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...
10 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."
ribbonfarm
The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet
My essay The Extended Internet Universe, where I coined the term “cozyweb” (probably in my top 5...
9 months ago
My essay The Extended Internet Universe, where I coined the term “cozyweb” (probably in my top 5 most successful memes) is featured in this cute little collectible book, The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet put together by Yancey Strickler (whom you may have heard of as the...
The Elysian
Is America about to fall? Or flourish?
That depends on us.
2 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Man of My Kidney'
I met my
nephrologist for the first time when we shared an elevator to his office on the
fourth...
8 months ago
I met my
nephrologist for the first time when we shared an elevator to his office on the
fourth floor of the hospital. Between patients he was eating a banana, his breakfast, and carried a stack of folders in his other hand. On the front of his
white lab coat was his name, the...
Anecdotal Evidence
'When We Have Excellent Books, They Sell'
“People tell
us all the time that civilization is finished, that the world is coming to an
end. But...
4 months ago
“People tell
us all the time that civilization is finished, that the world is coming to an
end. But then we look at our sales details and we smile.”
John Byron
Kuhner posts a rare dispatch of hope from the world of books, the beating heart
of what remains of our civilization. In...
Anecdotal Evidence
'To Be in Some Respect Unique'
“[L]et us
not forget that ‘public’ denotes a collection not of identical units, but of
units...
11 months ago
“[L]et us
not forget that ‘public’ denotes a collection not of identical units, but of
units separable and (under close scrutiny) distinguishable one from another.”
I work with professors of statistics, among others, for whom data are the primal substance of the human world. You...
Wuthering...
The appeal of Septology as religious fiction - the urge, inexplicably, to pray - because it helps!...
Septology is a stream-of-consciousness novel
throughout, a mix of sentence fragments, unconventional...
2 months ago
Septology is a stream-of-consciousness novel
throughout, a mix of sentence fragments, unconventional punctuation, and temporal
shifts, meaning the painter Asle is sometimes thinking about the present and
sometimes about the past.
These are all old moves, old techniques. I was a...
The Marginalian
17 Life-Learnings from 17 Years of The Marginalian
The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006, under an outgrown name, to an outgrown self that feels...
a year ago
The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006, under an outgrown name, to an outgrown self that feels to me now almost like a different species of consciousness. (It can only be so — if we don’t continually outgrow ourselves, if we don’t wince a little at our former ideas, ideals,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'An Enormous Yes'
“The voice was unmistakable. It made misery beautiful.”
My ideal setting for listening to music is...
6 months ago
“The voice was unmistakable. It made misery beautiful.”
My ideal setting for listening to music is my eleven-year-old Nissan. When
I play a CD, I listen and never treat
it as background. I hate the idea of music as ambient filler, a second
atmosphere. My youngest son plays music...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Very Quietly, an Aside'
Reporters
and their editors have always fetishized what’s known in the trade as the lede – the...
12 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...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Collection of Scraps and Shards of Knowledge'
“During this time we know [John] Donne was
collecting his fascinations in a book: a collection of...
5 months ago
“During this time we know [John] Donne was
collecting his fascinations in a book: a collection of scraps and shards of
knowledge known as a commonplace book.”
Like Donne (1572-1621), some of us are
magpie-minded, collecting objects shiny and drab, often without obvious
utility....
Anecdotal Evidence
'One of the Finest of Human Creatures'
Turnstile One (1948) is a slender anthology of poems,
stories, essays and reviews edited by V.S...
11 months ago
Turnstile One (1948) is a slender anthology of poems,
stories, essays and reviews edited by V.S Pritchett and drawn from The New Statesman and Nation. Founded in
1913 by the Webbs and others associated with the Fabian Society, the magazine’s
politics were left-wing and many of...
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...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Barricades Against Boredom'
I’ve reminded
my sons with tedious regularity that the world is densely populated with boring
people...
a year ago
I’ve reminded
my sons with tedious regularity that the world is densely populated with boring
people and boring situations. Think of advertising, PowerPoint, golf, Marxists,
super-hero movies, activists of any stripe, videogames and the novels of Joseph
McElroy. That each of...
This Space
39 Books: 1999
I've always preferred the Serpent's Tail edition of Pessoa's Book of Disquiet over the others...
8 months ago
I've always preferred the Serpent's Tail edition of Pessoa's Book of Disquiet over the others published around the same time, such as from Quartet Encounters and Carcanet, the latter with a fussy variant on the title: The Book of Disquietude. But this one is the most pleasurable...
The American Scholar
Sienna Martz
Sculpting the detritus of fast fashion
The post Sienna Martz appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 months ago
Sculpting the detritus of fast fashion
The post Sienna Martz appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Whole Sky Seems to Turn Into Rain'
The storm
was brief and fierce. Wind pushed the rain horizontally, like an airborne
river. The tops...
8 months ago
The storm
was brief and fierce. Wind pushed the rain horizontally, like an airborne
river. The tops of newly planted trees touched the ground. Yard and street filled
with branches, leaves and pine cones. A block away, an oak cracked and fell,
blocking the street. We lost power at...
Journal and Links by...
🔗 Being Hired to Care
One of the biggest mistakes that I see people make as they start to dip their toes into advising is...
5 months ago
One of the biggest mistakes that I see people make as they start to dip their toes into advising is try to anchor their work to specific deliverables. Doing this is bad for a number of reasons, but the primary one is that when you’re being brought on as an advisor, you’re not...
The Marginalian
Between Encyclopedia and Fairy Tale: The Wondrous Birds and Reptiles of 18th-Century Artist Dorothea...
Imagine a world of constant wars and deadly plagues, a world without eyeglasses, bicycles, or...
4 months ago
Imagine a world of constant wars and deadly plagues, a world without eyeglasses, bicycles, or sanitation. Imagine being a gifted child in that world, knowing you are born into a body that will never be granted the basic rights of citizenship in any country, into a mind that will...
The Elysian
Hint #1
I'm publishing a new print collection in three weeks.
5 months ago
I'm publishing a new print collection in three weeks.
Anecdotal Evidence
'On the Marge of Lake Lebarge'
Memory has
no conscience and little sense of good taste. It’s our most intimate capacity
yet often...
a year ago
Memory has
no conscience and little sense of good taste. It’s our most intimate capacity
yet often feels alien, as though we were recalling the memories of someone
else. In the past, of course, we were
someone else. As a kid I watched ridiculous amounts of television, which is...
sbensu
How to: friction logs
Friction logs are a technique to improve your own products and understand others. You use the...
a year ago
Friction logs are a technique to improve your own products and understand others. You use the produdct the way a real user would and write down every single moment you experience some form of negative emotion.
Escaping Flatland
Ethos and imagination
Milk Drop Coronet, an ultra-high-speed photograph of the splash of a drop of milk, Harold Edgerton,...
2 months ago
Milk Drop Coronet, an ultra-high-speed photograph of the splash of a drop of milk, Harold Edgerton, 1957
Escaping Flatland
Bring everything into the conversation layer
A conversation is not an interface that lets you get to know each other; it is an interface that...
a week ago
A conversation is not an interface that lets you get to know each other; it is an interface that lets you savor and get enriched by the Otherness of each other. The richer the conversation becomes, the more this Otherness can be expressed and explored.
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Word Can Open Like a Tomb to Reveal Its Past'
The poet William
Wenthe opens his essay “The Glamour of Words” with a provocative memory. It was
the...
9 months ago
The poet William
Wenthe opens his essay “The Glamour of Words” with a provocative memory. It was
the anniversary of Charles Dickens’ death and he was in the Poets’ Corner of
Westminster Abbey, where Dickens is interred and his sister is speaking to mark
the occasion. Wenthe looks...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Thoughts Wait Here for Future Readers'
In Another Beauty (trans. Clare Cavanagh,
2000), the late Adam Zagajewski revisits his alma mater,...
a year ago
In Another Beauty (trans. Clare Cavanagh,
2000), the late Adam Zagajewski revisits his alma mater, the Jagiellonka
Library in Kraków, and calls it a “botanical garden of ideas,” a metaphor
worthy of the librarian Borges. I briefly visited the Jagiellonka, as it’s
known, in 2012...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Probity Was Perhaps the Highest Good'
As a
newspaper reporter I covered only one capital murder trial. This was in rural
Indiana in 1983....
9 months ago
As a
newspaper reporter I covered only one capital murder trial. This was in rural
Indiana in 1983. At the age of eighteen, William Spranger had fatally shot a
town marshal, William Miner, in the back with the officer’s service revolver. The
jury found Spranger guilty and Judge...
Josh Thompson
What Do You Do?
I enjoy meeting new people. Usually, one of the first questions I’ll ask them is “What to you...
over a year ago
I enjoy meeting new people. Usually, one of the first questions I’ll ask them is “What to you do?”
They usually respond with their occupation, or their status in school. My follow-up question is “When you’re not doing that, what do you do?”
Sometimes this is a conversational...
Josh Thompson
Whole Messages in Slack
I use Slack at work. And used it in Turing. And am in a few programming-related Slack groups. (Ahoy,...
over a year ago
I use Slack at work. And used it in Turing. And am in a few programming-related Slack groups. (Ahoy, #DenverDevs). My last job, I used Slack. The job before that, I got the whole company on Slack. I’ve used it for years.
Slack delivers value to me, and induces little anxiety, and...
