Persian literature this month. And I am reading in Portuguese again, slowly,
slowly.
PERSIAN LITERATURE, MOSTLY CLASSICAL
Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (1110), Abolqasem Ferdowsi – See here for notes on this
big epic in Dick Davis’s translation.
The...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Postmodern Pigeonhole Is a Shuck'
With Tom
Disch’s suicide in 2008 we lost not only one of our best poets, a fine writer
of short...
a month ago
With Tom
Disch’s suicide in 2008 we lost not only one of our best poets, a fine writer
of short stories and of one novel, Camp
Concentration, but perhaps the most entertaining of our critics. His only
recent rivals have been Turner Cassity and R.S. Gwynn. “Entertainment” and...
The American Scholar
The Importance of Being Different
A travel writer’s education
The post The Importance of Being Different appeared first on The...
7 months ago
A travel writer’s education
The post The Importance of Being Different appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
Primitive Obsession & Exceptional Values
I’ve been working through Avdi Grimes’ Mastering the Object Oriented Mindset course.
One of the...
over a year ago
I’ve been working through Avdi Grimes’ Mastering the Object Oriented Mindset course.
One of the topics was using “whole values”, instead of being “primative obsessed”. The example Avdi gave was clear as day.
He used a course with a duration attribute to show the...
Josh Thompson
Quick Dive into React
As usual, this is a work in progress. At a high level, I’m familiarizing myself with Phoenix/Elixir,...
over a year ago
As usual, this is a work in progress. At a high level, I’m familiarizing myself with Phoenix/Elixir, and need to sharpen my React knowledge along the way.
After working through part 1 of a slack clone in Elixir/Phoenix tutorial, I ran into some errors getting the React app up and...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Kind of Representative Figure of His Era'
We gave our sons
Hebrew names: Joshua, Michael, David. They roughly translate as “God is...
a year ago
We gave our sons
Hebrew names: Joshua, Michael, David. They roughly translate as “God is deliverance,”
“gift of God” and “beloved,” respectively. We are not Jewish and not linguists
but we like plain names rooted in tradition, names with an identifiable history
traceable, in this...
Wuthering...
Thales, the first philosopher - what is philosophy, anyways?
He [Thales of Miletus] held that the original substance of all things is water, and that the world...
a year ago
He [Thales of Miletus] held that the original substance of all things is water, and that the world is animate and full of deities. They say he discovered the seasons of the year, and divided the day into 365 days. (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, p. 12,...
Josh Thompson
$150 Custom-Made Standing Desk
My desk/our kitchen table
Standing desks are
all the
rage. (I’m still waiting for
walking desks...
over a year ago
My desk/our kitchen table
Standing desks are
all the
rage. (I’m still waiting for
walking desks to catch up.)
Kristi and I outfitted our space with reclaimed furniture from Craigslist (also known as “cheap”), so we wanted to keep it going with a desk. My setup at our kitchen...
Josh Thompson
Recommended Reading
I’ve read many books over the years. Thousands. Here’s a few that I find myself...
7 months ago
I’ve read many books over the years. Thousands. Here’s a few that I find myself referencing/recommending.Periodically, I refresh this list. It’s changed over the years years.
the list you are about to read is heavily reworked, based off this older list:...
Josh Thompson
Upgrade your job
So, apparently I send a lot of email about people trying to get cool jobs. Here’s yet
another email...
over a year ago
So, apparently I send a lot of email about people trying to get cool jobs. Here’s yet
another email I sent to a friend, recorded here.
Hi [redacted],
First I want to highlight is that flexible/remote jobs are
just like normal jobs, but more people want them, so the companies...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Title Is Apt and Not a Whit Pretentious'
I hadn’t
opened my copy of Raymond Sokolov’s Wayward
Reporter: The Life of A.J. Liebling (Harper and...
3 weeks ago
I hadn’t
opened my copy of Raymond Sokolov’s Wayward
Reporter: The Life of A.J. Liebling (Harper and Row, 1980) in a long time.
It’s a rather skimpy biography, though the only one we have, so I hope someone,
someday writes a life worthy of Liebling’s gifts. When I was a...
This Space
39 Books: 2006
My choice for 2003 began with indecision, as I couldn't imagine writing about Robert Antelme's The...
7 months ago
My choice for 2003 began with indecision, as I couldn't imagine writing about Robert Antelme's The Human Race. Instead I wondered if I could say something about Timothy Hyman's Sienese Painting. While I have little or no feeling for art, I am drawn to reading about it. The book's...
Wuthering...
The Making of Americans as conceptual art - I have already made several diagrams
Sometime I will be able to make a diagram. I have already made several diagrams. I will sometime...
7 months ago
Sometime I will be able to make a diagram. I have already made several diagrams. I will sometime make a complete diagram and that will be a very long book... (580)
I am going to write about The Making of Americans as
conceptual art, art where how it is made is a central part...
The Marginalian
How to Bear Your Loneliness: Grounding Wisdom from the Great Buddhist Teacher Pema Chödrön
"We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness."
a year ago
"We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness."
Escaping Flatland
Self-help for cocoons
and what's on my mind
10 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'We Enter Again November'
The final
stanza of Howard Nemerov’s “Elegy of Last Resort” from his second collection, Guide to the...