The Marginalian
The Dalai Lama’s Ethical and Ecological Philosophy for the Next Generation, Illustrated
"We are all interconnected in the universe, and from this, universal responsibility arises......
a year ago
"We are all interconnected in the universe, and from this, universal responsibility arises... Everyone has the responsibility to develop a happier world."
The Elysian
Week 8: What communities should know about you? (Write a story about them)
8 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Whole Point of Literature'
I learned of
some twits who see no reason to read Tolstoy because he was such a terrible...
2 months ago
I learned of
some twits who see no reason to read Tolstoy because he was such a terrible human
being, as though this constituted recently declassified information. Such an understanding
of literature and literary history, if followed to its logical conclusion, will
result in a...
The American Scholar
“The Imaginary Iceberg” by Elizabeth Bishop
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “The Imaginary Iceberg” by Elizabeth Bishop appeared first on...
9 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “The Imaginary Iceberg” by Elizabeth Bishop appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
“À une passante” by Charles Baudelaire
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “À une passante” by Charles Baudelaire appeared first on The...
6 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “À une passante” by Charles Baudelaire appeared first on The American Scholar.
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 =...
Ben Borgers
Are My Technical Posts Worth It?
over a year ago
The Marginalian
The Bird in the Heart: Terry Tempest Williams on the Paradox of Transformation and How to Live with...
"We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather...
11 months ago
"We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay."
Escaping Flatland
Integrity
Intensely Human, No 3
11 months ago
This Space
39 Books: 2015
In the Spring of 1997, I visited a friend in Kassel, a city in the middle of Germany, home of the...
8 months ago
In the Spring of 1997, I visited a friend in Kassel, a city in the middle of Germany, home of the Brothers Grimm and Franz Rosenzweig, and not very far from Weimer, hence the visit to the Goethehaus mentioned in the entry for 1989. I hadn't heard of it before and nor had my...
sbensu
Twitter's Sith and Jedi
In Star Wars, hate gives the Sith power from the dark side of the Force beyond what the Jedi can...
11 months ago
In Star Wars, hate gives the Sith power from the dark side of the Force beyond what the Jedi can reach. But when they lean into hate, they lose their soul to it. Twitter offers the same bargain as the Force.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Appear to the Public to be Some Sort of Miracle'
On Christmas
Eve 1890, Chekhov writes to his friend and editor Alexi Suvorin:
“I believe
in both...
5 months ago
On Christmas
Eve 1890, Chekhov writes to his friend and editor Alexi Suvorin:
“I believe
in both [Robert] Koch and spermine, and I praise the Lord. Kochines, spermines,
etc. all appear to the public to be some sort of miracle that has sprung
unexpectedly from someone’s head like...
The American Scholar
The Importance of Being Different
A travel writer’s education
The post The Importance of Being Different appeared first on The...
8 months ago
A travel writer’s education
The post The Importance of Being Different appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'The World's an End'
In recent
years John Dryden has become one of my reliable poets. He impresses me as a
sane adult,...
5 months ago
In recent
years John Dryden has become one of my reliable poets. He impresses me as a
sane adult, with equal emphasis on both of those words. No dabbling in drugs
and madness. I brought a volume of his poems with me to Cleveland where I’m
visiting my brother in hospice. No...
The Elysian
What movement does the world need now?
Your answers to December's writing prompt.
4 days ago
Your answers to December's writing prompt.
Journal and Links by...
🔗 Knowledge workers
Perhaps it’s even better to acknowledge that there never were any knowledge workers. There have only...
6 months ago
Perhaps it’s even better to acknowledge that there never were any knowledge workers. There have only ever been workers.
— Mandy Brown
Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
The American Scholar
Dottie Lo Bue
House and home
The post Dottie Lo Bue appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 months ago
House and home
The post Dottie Lo Bue appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
From Las Cosas Nuevas by Ennio Moltedo
The post From <em>Las Cosas Nuevas</em> by Ennio Moltedo appeared first on The American Scholar.
9 months ago
The post From <em>Las Cosas Nuevas</em> by Ennio Moltedo appeared first on The American Scholar.
Journal and Links by...
✏️ Nothing Bad About It
A year ago, Jen and I made an overland run from the south end of Anza-Borrego to the northern end....
a year ago
A year ago, Jen and I made an overland run from the south end of Anza-Borrego to the northern end. On the last night in Hawk Canyon, a super windy night made for less than ideal sleep. We ended up closing up the tent and sleeping in the front seats. Thankfully, the seats in a...
Steven Scrawls
I want to love fiction
I want to love fiction
I want to love fiction.
I want to love both reading and writing fiction. I...
9 months ago
I want to love fiction
I want to love fiction.
I want to love both reading and writing fiction. I want to obsess
over the craft of fiction, to pore over characterization and structure,
to create stories that radiate color and humanity and hope.
I want fiction to be a tool for...
Josh Thompson
How To Take Back Your Attention On The Internet with uBlock
note: this page has 17Mb of gifs and images. I don’t really want to take the time to manually trim...
over a year ago
note: this page has 17Mb of gifs and images. I don’t really want to take the time to manually trim the gifs from >3Mb/each to <1Mb each, so I didn’t. If you’re on mobile, or trying to conserve data, you might want to come back to this one later.
I value my attention and focus. I...
Anecdotal Evidence
'This Refined, White-Sheeted Torture'
My tutelary
spirit of recent days has been the American poet L.E. Sissman, dead from
Hodgkin...
5 months ago
My tutelary
spirit of recent days has been the American poet L.E. Sissman, dead from
Hodgkin lymphoma at age forty-eight. Out in the hall I spoke with three
oncologists after they had yet again examined
my brother. I asked the question no one had yet asked: How much time does...
Wuthering...
The Story of the Stone, volume 2 - all agreed that this was the definitive poem on the subject of...
I have continued on with The Story of the Stone, the
2,500 page 18th century Chinese novel by, or...
2 months ago
I have continued on with The Story of the Stone, the
2,500 page 18th century Chinese novel by, or mostly by, Cao Xueqin. Here I will write about the second volume of
the David Hawkes translation, The Crab-flower Club. Last time, after reading the first fifth of
the novel, I...
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
'How Quickly It Would Slip By'
“[S]ome of
the memories I can now summon up have a greater intensity than the events...
4 months ago
“[S]ome of
the memories I can now summon up have a greater intensity than the events themselves
seemed to possess at the time, or rather – since memory has a filter of its
own, sometimes surprising in what it suppresses or retains, but always significant
– some of them stand out...
Steven Scrawls
Word Rot
Word Rot
Unless you are extraordinarily unfortunate, every problem you ever
face will have been...
a year ago
Word Rot
Unless you are extraordinarily unfortunate, every problem you ever
face will have been faced in some form by someone who came before you.
That person may have already shared the story of that challenge, and
that story might have melded with other tales to form collective...
Journal and Links by...
✏️ This Is What We Have To Lose
Yesterday felt defeating with the damning report that our climate has indeed moved unfortunately...
over a year ago
Yesterday felt defeating with the damning report that our climate has indeed moved unfortunately forward into severity and decline. It’s too late for some aspects but not too late to avoid some of the worst aspects.
The fires, the smoke, and the record-high temperatures that...
Steven Scrawls
Quicksilver and Clay
Quicksilver and Clay
Like everyone else, I walk around the world in a body made of
quicksilver and...
a year ago
Quicksilver and Clay
Like everyone else, I walk around the world in a body made of
quicksilver and clay. The pieces of my body—my sense of humor, my
beliefs, my opinions and artistic sensibilities and worldviews,
everything—combine to present a cohesive self to be...
Astral Codex Ten
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity
...
2 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Each Sweaty Midnight I’m a Lifer'
Think of
this as an unexpected coda to Monday’s post, “A Recon Patrol Is a Small Unit,”
in which I...
5 months ago
Think of
this as an unexpected coda to Monday’s post, “A Recon Patrol Is a Small Unit,”
in which I asked readers to report anything they knew about the war
correspondent Albert W. Vinson. He was author of a dispatch recounting a 1968 reconnaissance
patrol in Vietnam led by the...
The Marginalian
The Cosmogony of You
We live in a state of perpetual dissociation from the almost unbearable wonder of being alive....
a month ago
We live in a state of perpetual dissociation from the almost unbearable wonder of being alive. Wonder is always an edge state, its edge so sharp it threatens to rupture the mundane and sever us from what we mistake for reality — the TV, the townhouse, the trauma narrative. If we...
Josh Thompson
Processes Vs. Goals (or, Systems vs. Accomplishments)
In this
excellent article on systems vs. goals, James argues that even if you did not pursue any...
over a year ago
In this
excellent article on systems vs. goals, James argues that even if you did not pursue any specific goals, with the right
system, you will still go a long way.
This idea has been floating around my head for over a year, now, and I think it’s slowly coalescing into something...
Josh Thompson
Preparing to adopt a habit
There are many habits I wish I had. More times than I can count, I have tried to get up early. I...
over a year ago
There are many habits I wish I had. More times than I can count, I have tried to get up early. I faithfully set my alarm for some crack-of-dawn time that leaves me with a reasonable amount of sleep, but gives me time to myself before I have to get ready for work.
Almost as many...
The Marginalian
The Hot Shower as Uncommon Prayer
One of the paradoxes of being alive is that it is often through the extremes of sensation, through...
a week ago
One of the paradoxes of being alive is that it is often through the extremes of sensation, through the shock of having a body, that we come most proximate to the subtleties of the soul. Walt Whitman knew this: “If the body is not the soul,” he sang electric, “what is the soul?”...
Journal and Links by...
✏️ Hoja Santa
On our first visit to Mexico City, and because we're often weary of lines, we opted out on the...
over a year ago
On our first visit to Mexico City, and because we're often weary of lines, we opted out on the well-known Panaderia Rosetta. We even skipped eating the infamous Mexican pastry concha!
But on this trip, after having a delicious chocolate one from Delirio, and seeing the location...
Ben Borgers
Trash Bags in the Laundry Room
over a year ago
Ben Borgers
Donating forks to the dining hall
7 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'For the Ordinary Educated Man'
I’ve read
most of Robert Conquest’s books – history, poetry, fiction – and here is the
sole passage...
6 months ago
I’ve read
most of Robert Conquest’s books – history, poetry, fiction – and here is the
sole passage I have almost committed to memory:
“Literature
exists for the ordinary educated man, and any literature that actively requires
enormous training can be at best of only peripheral...
Anecdotal Evidence
'To Build a House for Fools and Mad'
An entry dated
June 15, 1830 in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Table
Talk: “[Jonathan, not Taylor]...
7 months ago
An entry dated
June 15, 1830 in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Table
Talk: “[Jonathan, not Taylor] Swift
was anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco,--the
soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place. Yet Swift was rare.”
Now there’s a
metaphor that sticks in the mind – “dwelling in a dry...
Journal and Links by...
✏️ Midlife Malaise Part II
It’s been an interesting year so far. Overall, I can’t overtly complain: I find my work gratifying,...
a year ago
It’s been an interesting year so far. Overall, I can’t overtly complain: I find my work gratifying, and have been fortunate to take some great trips this year both internationally (Mexico City and Kuala Lumpur), as well as some off-roading and camping locally.
But there’s a...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Master Etcher of Human Portraits'
In
celebration of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s fiftieth birthday, on December 22,
1919, seventeen...
a year ago
In
celebration of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s fiftieth birthday, on December 22,
1919, seventeen poets and friends were asked to contribute to a symposium published
a day earlier in the New York Times Book
Review. All but Robert Frost contributed. Amy Lowell wrote: “A realist,...
The American Scholar
Tramping With Virginia
A seminal essay about walking the streets of London can present challenges in the classrooms of...
8 months ago
A seminal essay about walking the streets of London can present challenges in the classrooms of today
The post Tramping With Virginia appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
Wholeness and the Implicate Order: Physicist David Bohm on Bridging Consciousness and Reality
How to "include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided,...
a year ago
How to "include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border."
Josh Thompson
Maybe "Now" Is Not the Right Time
Recently I deleted a bunch of old notes I had in
Evernote. Some of the notes were almost immediately...
over a year ago
Recently I deleted a bunch of old notes I had in
Evernote. Some of the notes were almost immediately unneeded, like old receipts and confirmations.
Much of the rest was notes related to goals (“Checklist to move out of MD Apartment”, “Planning trip to Buenos Aires”) or to...
Wuthering...
Menander's Dyskolos - each man would hold a moderate share and be content
This week it’s Menander’s Dyskolos, or The Grouch, or The Misanthrope (316 BCE), which may or may...
over a year ago
This week it’s Menander’s Dyskolos, or The Grouch, or The Misanthrope (316 BCE), which may or may not have inspired the title of Molière’s great play, and nothing more than the title since the play was, like all of Menander’s plays, long lost. A fairly complete Dyskolos was the...
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."
The Marginalian
The Merger Self, the Seeker Self, and the Lifelong Challenge of Balancing Intimacy and Independence
Each time I see a sparrow inside an airport, I am seized with tenderness for the bird, for living so...
9 months ago
Each time I see a sparrow inside an airport, I am seized with tenderness for the bird, for living so acutely and concretely a paradox that haunts our human lives in myriad guises — the difficulty of discerning comfort from entrapment, freedom from peril. It is a paradox rooted in...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Mind Quite Vacant Is a Mind Distress’d'
I’ll be
going halftime at the university, effective July 1, in preparation for retiring
later this...
7 months ago
I’ll be
going halftime at the university, effective July 1, in preparation for retiring
later this year. I knew a guy in high school who already yearned for retirement
despite never having had a job, whereas I’d been working since I was twelve. He
wanted to play golf and go...
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.
The Elysian
Please come up with wildly speculative futures
Inside my writing philosophy.
9 months ago
Inside my writing philosophy.
Journal and Links by...
🔗 Tusks
No timeline. Just your posts. There are many great Mastodon apps. Tusks isn’t meant to replace but...
5 months ago
No timeline. Just your posts. There are many great Mastodon apps. Tusks isn’t meant to replace but to augment. It makes posting on Mastodon feel like publishing to your blog.
Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
Anecdotal Evidence
'Its Super-Ego Has Gone AWOL'
The American
philosopher Brand Blanshard delivered the Riecker Memorial Lecture at the
University of...
3 months ago
The American
philosopher Brand Blanshard delivered the Riecker Memorial Lecture at the
University of Arizona in 1962. It was published that year as a twenty-three-page
pamphlet titled “On Sanity in Thought and Art.” For much of the text Blanshard
reviews various twentieth-century...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Soil Must Have Been Prepared'
Tom Disch
took the title of his first collection of essays and reviews from “The Castle of...
a year ago
Tom Disch
took the title of his first collection of essays and reviews from “The Castle of Indolence” (1748), eighty-one Spenserian stanzas by the Scottish poet James
Thomson. The poem is a sort of mock-epical hymn to the Protestant work ethic, a virtue ably
represented by...
The Marginalian
The Afterlives of the Soul: Sister Nivedita on Love and Death
"To the soul, time does not exist. Only her own great purpose exists, shining clear and steady...
a year ago
"To the soul, time does not exist. Only her own great purpose exists, shining clear and steady through the mists before her."
Josh Thompson
Notes on, and quotes from: The Politics of Jesus (Yoder, 1972, 1994)
As I’ve done many times before, compiling some notes about some long quotes from some books.
In the...
over a year ago
As I’ve done many times before, compiling some notes about some long quotes from some books.
In the modern world, we’re loath to read long, complicated passeges of text. I hope to get some of you to eventually order your own copy of The Politics of Jesus. On my website you can...
The Elysian
Founders will get much richer by exiting to employees
This is how we create a wave of employee ownership.
5 months ago
This is how we create a wave of employee ownership.
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...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Thy Auld Damn'd Elbow Yeuks Wi' Joy'
It’s the sheer unembarrassed
redundancy of English I love. We have a dozen ways or more to say...
6 days ago
It’s the sheer unembarrassed
redundancy of English I love. We have a dozen ways or more to say everything.
Synonyms are never scrupulously identical, and each encourages us to refine our
expression and avoid the lazy articulation of the herd. Even so childishly slangy
a word as...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Discussian of General Ideas'
A friend who
is not a dedicated reader but has more common sense and worldly knowhow than I’ve
ever...
5 months ago
A friend who
is not a dedicated reader but has more common sense and worldly knowhow than I’ve
ever possessed tells me he plans to reread Animal
House and 1984. Neither have I
read since junior-high school, probably the ideal time for such books, which
are among the most...
Journal and Links by...
✏️ To Comprehend
To stand in a landscape that is hard to comprehend is to know that not all that should be celebrated...
a year ago
To stand in a landscape that is hard to comprehend is to know that not all that should be celebrated is human-made. To understand that to get here, it took hundreds, thousands, millions of denominations of time to render this environment is a lesson in a slow life that we’ve...
Journal and Links by...
✏️ Mama and Me ‘24
Jen and I recently returned from our annual visit to see my family in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Taking...
3 months ago
Jen and I recently returned from our annual visit to see my family in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Taking photos with the family has become even more important as the years go by, and this core memory captured by Jen of my mama and me, is a great one for posterity.
Read on...
Wuthering...
Books I Read in July 2023
How embarrassing that I did not write a thing this month,
but I promise I had a good excuse. ...
a year ago
How embarrassing that I did not write a thing this month,
but I promise I had a good excuse. Posts
on Cynicism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism will appear this month, I swear, or at
least hope. My eventual excuse this month will
be, I am afraid, even better.
Still, I...
The Marginalian
How Emotions Are Made
"Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world."
11 months ago
"Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world."
Journal and Links by...
🔗 High Desert Road Map
From Morongo Valley to 29 Palms, there’s plenty to explore. Here are a few of our favorite...
6 months ago
From Morongo Valley to 29 Palms, there’s plenty to explore. Here are a few of our favorite places.
Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
This Space
The disaster of writing: My Weil by Lars Iyer
"When a
plane crashes, a bomb explodes, a city floods or a pandemic begins,
Lucy Easthope's phone...
a year ago
"When a
plane crashes, a bomb explodes, a city floods or a pandemic begins,
Lucy Easthope's phone starts to ring" says the blurb to her recent book subtitled Stories of Love, Loss and Hope from an Expert in Disaster, and goes on to report rapturous praise from critics and...
Steven Scrawls
The Controversial Aftermath of the 777Linguine Interview
The
Controversial Aftermath of the 777Linguine Interview
Longtime fans of popular EDM “angststep”...
6 months ago
The
Controversial Aftermath of the 777Linguine Interview
Longtime fans of popular EDM “angststep” artist 777Linguine are
“shocked” and “betrayed” after his polarizing statements yesterday that
his latest album, NOMORETEARS2CRY, was written and recorded in a time of
“profound...