2 months ago
The final
stanza of Howard Nemerov’s “Elegy of Last Resort” from his second collection, Guide to the Ruins (1950):
“We enter
again November; cold late light
Glazes the field, a little fever of love,
Held in numbed hands, admires the false gods;
While lonely on this coast the...
Anecdotal Evidence
'An Obscuration of the Luminaries of Heaven'
In 1963, our
street in a suburb on the West Side of Cleveland was still unpaved and the...
8 months ago
In 1963, our
street in a suburb on the West Side of Cleveland was still unpaved and the city
periodically coated it with tar. Rain fell on the morning of July 20 but by late
afternoon the skies had cleared and all that remained of the rain were puddles
in the water-proof street....
Josh Thompson
Array divergence in Ruby
Lets say you have a list of valid items, and you want to run another array against it, and pull out...
over a year ago
Lets say you have a list of valid items, and you want to run another array against it, and pull out the items that don’t match.
You don’t want to iterate through all of the items in one array, calling other_array.include?(item). (That’s computationally expensive)
valid_people =...
The Elysian
Further reading on employee ownership
My notes from the margins of my research.
4 months ago
My notes from the margins of my research.
Ben Borgers
Work-Life Separation in College
over a year ago
The Marginalian
The Science of Tears and the Art of Crying: An Illustrated Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Deepest...
“All the poems of our lives are not yet made. We hear them crying to us,” Muriel Rukeyser writes in...
2 months ago
“All the poems of our lives are not yet made. We hear them crying to us,” Muriel Rukeyser writes in her timeless ode to the power of poetry. “Cry, heart, but never break,” entreats one of my favorite children’s books — which, at their best, are always philosophies for living. It...
Astral Codex Ten
Hidden Open Thread 360.5
...
2 weeks ago
The Elysian
How would anarchist societies protect themselves?
Letters to an anarchist, part three.
a month ago
Letters to an anarchist, part three.
The Marginalian
The Lost Drop: An Illustrated Celebration of the Wonder of the Water Cycle and the Interconnected...
I remember when I first learned about the water cycle, about how it makes of our planet a living...
a year ago
I remember when I first learned about the water cycle, about how it makes of our planet a living world and binds the fate of every molecule to that of every other. I remember feeling in my child-bones the profound interconnectedness of life as I realized I was breathing the...
Josh Thompson
Parenting: A Place for Sources And Stories
As some of us are or might be, I “am a parent”, or I “have a child”, or something like that.
This is...
7 months ago
As some of us are or might be, I “am a parent”, or I “have a child”, or something like that.
This is complex for me to write and engage with, because something that is certainly true for all of us is that we “have a parent” or we “have been a child”. To talk about any of it is to...
The Marginalian
2,000 Years of Kindness
From Marcus Aurelius to Einstein, poets and philosophers on the deepest wellspring of our humanity.
a year ago
From Marcus Aurelius to Einstein, poets and philosophers on the deepest wellspring of our humanity.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Commonplace Insights'
The Center for Popular Culture Studies at Bowling
Green State University in Ohio was founded in...
3 months ago
The Center for Popular Culture Studies at Bowling
Green State University in Ohio was founded in 1970, the year I entered BG as a
freshman. Today it’s the only institution in the country to have a Department
of Popular Culture. As an English major I hung around with professors who...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Single Line of Calm'
Judged
solely as a liquid asset, the most valuable book I ever held was a history of
Argentina...
4 weeks ago
Judged
solely as a liquid asset, the most valuable book I ever held was a history of
Argentina borrowed from the public library in Schenectady, N.Y. At home I discovered
the previous reader had marked his place with a twenty-dollar bill. I returned
the book but not the cash. It...
The Marginalian
The Messiah in the Mountain: Darwin on Wonder and the Spirituality of Nature
Here we are, matter yearning for meaning, each of us a fragile constellation of chemistry and chance...
7 months ago
Here we are, matter yearning for meaning, each of us a fragile constellation of chemistry and chance hurtling through a cold cosmos that has no accord for our wishes, takes no interest in our dreams. “I can’t but believe that all that majesty and all that beauty, those fated and...
The American Scholar
Corona Chasers
You never forget your first solar eclipse
The post Corona Chasers appeared first on The American...
7 months ago
You never forget your first solar eclipse
The post Corona Chasers appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
Find out how much money you've made (in your entire life)
This post went by on the Personal Finance subreddit today:
https://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/
After...
over a year ago
This post went by on the Personal Finance subreddit today:
https://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/
After creating an account / logging in, click on Earnings, then add the columns. If you have been working for many years, try copying/pasting the column in excel and using the sum...
Anecdotal Evidence
'We Find Other Things Which We Liked Better'
One night in the spring of 1766, Boswell and Goldsmith visited Dr. Johnson unannounced and
asked if...
10 months ago
One night in the spring of 1766, Boswell and Goldsmith visited Dr. Johnson unannounced and
asked if he wished to join them at the Mitre Tavern on Fleet Street in London.
Johnson was “indisposed” and Goldsmith said, “[W]e will not go to the Mitre to-night,
since we cannot have the...