Josh Thompson
Waking Up Early, Part 3
I’ve written about my attempts to
wake up early before.
Most recently, I
promised to take a sleep...
over a year ago
I’ve written about my attempts to
wake up early before.
Most recently, I
promised to take a sleep log, to track trends. Fortunately, I did not intend to try to wake up early, because I didn’t.
Here’s what I learned in the last three weeks:
Benadryl messes with your ability to...
The Elysian
Mondragon as the new City-State
This cooperative could be its own country.
4 months ago
This cooperative could be its own country.
The Elysian
How many hours a week do you (actually) spend on your salary job?
I can’t find any statistics about this (because how would you?), but most of the people I know who...
6 months ago
I can’t find any statistics about this (because how would you?), but most of the people I know who work salary jobs work significantly fewer tha…
Journal and Links by...
🔗 What price?
If anything, as the well gets poisoned by their own outputs, large language models may well end up...
3 months ago
If anything, as the well gets poisoned by their own outputs, large language models may well end up eating their own slop and getting their own version of mad cow disease. So this might be as good as they’re ever going to get.
— Jeremy Keith
I use AI. Not particularly for...
Ben Borgers
Thursday, January 13, 2022
over a year ago
The Marginalian
Archives of Joy: Reflections on Animals and the Nature of Being
An invitation to "a certain, forgotten way of seeing the world" and an exultation at "earthly life,...
a year ago
An invitation to "a certain, forgotten way of seeing the world" and an exultation at "earthly life, with its duration so short it obliges us to surpass ourselves."
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...
The American Scholar
Writer on Board
The cruise story from Twain to Shteyngart
The post Writer on Board appeared first on The American...
4 months ago
The cruise story from Twain to Shteyngart
The post Writer on Board appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
Habits, Milestones, and Climbing
Since April 9th, I have spent exactly 70 minutes training for climbing. Prior to April 27th, I have...
over a year ago
Since April 9th, I have spent exactly 70 minutes training for climbing. Prior to April 27th, I have climbed exactly seven times in the last five months.
I just spent two days at the New River Gorge and exceeded my expectations, considering my almost half-year hiatus from regular...
The Marginalian
Some Thoughts about the Ocean and the Universe
How to bear the gravity of being.
a year ago
How to bear the gravity of being.
Wuthering...
Ferdowsi's Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings - No one has any knowledge of those first days...
My little Persian literature syllabus in March was built on Aboloqasem
Ferdowsi’s gigantic epic...
9 months ago
My little Persian literature syllabus in March was built on Aboloqasem
Ferdowsi’s gigantic epic Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (1010), a
slender 850 pages in Dick Davis’s 2006 prose (mostly) translation. He added another 100 pages to the 2016
edition, whether filling out...
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
'Tomorrow I Propose to Regulate My Room'
A reader in Columbus,
Ohio reports a “Samuel Johnson sighting in Ogden Nash.” In the December...
a month 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...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Minute Passage of Private Life'
A young reader asks “Why ‘anecdotal’?” It was a last-minute decision
that Sunday afternoon almost...
a year ago
A young reader asks “Why ‘anecdotal’?” It was a last-minute decision
that Sunday afternoon almost eighteen years ago. I had it narrowed down to
three or four potential titles but liked the legal/criminological connotation
of “anecdotal evidence,” which is always judged suspect by...
Josh Thompson
POODR Notes: Acquiring Behavior Through Inheritance (Chapter 6)
I’m reading through Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby .
These are some notes from chapter 6,...
over a year ago
I’m reading through Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby .
These are some notes from chapter 6, Acquiring Behavior Through Inheritance; mostly these are for me, and they don’t intend to stand on their own. Read the book, work through chapter six, and then come back and read...
Josh Thompson
Blocks and Closures in Ruby
Continuing on from yesterday’s post about method_missing, I’m moving on to a part of Ruby’s language...
over a year ago
Continuing on from yesterday’s post about method_missing, I’m moving on to a part of Ruby’s language that has been a bit of a mystery for me for quite some time. I’m still working through Metaprogramming in Ruby.
It’s the concept of lambdas, procs, blocks, and more. I also hope...
Josh Thompson
Type. Publish. Done.
Yesterday I read How the Hell do I Prioritize Work, Blog & Find Balance.
The author of the letter is...
over a year ago
Yesterday I read How the Hell do I Prioritize Work, Blog & Find Balance.
The author of the letter is a busy, accomplished guy and still manages to write regularly.
He said, in short:
I sit down, and I write. I’ve done it a lot, so I’m not bad at it. I don’t often proof read my...
The Marginalian
A Taste of How It Feels to Be Free: Pioneering Psychoanalyst Karen Horney on Our Inner Conflicts,...
"The most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals is the striving for wholeheartedness: to be...
a year ago
"The most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals is the striving for wholeheartedness: to be without pretense, to be emotionally sincere, to be able to put the whole of oneself into one’s feelings, one’s work, one’s beliefs. It can be approximated only to the extent that...
Escaping Flatland
Notes on energy and intelligence becoming cheaper
In 2015, I amused myself by training a neural network to generate poems in the style of various...
a year ago
In 2015, I amused myself by training a neural network to generate poems in the style of various poets I knew and submitted the results to a fanzine.
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Jewish Kind of Feeling of the World'
Isaac
Bashevis Singer, speaking with an interviewer in 1983:
“I really
don’t believe that a writer...
a month ago
Isaac
Bashevis Singer, speaking with an interviewer in 1983:
“I really
don’t believe that a writer can have a programme. Many have; they say, ‘I’m writing
about alienation’, or whatever they call it. I don’t have this programme. I
have a story to tell and I sit down to tell the...
This Space
Blood Knowledge by Kirsty Gunn
"A novel is a kind of lazy way of writing a short story, a short story a lazy way of writing a poem"...
a month ago
"A novel is a kind of lazy way of writing a short story, a short story a lazy way of writing a poem" said Muriel Spark, adding by explanation: "The longer they become, the more they seem to lose value". We might wonder then if the most value is to be found in the shortest novels,...
The American Scholar
Birthday Boy
The post Birthday Boy appeared first on The American Scholar.
a week ago
The post Birthday Boy appeared first on The American Scholar.
Ben Borgers
Why Do We Still Use Snapchat?
over a year ago
Escaping Flatland
A summary of what I wrote in 2023
In 2023, I published 37 essays. I’ve spent the better part of the morning going through it all to...
a year ago
In 2023, I published 37 essays. I’ve spent the better part of the morning going through it all to see what the themes were—it is quite surprising to notice what emerges when you allow yourself to follow your curiosity and intuition for a full year. I wrote a summary of the...
Ben Borgers
It's Fun to Do Things with Care
over a year ago
Josh Thompson
Full Copy of 'The Atlanta Zone Plan' from 1922
A Warning and a Request
In a moment, you will read the full text of a 1922 marketing pamphlet. This...
over a year ago
A Warning and a Request
In a moment, you will read the full text of a 1922 marketing pamphlet. This document is an important thread to understanding some very large political problems facing the world today, specifically housing, affordability, the growing wealth gap, and...
The American Scholar
The Challenge
The post The Challenge appeared first on The American Scholar.
5 months ago
The post The Challenge appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
2015: The year I didn't think much?
I generally think that if I write what I am thinking about, I can think about it a lot better....
over a year ago
I generally think that if I write what I am thinking about, I can think about it a lot better. Writing has a clarifying effect (or is it affect?) on thought.
If that’s the case, I just didn’t think much in 2015:
I wrote about 45 things in 2013 and 2014. I wrote 8 in 2015.
I’m...
Escaping Flatland
Almost everyone I’ve met would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on
Including me
a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'What Will Become of My Diary?'
“During the
morning hours of the first of September 1939, war broke out between Germany and
Poland...
4 months ago
“During the
morning hours of the first of September 1939, war broke out between Germany and
Poland and indirectly between Germany and Poland’s allies, England and France.
This war will indeed bring destruction upon human civilization which merits
annihilation and destruction....
The Marginalian
The Managed Heart: Emotional Labor and the Psychological Cost of Ambivalence
What are you unwilling to feel? This is one of the most brutal, most clarifying questions in life,...
2 months ago
What are you unwilling to feel? This is one of the most brutal, most clarifying questions in life, answering which requires great courage and great vulnerability. Out of that unwillingness arises the greatest inner tension of the heart: that between what we wish we felt and what...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Like a Golden Retriever'
Part of the pleasure of listening to the late jazz
musician Dave McKenna playing piano was hearing...
a year ago
Part of the pleasure of listening to the late jazz
musician Dave McKenna playing piano was hearing the musical quotes he wove into his improvisations. The practice, deplored by some
critics, was not unique to McKenna, of course. To cite only jazz musicians I
have seen in person,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'I Read You As I Listen to Rare Music'
Rare is the
writer who captures our imagination when we’re young and still assembling our
personal...
5 months ago
Rare is the
writer who captures our imagination when we’re young and still assembling our
personal canons, and remains rereadable for the rest of our lives. For me that
would include Swift, Defoe and a third English novelist, a rather exotic import
from Poland: Joseph Conrad. I...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Midst the Pomp and Toil of War'
I learned
that General George S. Patton, Jr. wrote poetry from my father, a man who never
read...