Anecdotal Evidence
'His Empty Heart is Full at Length'
Two-hundred-fifty
years ago, in the late summer and fall of 1773, Dr. Johnson and Boswell made
their...
a year ago
Two-hundred-fifty
years ago, in the late summer and fall of 1773, Dr. Johnson and Boswell made
their grand tour of Scotland, including the Hebrides, and both would
publish accounts of their adventures. Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland appeared in...
The Marginalian
The Life of Trees: A Poem
"I want to sleep and dream the life of trees, beings from the muted world..."
a year ago
"I want to sleep and dream the life of trees, beings from the muted world..."
The Marginalian
How to Triumph Over the Challenges of the Creative Life: Audubon’s Antidote to Despair
We move through the world as surfaces shimmering with the visibilia of our accomplishments, the...
3 months ago
We move through the world as surfaces shimmering with the visibilia of our accomplishments, the undertow of our suffering invisible to passers-by. The selective collective memory we call history contributes to this willful blindness, obscuring the tremendous personal cost behind...
The Marginalian
The Donkey and the Meaning of Eternity: Nobel-Winning Spanish Poet Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Love Letter...
"Come with me. I'll teach you the flowers and the stars."
a year ago
"Come with me. I'll teach you the flowers and the stars."
The American Scholar
Three Poems
The post Three Poems appeared first on The American Scholar.
4 months ago
The post Three Poems appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
The Fairy Tale Tree
Creativity is at bottom the combinatorial work of memory and imagination. All of our impressions,...
11 months ago
Creativity is at bottom the combinatorial work of memory and imagination. All of our impressions, influences, and experiences — every sight we have ever seen, every book read, every landscape walked, every love loved — become seeds for ideas we later combine and recombine,...
The Marginalian
Nature’s Oldest Mandolin: The Poetic Science of How Cicadas Sing
“The use of music,” Richard Powers wrote, “is to remind us how short a time we have a body” — a...
8 months ago
“The use of music,” Richard Powers wrote, “is to remind us how short a time we have a body” — a truth nowhere more bittersweet than in the creature whose body is the oldest unchanged musical instrument on Earth: a tiny mandolin silent for most of its existence, then sonorous with...
The Elysian
Hint #1
I'm publishing a new print collection in three weeks.
4 months ago
I'm publishing a new print collection in three weeks.
The Marginalian
Trauma, Growth, and How to Be Twice as Alive: Tove Jansson on the Worm and the Art of Self-Renewal
"Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment."
5 months ago
"Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment."
The Marginalian
In the Dark: A Lyrical Illustrated Invitation to Find the Light Behind the Fear
The mind is a camera obscura constantly trying to render an image of reality on the back wall of...
a year ago
The mind is a camera obscura constantly trying to render an image of reality on the back wall of consciousness through the pinhole of awareness, its aperture narrowed by our selective attention, honed on our hopes and fears. In consequence, the projection we see inside the dark...
Ben Borgers
Prototyping an AI-powered note-taking app
a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Living Through Radical Change'
Ten years
ago, Joseph Epstein wrote to his friend Frederic Raphael:
“I have
myself long ago put...
8 months ago
Ten years
ago, Joseph Epstein wrote to his friend Frederic Raphael:
“I have
myself long ago put aside any thought about writing an autobiography. . . .
When I became, almost without conscious decision, a bookish and a scribbling
man, the larger sense of adventure went out of my...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Their Thoughts, Their Longings, Hopes, Their Fate'
A new
record: stopped three times at train crossings in a single day without leaving
the city,...
10 months ago
A new
record: stopped three times at train crossings in a single day without leaving
the city, driving only to the university library and back, twenty-two miles. Because
of its sprawling, unplanned nature, Houston is a dense web of train tracks, as
John Bainbridge, a staff writer...
The American Scholar
Queen of the Night
Leigh Ann Henion embraces the creatures that light up the dark
The post Queen of the Night appeared...
3 months ago
Leigh Ann Henion embraces the creatures that light up the dark
The post Queen of the Night appeared first on The American Scholar.
Ben Borgers
A Design Improvement for Our Communal Showers
over a year ago
Josh Thompson
Cultivate Curiosity, or 'Reasons to be More Childlike'
I’ve had an idea rolling around my head.
I suspect that “being curious” will correlate well with...
over a year ago
I’ve had an idea rolling around my head.
I suspect that “being curious” will correlate well with positive outcomes in my life, on pretty much any time horizon, be it days, weeks, or decades. Curiosity feels like a tolerable antidote to boredom, though boredom in and of itself is...
The American Scholar
“I Will Greet the Sun Again” by Forugh Farrokhzad
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “I Will Greet the Sun Again” by Forugh Farrokhzad appeared...
4 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “I Will Greet the Sun Again” by Forugh Farrokhzad appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'What She or He Ought to Know'
In a
typically mordant essay, “A Great Fog Over the Past,” Peter Hitchens cites “Spanish Waters,” a...
4 months ago
In a
typically mordant essay, “A Great Fog Over the Past,” Peter Hitchens cites “Spanish Waters,” a poem by John Masefield, one of the first poets I claimed as my own
when a boy, years before Eliot and Yeats. The poem’s “decrepit beggar,” as Hitchens
puts it, “knows where the...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Provided That He Gives Us What We Can Enjoy'
A reader is
enjoying Tristram Shandy and passing
along choice selections from Sterne’s novel. This...
a year ago
A reader is
enjoying Tristram Shandy and passing
along choice selections from Sterne’s novel. This she gleaned from Book V,
Chap. 32, spoken by Tristram’s father:
“—Here is
the glass for pedagogues, preceptors, tutors, governors, gerund-grinders, and
bear-leaders, to view...
The American Scholar
“The Poet’s Occasional Alternative” by Grace Paley
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “The Poet’s Occasional Alternative” by Grace Paley appeared...
4 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “The Poet’s Occasional Alternative” by Grace Paley appeared first on The American Scholar.
Wuthering...
The elegant, intricate, sour comedies of Terence
The great Roman playwright Terence wrote six plays between 166 and 160 BCE, twenty years after the...
a year ago
The great Roman playwright Terence wrote six plays between 166 and 160 BCE, twenty years after the death of Plautus. The story is that he wrote the first one at age nineteen, while enslaved, thus winning his freedom and entry into a world of aristocratic patrons. Plautus was...
The Marginalian
No One You Love Is Ever Dead: Hemingway on the Most Devastating of Losses and the Meaning of Life
"We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other."
7 months ago
"We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other."
The Marginalian
Excellent Advice for Living: Kevin Kelly’s Life-Tested Wisdom He Wished He Knew Earlier
"The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished."
a year ago
"The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished."
Steven Scrawls
Easy Questions, Part 2: Delusional Desires in Fiction
Easy
Questions, Part 2: Delusional Desires in Fiction
In Part 1, I examined a few
common tropes in...
7 months ago
Easy
Questions, Part 2: Delusional Desires in Fiction
In Part 1, I examined a few
common tropes in stories and suggested that some stories might explore
certain questions not because those questions are interesting, but
because engaging with those questions allows the story to...
Ben Borgers
The Brain Can Observe Itself
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Censure of Knaves and Fools'
“Mr. Michael
Johnson was a man of large and robust body, and of a strong and active mind;
yet, as in...
3 months ago
“Mr. Michael
Johnson was a man of large and robust body, and of a strong and active mind;
yet, as in the most solid rocks veins of unsound substance are often
discovered, there was in him a mixture of that disease, the nature of which
eludes the most minute enquiry, though the...
The American Scholar
The Wonder of It All
In search of awe
The post The Wonder of It All appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
In search of awe
The post The Wonder of It All appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
May Sarton on Writing, Gardening, and the Importance of Patience Over Will in Creative Work
"Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone."
a year ago
"Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone."
Josh Thompson
Refactoring practice: Get rid of `attr_accessors` in `ogre.rb` in 2 minutes
Preparing for Turing Series Index
What follows is an eight-part series that will help you pick up...
over a year ago
Preparing for Turing Series Index
What follows is an eight-part series that will help you pick up useful information about a number of topics related to Ruby, specifically geared for students learning the Ruby programming language, as part of the Turing School’s Backend Software...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Let the Words Glide Through the Air'
Some years
ago, out of the blue, a reader whose name I have forgotten sent me a copy of No Earthly...
a year ago
Some years
ago, out of the blue, a reader whose name I have forgotten sent me a copy of No Earthly Estate: The Religious Poetry of
Patrick Kavanagh (The Columba Press, Dublin, 2002) by Father Tom Stack. I was grateful because it sent me back to the Irish poet (1904-67) who seems...
The Marginalian
Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance
One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do...
5 months ago
One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives. We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Gave Themselves Without Idle Words to Death'
Rudyard
Kipling was barely twenty years old when he wrote his “Prelude” to Departmental Ditties...
a year ago
Rudyard
Kipling was barely twenty years old when he wrote his “Prelude” to Departmental Ditties (1886), which
includes these lines: “The deaths ye died I have watched beside, / And the
lives ye led were mine.” Eugene Sledge was nineteen when he enlisted in the
Marine Corps a year...
Anecdotal Evidence
'I Wish That He’d Arrived Much Sooner'
I offended
a reader by referring to Samuel Taylor Coleridge as “a brilliant windbag junkie.”
Let’s...
a year ago
I offended
a reader by referring to Samuel Taylor Coleridge as “a brilliant windbag junkie.”
Let’s consider each part of the epithet. “Brilliant”? Without question. He wrote
three incontestably good poems but Coleridge is an early specimen of the “public
intellectual,” bristling...
The Marginalian
John Quincy Adams on Impostor Syndrome and the True Measure of Success
“You will never get any more out of life than you expect,” Bruce Lee wrote to himself. All...
7 months ago
“You will never get any more out of life than you expect,” Bruce Lee wrote to himself. All expectation is a story of the possible. Every person lives inside a story of who they are, what they are worth, and what is possible for their life, and suffers in proportion to how...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Amber of His Style'
Isaac
Waisberg at IWP Books has digitalized three volumes of Desmond MacCarthy’s essays
and reviews...