7 months ago
I learned
that General George S. Patton, Jr. wrote poetry from my father, a man who never
read poetry. I was a senior in high school. Days before we went to see the
Oscar-winning film Patton, he delivered
a lecture on the general’s military prowess, anti-Semitism and desire
to...
The Marginalian
The Dictionary Story: A Love Letter to Language Tucked Into a Delightful Fable about the Difficult...
“Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf rasped in the only surviving recording of her voice — a...
2 months ago
“Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf rasped in the only surviving recording of her voice — a love letter to language as an instrument of thought and a medium of being. “Words are events, they do things, change things,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a generation after her. To...
Wuthering...
Thou hast devourd thy sonnes - some notes on Seneca's horror plays
My Seneca reading in March:
Medea, tr. Frederick Ahl
The Trojan Women, tr. E. F. Watling
Thyestes,...
a year ago
My Seneca reading in March:
Medea, tr. Frederick Ahl
The Trojan Women, tr. E. F. Watling
Thyestes, tr. Jasper Heywood
Hercules Furens, tr. Heywood
The Madness of Hercules, tr. Dana Gioia
The plays themselves are all from the mid-1st century,
perhaps written when Seneca was in...
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
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.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Working a Thing Out'
Long ago an
editor urged me never to assume I knew what readers were thinking or what they
wanted....
6 months ago
Long ago an
editor urged me never to assume I knew what readers were thinking or what they
wanted. It’s presumptuous to do so. Mind-reading quickly turns into seeking
approval from readers and sucking up to them. Be clear, don’t condescend,
respect the reader’s intelligence....
ben-mini
Building FirstMover
I had one month to find a place to live in Manhattan. I reached out to friends for tips, and nearly...
4 months ago
I had one month to find a place to live in Manhattan. I reached out to friends for tips, and nearly all of them pointed me to StreetEasy, the Zillow-owned NYC real estate search platform. Some of my more Type-A friends gave me extra helpful advice:
Narrow your search to 2-4...
Astral Codex Ten
How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates
...
4 days ago
The Marginalian
The Art of Withstanding Abandonment: The Patience of the Penguin and How Evolution Invented Faith
“Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other...
5 months ago
“Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other are not separated,” Simone Weil wrote in her soulful meditation on the paradox of closeness and separation. To be separated from a loved one — in space or in silence, by choice or...
The Marginalian
Octavio Paz on Freedom
"Without freedom, what we call a person does not exist."
a year ago
"Without freedom, what we call a person does not exist."
Anecdotal Evidence
'To Have Part of His Life to Himself'
“I am not
obliged to do any more.”
Retirement
is my choice. For most of my life I assumed I would...
3 weeks ago
“I am not
obliged to do any more.”
Retirement
is my choice. For most of my life I assumed I would drop dead at the keyboard in my office, mid-sentence,
but next week I retire. I have always enjoyed work, the
sense of contributing something to an enterprise, no matter how...
The Marginalian
I Touched the Sun: A Tender Illustrated Parable About How to Find and Bear Your Inner Light
“One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives...
a year ago
“One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light,” James Baldwin wrote in one of his finest, least known essays. In his exquisite memoir of the search for inner light, the blind resistance hero...
Anecdotal Evidence
'I'd Walk in Heaven With My Feet on Earth'
“If love of
beauty were the same as faith, / I’d walk in heaven with my feet on earth.”
The...
a year ago
“If love of
beauty were the same as faith, / I’d walk in heaven with my feet on earth.”
The late
Terry Teachout once described himself as a “Midwestern aesthete,” an identification I
have happily claimed. I sense that a love of beauty has grown scarce and too
often earns contempt...
Josh Thompson
Anki and Memorization with Spaced Repetition Software
This is not meant to be read in isolation. Memorization is almost useless without doing work ahead...
over a year ago
This is not meant to be read in isolation. Memorization is almost useless without doing work ahead of time to grasp the material. For the full context, start with Learning how to Learn
I’ve not been able to find any comprehensive guides to using Anki to learn programming, so this...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Chronic Independence of Mind'
“A chronic
independence of mind is unpardonable in any age; in our own it has certainly
been safer...
2 months ago
“A chronic
independence of mind is unpardonable in any age; in our own it has certainly
been safer to praise independence than to exemplify it.”
Bracing
words from one of literature’s inveterate outsiders, English poet and critic C.H.
Sisson (1914-2003). He’s writing about...
The Marginalian
The Porcupine Dilemma: Schopenhauer’s Parable about Negotiating the Optimal Distance in Love
This is the supreme challenge of intimacy — how to reconcile the aching yearning for closeness with...
a year ago
This is the supreme challenge of intimacy — how to reconcile the aching yearning for closeness with the painful pressures of actually being close, how to forge a bond tight enough to feel the warmth of connection but spacious enough to feel free. Kahlil Gibran knew this when he...
The American Scholar
A Messy Mix
The post A Messy Mix appeared first on The American Scholar.
8 months ago
The post A Messy Mix appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Elysian
No one buys books
Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DOJ.
9 months ago
Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DOJ.
This Space
39 Books: 2003
This year I read Robert Antelme's The Human Race for the first time. I was nonplussed. The strange...
8 months ago
This year I read Robert Antelme's The Human Race for the first time. I was nonplussed. The strange title, closer to popular sociology than memoir, should have been a warning. This was not quite the horror story one imagines of memoirs from those who survived Nazi concentration...
Anecdotal Evidence
'It Is Pure Absence, No Place, Nowhere, Not'
I remember
in high school reading Louis Fischer’s The
Life of Lenin (1964), though all I retain of...
5 months ago
I remember
in high school reading Louis Fischer’s The
Life of Lenin (1964), though all I retain of the book is the account of
Lenin’s autopsy, following his death at age fifty-two from atherosclerosis.
When tapped with tweezers, his cerebral arteries pinged like stone. They...
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."
sbensu
The birth of a (pseudo) currency
A dozen pseudo-currencies were issued in Argentina in 2002. How did that work? And why are they...
11 months ago
A dozen pseudo-currencies were issued in Argentina in 2002. How did that work? And why are they coming back in 2024?
Journal and Links by...
🔗 Mundango
Mundago is a game about enjoying the small things in life. Each day you get a brand new board of...
2 months ago
Mundago is a game about enjoying the small things in life. Each day you get a brand new board of activities you can pursue. Your board is yours. Your friends' boards will be different. Tap items to check them off as you complete them.
— Dave Rupery
Thanks for a little bit of joy,...
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 Marginalian
Moonlight and the Magic of the Unnecessary
Every night, for every human being that ever was and ever will be, the Moon rises to remind us how...
10 months ago
Every night, for every human being that ever was and ever will be, the Moon rises to remind us how improbably lucky we are, each of its craters a monument of the odds we prevailed against to exist, a reliquary of the violent collisions that forged our rocky planet lush with life...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Steeplejacks Top Out the Chrysler Building,'
A friend
sent me a link to a 1978 BBC documentary about a working-class hero in England.
I had never...
7 months ago
A friend
sent me a link to a 1978 BBC documentary about a working-class hero in England.
I had never heard of Fred Dibnah, practitioner of a trade I didn’t know was still
extant: steeplejack. In the words of the OED:
“a person who climbs steeples or tall chimneys to repair them.”...
The Marginalian
Anne Morrow Lindbergh on Embracing Change in Relationships and the Key Pattern for Nourishing Love
"All living relationships are in process of change, of expansion, and must perpetually be building...
11 months ago
"All living relationships are in process of change, of expansion, and must perpetually be building themselves new forms."
This Space
“Can there be a pure narrative?”
The question opening Maurice Blanchot’s essay The Experience of Proust* has always drawn me back,...
over a year ago
The question opening Maurice Blanchot’s essay The Experience of Proust* has always drawn me back, not to secure a yes or a no, but to keep the question of pure narrative open in its initial uncertainty, perhaps, rather, in its impossibility, as it appears to make reading and...
Josh Thompson
Monthly Review: October
This is my first monthly review. I’ll spend some time fleshing out the why and the how, and then get...
over a year ago
This is my first monthly review. I’ll spend some time fleshing out the why and the how, and then get right to it. If you don’t want to read a lot of introspective Josh, stop reading. I use the word “I” dozens of times. Consider yourself warned.
For a long time I have feared life...
The American Scholar
Hot and Cold
The post Hot and Cold appeared first on The American Scholar.
6 months ago
The post Hot and Cold appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
Circles of Influence
I was listening to a podcast today, where they said if you have problems knowing what to write...
over a year ago
I was listening to a podcast today, where they said if you have problems knowing what to write about, or you’ve hit a block, write about something that angers you.
This is easy. I could write about any number of things that we’ve all read in a newspaper, and get good and angry...
Journal and Links by...
🔗 Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset for the geospatial community
It is reasonable to ask, why a company like Foursquare who has spent years building a proprietary...
a month ago
It is reasonable to ask, why a company like Foursquare who has spent years building a proprietary dataset would freely open a layer of that data to the community. So reasonable in fact that many of my colleagues thought I had lost my mind when I shared the news that we would be...
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."
This Space
A modern heretic
Literature can be defined by the sense of the imminence of a revelation which does not in fact...
over a year ago
Literature can be defined by the sense of the imminence of a revelation which does not in fact occur.
I used this line, apparently from Borges, as an epigram to an essay in the early days of online writing. I can't remember what book it came from and after searching I found a...
Journal and Links by...