8 months ago
Isaac
Waisberg at IWP Books has digitalized three volumes of Desmond MacCarthy’s essays
and reviews -- Portraits (1931), Criticism (1932), Memories (1953) – with a promise of more to come. MacCarthy’s reputation
in the U.S. is almost sub-atomic. Devotees of Bloomsbury think of hm...
The Marginalian
On Wanting to Change: Adam Phillips on Our Capacity for Transformation
"There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it."
7 months ago
"There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it."
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Superior Graduate School'
When I was permitted, starting at age eleven, to ride the CTS
bus into downtown Cleveland and spend...
a year ago
When I was permitted, starting at age eleven, to ride the CTS
bus into downtown Cleveland and spend the day as I wished, with money earned from
a paper route and an erratically dispensed allowance, it was always a bookish
outing. The bus let me off on Public Square near...
The Marginalian
Milan Kundera on the Power of Coincidences and the Musicality of How Chance Composes Our Lives
"Human lives... are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a...
a year ago
"Human lives... are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence... into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life."
Wuthering...
Metamorphoses, Books XI to XV - The whole of it flows
I had better finish up Ovid’s Metamorphoses before I
forget what was in it. It is full of
memorable...
9 months ago
I had better finish up Ovid’s Metamorphoses before I
forget what was in it. It is full of
memorable things, but I have limits.
Books XI through XV, the last five, in this post.
Book X ended with the songs of Orpheus, so he has to begin
Book XI with Orpheus’s gruesome death,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Where Silence Suddenly Erupts in Speech'
Zbigniew Herbert
visited Western Europe for the first time in 1958-59: France, then England,
Italy,...
a year ago
Zbigniew Herbert
visited Western Europe for the first time in 1958-59: France, then England,
Italy, France again and back to Poland. His budget was tight but Herbert was
no hedonistic tourist. Nor was he a stuffy academic or critic. The essays in Barbarian in the Garden (1962;...
The Elysian
Three classic utopian novels—now collectibles
More than 100 years ago, three thinkers imagined what a utopian future might look like in the year...
4 months ago
More than 100 years ago, three thinkers imagined what a utopian future might look like in the year 2000. Now, their novels are available as a collectible set.
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Profoundly Bitter Lesson'
My friend
Moshe Vardi is a computer scientist at Rice University, the Karen Ostrum...
a year ago
My friend
Moshe Vardi is a computer scientist at Rice University, the Karen Ostrum George
Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering. He has published
an essay, “A Moral Rot at Rice University”:
“I was well
aware that antisemitism is alive and well in the US,...
The American Scholar
A Rebel to Remember
Gregory P. Downs on the late Anthony E. Kaye’s groundbreaking history of Nat Turner
The post A Rebel...
4 months ago
Gregory P. Downs on the late Anthony E. Kaye’s groundbreaking history of Nat Turner
The post A Rebel to Remember appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
The Wondrous Birds of the Himalayas and the Forgotten Victorian Woman Whose Illustrations Rewilded...
Bridging Blake and Darwin with a single-hair brush.
a year ago
Bridging Blake and Darwin with a single-hair brush.
sbensu
Payments vs Transfers
Transfer means to move money but payment means "exchanging goods or services". A payment system has...
a year ago
Transfer means to move money but payment means "exchanging goods or services". A payment system has a lot more requirements than a transfer system and I rarely see the crypto ecosystem acknowledge these when building "payment" products.
The Perry Bible...
Brushed
The post Brushed appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.
7 months ago
The post Brushed appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Fragility of Happiness'
Christopher Carduff, books editor at the Wall Street Journal, asked me to review
a new translation...
a year ago
Christopher Carduff, books editor at the Wall Street Journal, asked me to review
a new translation of a Russian novel due for publication in November. The proofs arrived on Thursday and I sent Chris an email letting him know I was
already reading the book. The email bounced back...
Anecdotal Evidence
'And the Third Is To Be Kind.'
A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and
Solitude
(David R. Godine, 2002) is a collection of the...
a year ago
A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and
Solitude
(David R. Godine, 2002) is a collection of the late publisher/poet’s
photographs of artists well-known and obscure. Williams was no snob when it
came to talent and genius. He photographs Stevie Smith, Guy Davenport...
Josh Thompson
An Intro to Customer Success
Customer Success - what is it?
When I tell people I work in “Customer Success”, they immediately...
over a year ago
Customer Success - what is it?
When I tell people I work in “Customer Success”, they immediately think I do either Customer Support, or sales. In a way, they are correct. I do both. Today, and more in the future, I’ll dig deep into this particular industry.
A traditional...
ben-mini
Buying a House
Two days ago, I decided I want to buy my first house. My goal is to purchase it before the summer of...
3 months ago
Two days ago, I decided I want to buy my first house. My goal is to purchase it before the summer of 2025.
Why are you buying a house?
To make money. I see this as an opportunity in a space that many friends and family consider a safe, high-return bet (if done right). When...
Wuthering...
Books I Read in October 2023
The five-day hospital stay breaking the month in half is likely invisible to anyone but me, but that...
a year ago
The five-day hospital stay breaking the month in half is likely invisible to anyone but me, but that is why the fiction list is so mystery-heavy, and for that matter so long. Many of these books, the post-surgery group, are not just short but light, well-suited for the invalid's...
ben-mini
The Inner Game of Tennis
I just finished reading The Inner Game of Tennis by Tim Gallwey. Originally published in 1974, the...
2 months ago
I just finished reading The Inner Game of Tennis by Tim Gallwey. Originally published in 1974, the book explores how the thoughts of an athlete affect their game. It’s lauded as being at the forefront of what we now call “sports psychology”. Although my competitive sports days...
The American Scholar
Sheep Jones
Swimming below the surface
The post Sheep Jones appeared first on The American Scholar.
5 months ago
Swimming below the surface
The post Sheep Jones appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'About As Approachable As a Porcupine'
The large bay
window facing the garden in front of our house is better than television....
2 months ago
The large bay
window facing the garden in front of our house is better than television. No
commercials, no dependency on internet whims, no bills to pay. That’s where I
do most of my reading (best lighting in the house). From the couch I watch the
show in the garden. Butterflies,...
Josh Thompson
Daily Exercise - Russian Kettlebells
Exercise. It makes most people either cringe or salivate.
Those of you who love exercising for the...
over a year ago
Exercise. It makes most people either cringe or salivate.
Those of you who love exercising for the sake of exercising - you can stop reading now. This information is probably not relevant to you.
Those of you who don’t like to exercise, but know you really should exercise...
Josh Thompson
A Runbook for Upgrading Your Parent's Junky Old Laptop to a Chromebook
tl;dr: I’m creating a runbook for a very specific, delicate, and potentially time-consuming and...
over a year ago
tl;dr: I’m creating a runbook for a very specific, delicate, and potentially time-consuming and emotionally-charged operation to replace my 70-year-old newly-widowed mother-in-law's ancient desktop computer with a easy-for-me-to-manage Chromebook
Update: I posted to r/ChromeOS...
The Marginalian
Thunder, Bells, and Silence: The Eclipse that Went Extinct
What was it like for Martha, the endling of her species, to die alone at the Cincinnati Zoo that...
7 months ago
What was it like for Martha, the endling of her species, to die alone at the Cincinnati Zoo that late-summer day in 1914, all the other passenger pigeons gone from the face of the Earth, having once filled its skies with an immensity of beating wings, so many that John James...
The American Scholar
Paolo Arao
Acts of devotion
The post Paolo Arao appeared first on The American Scholar.
4 months ago
Acts of devotion
The post Paolo Arao appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
The Snow Maiden
Our final episode of 2018 is a send-off to the solstice
The post The Snow Maiden appeared first on...
4 days ago
Our final episode of 2018 is a send-off to the solstice
The post The Snow Maiden appeared first on The American Scholar.
This Space
Favourite books 2022
This selection does not include those books I enjoyed, that asinine dilution poured into innumerable...
over a year ago
This selection does not include those books I enjoyed, that asinine dilution poured into innumerable books of the year lists, though I enjoyed those not included in this selection.
Jon Fosse – Septology
Thomas Bernhard – The Rest is Slander
"we are concealing a secret, a secret...
Blog -...
Book Review - Codependent No More
With more than five million copies sold by its twenty-fifth anniversary
nearly a decade ago,...
over a year ago
With more than five million copies sold by its twenty-fifth anniversary
nearly a decade ago, Codependent No More is a startling, powerful book that
has touched the lives of so very many.
This Space
39 Books: 2013
I reread books like Aharon Appelfeld's A Table for One and Anne Atik's How It Was as if returning to...
7 months ago
I reread books like Aharon Appelfeld's A Table for One and Anne Atik's How It Was as if returning to a particular bench with a view of the sea. On first glance A Table for One promises only banal, coffee-table memories and reflections, and that would be almost right:
Real...
Anecdotal Evidence
'To Be Made Out of Emotions, Colors, Life Itself'
“[Robert
Conquest] and his two closest friends, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, proved
their...
5 months ago
“[Robert
Conquest] and his two closest friends, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, proved
their vocation by playing the games with language and perception that poets
play, three Musketeers at a time when not much else was disturbing the quiet
little cemetery of English...
Ben Borgers
The Magic of the Common Room
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Fundamental Truth of His Periodic Law”
My middle
son is given to serial enthusiasms, what others call hobbies. He’s a second
lieutenant in...
a year ago
My middle
son is given to serial enthusiasms, what others call hobbies. He’s a second
lieutenant in the Marine Corps, now in training at Quantico, and spends his weekends
rock climbing in Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. This lends a
pleasing symmetry to his life, as one...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Learning Is Not Defunct in the Republic'
“As you
probably don’t read National Review,
I enclose proof that learning is not defunct in the...
3 months ago
“As you
probably don’t read National Review,
I enclose proof that learning is not defunct in the Republic. Buckley had
printed a note . . . praising Waugh’s delightful whimsy in coining a nonsense
phrase like tohu bohu. Catholics tend
not to have read a word of Holy Writ.”
I...
The Elysian
The unbearable necessity of being online
On loving and loathing the internet as an artist and why we need to be here anyway.
9 months ago
On loving and loathing the internet as an artist and why we need to be here anyway.
Blog -...