🔗 Rivian — Pentagram
A custom typeface for the American electric vehicle manufacturer reflects its spirit of innovation...
2 months ago
A custom typeface for the American electric vehicle manufacturer reflects its spirit of innovation and adventure.
Söhne is the typeface du jour of late (Stripe, OpenAI/ChatGPT, Rivian prior to this, and even this very website), and its nice to see Pentagram evolve it in...
Anecdotal Evidence
'As Permanently a Monument As Anything'
Once it was a
commonplace: a letter in the mailbox, handwritten or typed, in an envelope most
likely...
6 months ago
Once it was a
commonplace: a letter in the mailbox, handwritten or typed, in an envelope most
likely moistened with the sender’s tongue and sealed. A person-to-person letter,
not junk mail, credit-card come-ons, campaign postcards, jury summonses and the
rest of the...
The Marginalian
The Beach and the Soul: Anne Morrow Lindbergh on the Benedictions of the Sea
"The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient... Patience,...
7 months ago
"The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient... Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach."
Anecdotal Evidence
'Look at This, It's Wonderful'
There’s a written nonfiction voice I find
especially repellent. For the sake of convenience I’ll...
a week ago
There’s a written nonfiction voice I find
especially repellent. For the sake of convenience I’ll call it “institutional.”
I encounter it most often in academic writing, but it has leaked into the larger culture.
For almost sixteen years I worked as a science
writer for a...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Our Instinctual Taste for Periodicity and Return'
I got a kick
out of Damian at A Sunday of Liberty reveling in a rhyme that seems...
a year ago
I got a kick
out of Damian at A Sunday of Liberty reveling in a rhyme that seems genetically
implanted in American kids, regardless of age or geography:
“Greasy,
grimy gopher guts!
Little dirty
birdie feet!”
As in any
folk tradition, variants abound. This is the version I grew...
Josh Thompson
Context Setting for certain patterns & classes of relationship difficulties
I’ve been “catching up” a lot in my life lately. Some of that catching up involves bringing up to...
over a year ago
I’ve been “catching up” a lot in my life lately. Some of that catching up involves bringing up to speed various people I’ve not spoken too (or spoken too much, or openly, or recently, or ever, or some combination thereof).
I am strongly biased towards written/editable/consistent...
Anecdotal Evidence
'His Own Exclusive Object'
I’ve
accumulated some of the accoutrements of age – bifocals, cane, hearing aids.
None embarrasses...
5 months ago
I’ve
accumulated some of the accoutrements of age – bifocals, cane, hearing aids.
None embarrasses me and all make life less annoying. I’ve never been seriously
ill. I take my handful of vitamins and meds in the morning. I no longer drink
and never smoked. Among the last things I...
The Elysian
Can we create a wise & enlightened citizenry?
We'll need to address cognitive biases if we want to reach Plato's ideal.
9 months ago
We'll need to address cognitive biases if we want to reach Plato's ideal.
The American Scholar
Masters of Horror and Magic
The German folklorists who helped build a nation
The post Masters of Horror and Magic appeared first...
2 months ago
The German folklorists who helped build a nation
The post Masters of Horror and Magic appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
George Saunders on How to Live an Unregretting Life
"At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often...
10 months ago
"At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me."
The American Scholar
Changing the Lens
Exploding the Canon, Episode 5 (Finale)
The post Changing the Lens appeared first on The American...
8 months ago
Exploding the Canon, Episode 5 (Finale)
The post Changing the Lens appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
The Science and Poetry of Anthotypes: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, Recreated in Hauntingly Beautiful...
On September 20, 1845, the polymathic Scottish mathematician Mary Somerville — the woman for whom...
a year ago
On September 20, 1845, the polymathic Scottish mathematician Mary Somerville — the woman for whom the word scientist was coined — sent a letter to the polymathic English astronomer John Herschel, who six years earlier had coined the word photography for the radical invention of...
The Marginalian
Audubon on Other Minds and the Secret Knowledge of Animals
“In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with...
4 months ago
“In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” Henry Beston observed of other animals two generations before naturalist Sy Montgomery...
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...
ben-mini
IMG_0416
Between 2009 and 2012, Apple iPhones and iPod Touches included a feature called “Send to YouTube”...
2 months ago
Between 2009 and 2012, Apple iPhones and iPod Touches included a feature called “Send to YouTube” that allowed users to upload videos directly to YouTube from the Photos app.
The feature worked… really well. In fact, YouTube reported a 1700% increase in total video uploads...
Josh Thompson
Letter to Two Climbers (Part 2)
Hello again, it’s me! We met climbing a few days ago.
I wrote you a letter, but didn’t want to leave...
over a year ago
Hello again, it’s me! We met climbing a few days ago.
I wrote you a letter, but didn’t want to leave it on such a pessimistic note.
First, I commend you both for getting out there. You both invested a lot in making that weekend happen. You acquired the correct tools, and spent...
Anecdotal Evidence
'There Is No Nothingness'
Once asked
about politics in a symposium portentously titled “The Writer’s Situation,”...
5 months ago
Once asked
about politics in a symposium portentously titled “The Writer’s Situation,” J.V.
Cunningham replied:
“You can
write on politics or not. I do not. But is politics meant here? Or is it,
rather, ideology? The latter is religious, not political, though religion...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Those Move Easiest Who Have Learn’d to Dance'
Alexander
Pope’s 1716 imitation of Martial’s epigram X.23:
“At length,
my Friend (while Time, with...
8 months ago
Alexander
Pope’s 1716 imitation of Martial’s epigram X.23:
“At length,
my Friend (while Time, with still career,
Wafts on his
gentle wing his eightieth year),
Sees his
past days safe out of Fortune’s power,
Nor dreads
approaching Fate’s uncertain hour;
Reviews his
life, and in...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Lack of Self-deception'
“There is a
difference between a villain and one who simply commits a crime. The villain is
an...
a year ago
“There is a
difference between a villain and one who simply commits a crime. The villain is
an extremely conscious person and commits a crime consciously, for its own
sake.”
A fine
distinction, one often lost on us. Auden is describing Shakespeare’s Richard
III and refers us to...
The Marginalian
Everything Is Happening All the Time: Legendary Physicist John Archibald Wheeler on Death and the...
“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” Walt Whitman writes in the prime of...
3 months ago
“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” Walt Whitman writes in the prime of life. “What happens when you get to the end of things?” four-year-old Johnny in Ohio asks his mother from the bathtub while Whitman’s borrowed atoms are becoming young grass in a...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Dubious or Questionable Medium'
In 1972,
Daryl Hine, the editor of Poetry, requested
poems “protesting the acceleration of the...
11 months ago
In 1972,
Daryl Hine, the editor of Poetry, requested
poems “protesting the acceleration of the undeclared Indo-Chinese War” for a
special issue to be published in September of that year. Hine said he would be “grateful
to consider any poem on this terrible and topical subject...
Journal and Links by...
🔗 Eva Decker
Eva Decker is a designer engineer who likes playing piano and writing CSS. Currently living in NYC...
5 months ago
Eva Decker is a designer engineer who likes playing piano and writing CSS. Currently living in NYC with Samwise.
— Eva Decker
Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
Anecdotal Evidence
'That Grand Marxist Stalin Did Ten In'
In one of
the essential books published in the twentieth century, The Great Terror (1968; rev. 1990,...
a month ago
In one of
the essential books published in the twentieth century, The Great Terror (1968; rev. 1990, 2008), Robert Conquest (1917-2015)
writes matter-of-factly: “We are told in recent Soviet articles that on 12
December 1937 alone, Stalin and Molotov sanctioned 3,167 death...
The Marginalian
The Power of Being a Heretic: The Forgotten Visionary Jane Ellen Harrison on Critical Thinking,...
"If we are to be true and worthy heretics, we need not only new heads, but new hearts, and, most of...
a year ago
"If we are to be true and worthy heretics, we need not only new heads, but new hearts, and, most of all, that new emotional imagination... begotten of enlarged sympathies and a more sensitive habit of feeling."
The Perry Bible...
The Good Knight
The post The Good Knight appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.
7 months ago
The post The Good Knight appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Master of Light But Stinging Irony'
I bought
Vikram Seth’s novel-in-verse The Golden
Gate when it was published in 1986. Around that...
6 months ago
I bought
Vikram Seth’s novel-in-verse The Golden
Gate when it was published in 1986. Around that time I was giving up the
practice of writing in books, which had always left me a little uncomfortable. Instead,
I switched to keeping notebooks. In The
Golden Gate I see that I...
Escaping Flatland
A summary of what I wrote in 2024
A man sets out to draw the world.
a month ago
A man sets out to draw the world.
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
The Violence of God and the Hermeneutics of Paul
Sometimes I (Josh) want to share around certain academic works. Sometimes its a PDF that I want...
over a year ago
Sometimes I (Josh) want to share around certain academic works. Sometimes its a PDF that I want someone to download and read, sometimes it’s text from a book I’ve read, and cannot otherwise get a sharable format of. So, I laboriously take photos of pages, use an optical character...
Josh Thompson
How to Move
Kristi and I are moving to Colorado in July. We’ve taken three broad steps to make this move...
over a year ago
Kristi and I are moving to Colorado in July. We’ve taken three broad steps to make this move happen:
We both are in process with new jobs
I just started working remotely for Litmus, which means I can seamlessly transition to Colorado this summer. Kristi spent a few days last week...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Energy in Things Shone Through Their Shapes'
Some
fugitive thinkers among us long for order in a manner almost nostalgic:
“I envied
those past...