Book Review - Iron John
Iron John by Robert Bly is a classic book about men. It has legions of
ardent fans, but I...
over a year ago
Iron John by Robert Bly is a classic book about men. It has legions of
ardent fans, but I reluctantly admit I am not one of the more zealous.
Although the book has high points – the classic story of Iron John as put
down by the Grimm brothers stands out to me, as well as an...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Bright, Cheerful, Salubrious Hell'
Max
Beerbohm’s first radio broadcast, delivered on December 29, 1935, is titled
“London Revisited.”...
a year ago
Max
Beerbohm’s first radio broadcast, delivered on December 29, 1935, is titled
“London Revisited.” He celebrates the city of his birth (in 1872) and youth –
the Edwardian era – and implicitly critiques the London of the interbellum
years:
“London has been
cosmopolitanised,...
The Marginalian
We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt, the Power of Defiant Goodwill, and the Art of...
"It is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most...
9 months ago
"It is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, matters the most."
sbensu
Designing for support teams
Support agents spend their entire lives using the same software. Their needs are very different from...
11 months ago
Support agents spend their entire lives using the same software. Their needs are very different from consumer software. Here are some things to keep in mind.
This Space
The last novel
"(We are, it seems to remind us, always saying goodbye to our children.)"
John Self's aside in his...
over a year ago
"(We are, it seems to remind us, always saying goodbye to our children.)"
John Self's aside in his review of JM Coetzee's The Death of Jesus captures the pervasive anxiety experienced while reading this novel better than even the most detailed plot summary, which is anyway likely...
Josh Thompson
Lifestyle Design (AKA Intentional Habit Building)
The top New Years resolutions indicate that Americans know they need to make changes. The top three...
over a year ago
The top New Years resolutions indicate that Americans know they need to make changes. The top three resolutions always relate to getting in shape, eating better, spending time better, and spending money better.
Everyone is aware that change is good, even necessary, but given the...
The American Scholar
Autumn 2024
The post Autumn 2024 appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 months ago
The post Autumn 2024 appeared first on The American Scholar.
Ben Borgers
JumboCode plans for Head of Engineering
a year ago
This Space
39 Books: 2009
The further I get into this series, the fewer books there are on my yearly lists that I haven't...
7 months ago
The further I get into this series, the fewer books there are on my yearly lists that I haven't already written about and among those few that I feel able to write about. For 2009 there is one outstanding exception: another book about a writer exiled in Paris. Already in this...
This Space
Favourite books 2020
Every time Dennis Cooper posts his favorite (sic) fiction and non-fiction of the year, it alone...
over a year ago
Every time Dennis Cooper posts his favorite (sic) fiction and non-fiction of the year, it alone exceeds the number of books I'm able to read in a year let alone the number from which it was presumably narrowed down. This is why I suggested a couple of years ago such pages choose...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Intensely Cultivated and Painstakingly Honest'
In the brief foreword to her first prose collection, Predilections
(1955), Marianne Moore writes as...
a month ago
In the brief foreword to her first prose collection, Predilections
(1955), Marianne Moore writes as good an apologia for her manner of writing, among others, as I’ve ever encountered:
“Silence is
more eloquent than speech – a truism; but sometimes something that someone...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Moved—Stopp’d--Shall I Go On?—No'
The
professor asked me to write a paper on Tristram
Shandy, the novel she had introduced to us in...
a month ago
The
professor asked me to write a paper on Tristram
Shandy, the novel she had introduced to us in her eighteenth-century English
fiction class. It was her favorite novel. Its bawdy humor matched her own. For
me it was love at first sight – for the novel, I mean. I was already a...
The Perry Bible...
Us
The post Us appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.
2 months ago
The post Us appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.
Escaping Flatland
Don’t sacrifice the wrong thing
I began emailing essays into the void on 30 May 2021, 53 days before Rebecka, our youngest daughter...
7 months ago
I began emailing essays into the void on 30 May 2021, 53 days before Rebecka, our youngest daughter was born. This writing experiment has followed roughly the same trajectory as the baby. In 2021, Escaping Flatland's prime achievement was putting a few toys in its mouth (a...
Anecdotal Evidence
'But Johnson Fought Back'
Epigraphs to
books are often superfluous. They can come off as cute or pretentious. They add...
3 months ago
Epigraphs to
books are often superfluous. They can come off as cute or pretentious. They add little
or nothing to the manner in which we read the book and often amount to our
author showing off, touting his own vast reading or giving himself an unearned
endorsement. The most...
Wuthering...
Ovid's Metamorphoses, Canto I, "Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge"
Some notes on Canto I of Ovid’s Metamorphosis (8 CE). Just some of the things I am looking for...
a year ago
Some notes on Canto I of Ovid’s Metamorphosis (8 CE). Just some of the things I am looking for or
enjoying while reading Ovid’s epic of “forms changed / into new bodies.” (tr. Charles Martin, 2004, p. 15). Or, per Arthur Golding (1567, p. 3 of the
Paul Dry paperback) “Of...
This Space
Kevin Hart and the outside
There are two reasons why listening to Kevin Hart's interview on the Hermitix podcast, and reading...
a year ago
There are two reasons why listening to Kevin Hart's interview on the Hermitix podcast, and reading his new collection and The Dark Gaze for the second time, has helped me to recognise what I have forgotten, missed, misconstrued or misunderstood in Maurice Blanchot's writing or,...