2 months ago
Some
fugitive thinkers among us long for order in a manner almost nostalgic:
“I envied
those past ages of the world
When, as I
thought, the energy in things
Shone
through their shapes, when sun and moon no less
Than tree or
stone or star or human face
Were seen
but as fantastic...
The Marginalian
From Stardust to Sapiens: A Stunning Serenade to Our Cosmic Origins and Our Ongoing Self-Creation
We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the...
a year ago
We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Give Him the Darkest Inch Your Shelf Allows'
Its 1,498
pages tip the scales at 3.2 pounds: Collected
Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson,...
9 months ago
Its 1,498
pages tip the scales at 3.2 pounds: Collected
Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, originally published in 1929. At Kaboom Books I bought the twelfth printing, from 1959. The dustjacket is a little
frayed around the edges but the book is otherwise sturdy. It collects the...
The American Scholar
To Catch a Sunset
Reflections on allergies, anxieties, and the limits of familial love
The post To Catch a Sunset...
7 months ago
Reflections on allergies, anxieties, and the limits of familial love
The post To Catch a Sunset appeared first on The American Scholar.
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
Turing Prep Chapter 2: Run your first tests (and make them pass)
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...
Josh Thompson
Illdefined Success is Unattainable
We all probably have a few projects floating around our head, but they seem daunting.
If it doesn’t...
over a year ago
We all probably have a few projects floating around our head, but they seem daunting.
If it doesn’t seem daunting, it’s not much of a project, and you should either ramp it up until it’s daunting, or discard it.
So - we have a daunting project. Now what? If you’re like me, you’ll...
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
Kinship in the Light of Conscience: Peter Kropotkin on the Crucial Difference Between Love,...
“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Whitman wrote in what may be the most elemental...
4 months ago
“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Whitman wrote in what may be the most elemental definition of solidarity — this tender recognition of our interdependence and fundamental kinship, deeper than sympathy, wider than love. Half a century after Whitman’s atomic...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Everyone He Knew Something About'
A reader who
enjoys the novels of Sinclair Lewis tells me she is put off by the length and
dullness...
2 months ago
A reader who
enjoys the novels of Sinclair Lewis tells me she is put off by the length and
dullness of Mark Schorer’s 1961 biography of the Nobel laureate. I haven’t read
Lewis since high school and have never read Schorer’s 867-page behemoth but I
sympathize. I remember reading...
The Marginalian
Emerson on the Singular Enchantment of Indian Summer (and a Better Term for This Liminal Season...
"There are days... wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and...
2 months ago
"There are days... wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony."
The Marginalian
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name
"Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still mostly undefined."
9 months ago
"Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still mostly undefined."
Wuthering...
Thanks and praise to celebrate the happiness of this great event – the end of the Greek play...
I am quoting the end of Alcestis by Euripides, his early whatever it is, not a tragedy, not a satyr...
over a year ago
I am quoting the end of Alcestis by Euripides, his early whatever it is, not a tragedy, not a satyr play, not a comedy. Admetos has won back his wife and the play is at its end, so he declares “a feast of thanks and praise” (tr. Arrowsmith), which is what I want to do. If we...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Stimulated to Vigour and Activity'
When John
Ruskin (b. 1819) traveled as a boy, his father packed in his luggage four small
volumes of...
9 months ago
When John
Ruskin (b. 1819) traveled as a boy, his father packed in his luggage four small
volumes of Dr. Johnson’s Rambler and Idler essays. In his peculiar memoir Praeterita (1885), Ruskin tells us “had
it not been for constant reading of the Bible, I might probably have...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Last of All Last Words Spoken Is, Good-bye'
Memory is often
an obligation, an expression of gratitude and fondness. It can be faulty, of
course,...
a year ago
Memory is often
an obligation, an expression of gratitude and fondness. It can be faulty, of
course, especially with age, and it pays to double-check the important things
if you intend to share the memories with others. I’ve just learned that a guy I
haven’t seen in half a...
Josh Thompson
Dizzying but Invisible Depth
The following is from https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru/posts/dfydM2Cnepe, but Google+ is...
over a year ago
The following is from https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru/posts/dfydM2Cnepe, but Google+ is shutdown, so it’s not easily sharable. I’m reposting here because this is such a useful post.
Dizzying but invisible depth
You just went to the Google home page.
Simple, isn’t...
Wuthering...
Plato's Symposium - philosophy as realist fiction - pick up something to tickle your nose with, and...
Philosophy makes me nervous, so I will begin my squib about Plato’s Symposium (c. 385-370 BCE) with...
over a year ago
Philosophy makes me nervous, so I will begin my squib about Plato’s Symposium (c. 385-370 BCE) with an anxiety-deflating observation: Symposium is fiction, a long story. It is fiction in that at least some of it is invented, but mostly in that it uses the techniques of fiction:...
This Space
39 Books: 2022
"Hölderlin...asked only that we accept silence as the one meaningful syllable in the...
7 months ago
"Hölderlin...asked only that we accept silence as the one meaningful syllable in the universe."
This line from Paul Stubbs' remarkable essay collection The Return to Silence is not an epigram to Marjorie Perloff's Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics, but it might have...
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 American Scholar
“Guests” by Celia Thaxter
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “Guests” by Celia Thaxter appeared first on The American...
a month ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “Guests” by Celia Thaxter appeared first on The American Scholar.
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...
sbensu
High Variance Management
How should you manage a team that is trying to achieve results out of the ordinary?
over a year ago
How should you manage a team that is trying to achieve results out of the ordinary?
Anecdotal Evidence
'We Are All Potential Recruits for Anarchy'
It’s an
honor to be published in The New
Criterion, a journal I started reading in 1986, four years...
7 months ago
It’s an
honor to be published in The New
Criterion, a journal I started reading in 1986, four years after it was
founded by the late Hilton Kramer and Samuel Lipman. To share pages in the June issue with Gary Saul Morson, Victor Davis Hanson and other gifted writers is...
Anecdotal Evidence
'In Itself and Forever Shipwreck'
I’ve just
finished rereading William Maxwell’s final novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow, published in...
a year ago
I’ve just
finished rereading William Maxwell’s final novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow, published in two issues of The New Yorker in 1979 and as a book the
following year. I read it in the magazine and I’ve since read the book –
Maxwell’s finest, written when he was seventy years...
The Elysian
“Friends” as the ideal community
The one where communes aren't the answer.
7 months ago
The one where communes aren't the answer.
This Space
39 Books: 1990
The first book I read in the 39 years of this series was a genre thriller, and I've read only two...
8 months ago
The first book I read in the 39 years of this series was a genre thriller, and I've read only two more since. The second one came along this year. In 1989, I got a temporary job in the archives of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum where I met Carl Erlewyn-Lajeunesse, an...
The American Scholar
What Comes Naturally
The post What Comes Naturally appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 months ago
The post What Comes Naturally appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
Fred Roger's Method For Writing Scripts
Someone said:
People think this is silly, but read about Fred rogers’ method for writing a script...
over a year ago
Someone said:
People think this is silly, but read about Fred rogers’ method for writing a script for his show. The rules aren’t fully applicable to presentations, but the attention to detail and to the Interpretation of the audience is. Don’t use any words carelessly.
I...
Anecdotal Evidence
'An Impetuous Eagerness to Subvert'
Dr. Johnson describes
the poet and physician Mark Akenside: “He
certainly retained an unnecessary...
7 months ago
Dr. Johnson describes
the poet and physician Mark Akenside: “He
certainly retained an unnecessary and outrageous zeal for what he called and
thought liberty; a zeal which sometimes disguises from the world, and not
rarely from the mind which it possesses, an envious desire of...
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...
3 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
'How to Live With Ourselves As We Are'
“What’s
essential is not Montaigne’s wisdom, but his wise recognition of his
foolishness; not his...
4 months ago
“What’s
essential is not Montaigne’s wisdom, but his wise recognition of his
foolishness; not his virtue, but his good cognizance of his vices; not his ‘honesty,’
but his honesty, his complete
leveling with the reader.”
I tried a
little experiment, a variation on bibliomancy. I...
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 American Scholar
For Want of Touch
The astonishing breadth of our passions
The post For Want of Touch appeared first on The American...
4 months ago
The astonishing breadth of our passions
The post For Want of Touch appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'All Is Not Dead'
Sadness
nicely coexists with happiness this time of year. Christmas is over. Memories
abound. We...
3 weeks ago
Sadness
nicely coexists with happiness this time of year. Christmas is over. Memories
abound. We underestimate ourselves when it comes to emotional capacity. Only
the insane know one emotion at a time, which is why bliss and clinical
depression are rare states and why Joseph...
The Marginalian
The Stunning Mystical Paintings of the 16th-Century Portuguese Artist Francisco de Holanda
Blake before Blake, Hilma before Hilma.
a year ago
Blake before Blake, Hilma before Hilma.
Anecdotal Evidence
'He Liked to Hold Ideas Up to the Light'
The single most
influential book in my life, the one that with time altered the way I think, not...
a year ago
The single most
influential book in my life, the one that with time altered the way I think, not just what I think, is Guy’s Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination (North
Point Press, 1981). I bought it that year in a lesbian bookstore in Manhattan. Over
the previous decade...