This Space
39 Books: 1994
Given that my undergraduate degree was in Philosophy, it may seem odd that this the first book of...
8 months ago
Given that my undergraduate degree was in Philosophy, it may seem odd that this the first book of philosophy in the series. Many will say it is not a book of philosophy at all. That would explain why I gorged on Nick Land's The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and...
The Marginalian
The Poetry of Reality: Robert Louis Stevenson on What Makes Life Worth Living
"The true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and...
a year ago
"The true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing."
The Marginalian
Maira Kalman on How to Live with Remorse and Make of It a Portal of Creative Vitality
Each time we have tried to elevate ourselves above the other animals by claiming singular possession...
10 months ago
Each time we have tried to elevate ourselves above the other animals by claiming singular possession of some faculty, we have been humbled otherwise: Language, it turns out, is not ours alone, nor is the use of tools, nor is music. Elephants grieve, octopuses remember and...
Anecdotal Evidence
'On the Cello of Shared Grief'
With the deaths
of certain writers our reaction is shamefully selfish: Why did he do that to me? No...
2 weeks ago
With the deaths
of certain writers our reaction is shamefully selfish: Why did he do that to me? No thought for family or friends, or
even other readers, merely one’s sense of personal betrayal. That’s how I felt
seven years ago when Richard Wilbur died at age ninety-six, as...
The American Scholar
Mortal Coils
We aren’t alone in facing the inevitable
The post Mortal Coils appeared first on The American...
4 months ago
We aren’t alone in facing the inevitable
The post Mortal Coils appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'So Many Delicate Aphorisms of Human Nature'
“We should hesitate
to name any writings which would afford so large and so various a selection of...
3 months ago
“We should hesitate
to name any writings which would afford so large and so various a selection of detached
passages complete in themselves. . . . We should be at a loss to name the
writer of English prose who is his superior, or, setting Shakespeare aside, the
writer of English...
The American Scholar
Fiction, Fakery, and Factory Farming
Spanish novelist Munir Hachemi talks about Living Things
The post Fiction, Fakery, and Factory...
a month ago
Spanish novelist Munir Hachemi talks about Living Things
The post Fiction, Fakery, and Factory Farming appeared first on The American Scholar.
Escaping Flatland
Garlic and gravel
fragments
5 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Scabrous Memory Writhes Here, Underneath'
I’ve just
learned that some thirty percent of Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, is
paved,...
a month ago
I’ve just
learned that some thirty percent of Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, is
paved, covered in concrete and asphalt. That doesn’t count buildings and other
structures. It amounts to roughly 384 square miles of ground surface that is “case-hardened,
carapaced,” to...
Anecdotal Evidence
'They Never Settle Down'
A reader has
happened on an unfamiliar word while reading Dimitri Obolensky’s The Byzantine...
3 weeks ago
A reader has
happened on an unfamiliar word while reading Dimitri Obolensky’s The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe,
500-1453 (1971), one he finds “especially amusing”:
“Cosmas [Indicopleustes]
tells us of monks who, ignoring their vows, live unchastely, engage in trade
and...
Ben Borgers
I Misjudged My Chinese Professor
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Mouldering Boots of Other Days'
The triolet,
like its cousins the rondeau, rondel, and rondelet, is an intricate French
verse form,...
9 months ago
The triolet,
like its cousins the rondeau, rondel, and rondelet, is an intricate French
verse form, usually eight lines long and written in iambic tetrameter. The
first line is repeated as the fourth and seventh lines. Among English-language
poets, Robert Bridges and Thomas Hardy...
Anecdotal Evidence
'We Live Missing Something'
Four years
late, I’ve read Gary Saul Morson’s “Poet of Loneliness,” his review of Fifty-Two Stories...
8 months ago
Four years
late, I’ve read Gary Saul Morson’s “Poet of Loneliness,” his review of Fifty-Two Stories (Knopf, 2020), a
Chekhov translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I ordered the
collection early in the COVID-19 lockdown and will always associate it with the
other...
This Space
Favourite books 2021
If such things matter, and they don't, my book of the year is Peter Holm Jensen’s The Moment. As I...
over a year ago
If such things matter, and they don't, my book of the year is Peter Holm Jensen’s The Moment. As I wrote in April, it’s one in which the writer seeks “a modest, self-effacing place within the intersection of time and eternity” and can be read again and again for this reason, as...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Pick Up a Machete and Start Exploring'
A splendid
day for American literature: born on March 1 are Ralph Ellison (1914), Howard
Nemerov...
10 months ago
A splendid
day for American literature: born on March 1 are Ralph Ellison (1914), Howard
Nemerov (1920) and Richard Wilbur (1921). I’m reminded of how important contemporary
American writers were to me when I was young, in the 60s and 70s. Everything
was new and promising, and I...
The Marginalian
Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way: A Tender Lunar Fable about the Stubborn Courage of Prevailing Over the Odds...
"But we will have to find a way to live, as people do."
4 months ago
"But we will have to find a way to live, as people do."
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