The American Scholar
Bubble Girl
The kidnapping that once riveted the nation
The post Bubble Girl appeared first on The American...
8 months ago
The kidnapping that once riveted the nation
The post Bubble Girl appeared first on The American Scholar.
Wuthering...
Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and their Stoic self-help books - I shall not be afraid when my last hour...
The curious thing about Stoicism is its long-lasting
survival in the self-help genre, curious at...
a year ago
The curious thing about Stoicism is its long-lasting
survival in the self-help genre, curious at least until I read Seneca’s Letters
from a Stoic (1st C.) several years ago and discovered that it was a self-help
book, one of the founding self-help books.
The Meditations of...
Ben Borgers
Is It Worth It to Be Passive Aggressive?
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Who Needs Your Stories?'
Have you
ever read something – it might be a poem or a history
book, almost anything – and...
3 months ago
Have you
ever read something – it might be a poem or a history
book, almost anything – and encountered a phrase or sentence so self-contained
and dense with meaning, in words so perfectly arranged, that you stop reading,
ponder and write it down? You may not even continue with...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Amber of His Style'
Isaac
Waisberg at IWP Books has digitalized three volumes of Desmond MacCarthy’s essays
and reviews...
9 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 American Scholar
Guillermo
The post Guillermo appeared first on The American Scholar.
4 months ago
The post Guillermo appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'I Read the Wild Wallpaper of My Heart'
Meade
Harwell, Gordon H. Felton, M.J.A. McGittigan, Jess H. Cloud, Byron Vazakas,
Ellis Foote, Myron...
a year ago
Meade
Harwell, Gordon H. Felton, M.J.A. McGittigan, Jess H. Cloud, Byron Vazakas,
Ellis Foote, Myron H. Broomell, Celeste Turner Wright.
Who are
these strangers? What brings them together? They recall a walk in the cemetery,
reading on the stones the names of people we have...
Anecdotal Evidence
'I Used to Stand in Front of the Windows'
In my dream I
was staring through the window of a bookstore, worried that sunlight would
bleach the...
a year ago
In my dream I
was staring through the window of a bookstore, worried that sunlight would
bleach the color from the cover of a book. At the center of a display that
seemed to be made of cotton gauze was not just any book but a first edition of Ulysses. In the rare books collection...
Josh Thompson
Injury Impedes Improvement
Kristi and I have been in Colorado for three months, I’ve been climbing regularly for two, I am back...
over a year ago
Kristi and I have been in Colorado for three months, I’ve been climbing regularly for two, I am back in shape and it feels good.
I am tempted to throw myself into climbing again. To climb every day, or maybe every other day, and finish every session with training. But here’s the...
The Marginalian
The Birth of the Byline: How a Bronze Age Woman Became the World’s First Named Author and Used the...
Days after I arrived in America as a lone teenager, the same age Mary Shelley was when she wrote...
7 months ago
Days after I arrived in America as a lone teenager, the same age Mary Shelley was when she wrote Frankenstein, not yet knowing I too was to become a writer, I found myself wandering the vast cool halls of the Penn Museum. There among the thousands of ancient artifacts was one to...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Future Spells Only Disaster'
Several
weeks ago in a post I wrote about Robert Conquest I referred to “the essential
books...
3 weeks ago
Several
weeks ago in a post I wrote about Robert Conquest I referred to “the essential
books published in the twentieth century,” and listed some of the titles deserving
a place in that category. Most, I wrote, “are not found in the traditionally
defined literary categories; that...
The American Scholar
“Daybreak in Alabama” by Langston Hughes
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “Daybreak in Alabama” by Langston Hughes appeared first on...
6 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “Daybreak in Alabama” by Langston Hughes appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
Anarchy (or, less provocatively, Mutuality and Co-Creation)
In 2017, I read The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the...
8 months ago
In 2017, I read The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey; everything and nothing changed.
Lots changed because all of I sudden, I could clearly label a dynamic that had always irked me. I could see that some people would avoid...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Like a Wagon-Load of Monkeys'
“It is not
an accident that Gulliver has become
a child’s book; only a child could be so...
a year ago
“It is not
an accident that Gulliver has become
a child’s book; only a child could be so destructive, so irresponsible and so
cruel.”
And only a
parent could acknowledge the potential for raw nastiness in the heart of a child.
V.S. Pritchett had two children and few illusions...
Wuthering...
Books I Read in August 2023
As I suspected my energy for writing in August was diverted
to more important things. Plenty of...
a year ago
As I suspected my energy for writing in August was diverted
to more important things. Plenty of energy
to read, though.
With a respite in September, I should soon be able to write
a bit on the Greek philosophers I have been reading. The Cynics, Epicureans, and Stoics work...
The Marginalian
Wonder Beyond Why: The Majesty and Mystery of the Birds-of-Paradise
“To go all the way from a clone of archaebacteria, in just 3.7 billion years, to the B-Minor Mass...
a year ago
“To go all the way from a clone of archaebacteria, in just 3.7 billion years, to the B-Minor Mass and the Late Quartets, deserves a better technical term for the record than randomness,” the poetic scientist Lewis Thomas wrote in his forgotten masterpiece of perspective. This is...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Well-known Types of Miracle'
It’s grim
out there and getting grimmer. Two poems encountered on the same day provided a
touch of...
8 months ago
It’s grim
out there and getting grimmer. Two poems encountered on the same day provided a
touch of buoyancy. The first was originally written in Russian by Vladimir
Nabokov on May 6, 1923:
“No, life is
no quivering quandary!
Here under
the moon things are bright and dewy.
We are...
The American Scholar
Set in Seclusion
The post Set in Seclusion appeared first on The American Scholar.
7 months ago
The post Set in Seclusion appeared first on The American Scholar.
Journal and Links by...
✏️ Threaded
I penned a Thot(?!), or rather, a post on Threads, the Twitter clone that Meta released some time...
a year ago
I penned a Thot(?!), or rather, a post on Threads, the Twitter clone that Meta released some time ago. I don’t find it particularly useful, as my Twitter usage had declined long ago.
Anyway, the post (and accompanying photo):
“When I contemplate the idea of relocating, it’s 70°...
Journal and Links by...
🔗 Type Design Resources
A growing, public, collaborative collection of type design resources. Everything from learning the...
3 months ago
A growing, public, collaborative collection of type design resources. Everything from learning the basics to running your own foundry.
Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
Josh Thompson
Mythical Creatures: Refactoring wizard.rb
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...
Ben Borgers
It Doesn’t Have to Be Every Day
over a year ago
Josh Thompson
Three Levels of Competence
Raise your hand if you’d like to be better at climbing.
Yeah. Me too.
I’ve spent an unusual amount...
over a year ago
Raise your hand if you’d like to be better at climbing.
Yeah. Me too.
I’ve spent an unusual amount of time working with beginners, to help them improve at climbing. I’ve also worked a lot with (what I would consider to be) intermediate climbers, so
can get better. I’ve certainly...
Wuthering...
Paradoxes and epistemology - early Greek philosophy as conceptual innovation - "Zeno argues...
The conceptual innovation of Thales that we identify as the birth of philosophy quickly spun off...
a year ago
The conceptual innovation of Thales that we identify as the birth of philosophy quickly spun off other conceptual innovations. A real conceptual innovation does not require a book or even an argument. You say there are many gods? But what if there were one? Or none? ...
Astral Codex Ten
Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
...
a month ago
Astral Codex Ten
Hidden Open Thread 359.5
...
a month ago
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...
Ben Borgers
Designing Posters for Humans
over a year ago
Josh Thompson
October 2016 Goals
In the last year, I’ve fluctuated between writing
every day for 30 days and
not posting once in...
over a year ago
In the last year, I’ve fluctuated between writing
every day for 30 days and
not posting once in two months.
Frankly, neither of those is good for me.
I like writing because it clarifies my own thoughts. Sometimes it seems useful to others. I like to be useful (“utility” can...
This Space
Dead Souls by Sam Riviere
Even before one begins reading Sam Riviere’s first novel there is despondency as one registers that...
over a year ago
Even before one begins reading Sam Riviere’s first novel there is despondency as one registers that the title is a duplication of the English translation of Nikolai Gogol’s Мёртвые души, the novel in which a character seeks to buy dead serfs from their owners but who have yet to...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Taste for Strolling in Cemeteries'
Just
as most of the people we encounter across a lifetime mean nothing to us and
will not...
a year ago
Just
as most of the people we encounter across a lifetime mean nothing to us and
will not even
linger in memory, as they stir neither distaste nor devotion, so it is with
books and writers. Had I been one of those desperately obsessive readers who
records every title read, I...
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...
The Elysian
Yes, Taylor Swift is just as genius as Mary Shelley
The video from our live event.
3 months ago
The video from our live event.
The Elysian
Writing Prompt: Fix Capitalism
By September 30th.
4 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Well Educated and Glad of the Fact'
“[A] literary man or woman is someone who is not only steeped in literature but has made this...
2 months ago
“[A] literary man or woman is someone who is not only steeped in literature but has made this immersion into literature part of his or her own life, so that the experience of books has been integral with the experience of life and therefore strongly influences his or her general...
Journal and Links by...
✏️ Biblioteca Vasconselos
In the Buenavista neighborhood resides this impressive library that spans 409,000 sq ft, designed by...
over a year ago
In the Buenavista neighborhood resides this impressive library that spans 409,000 sq ft, designed by Mexican architects Alberto Kalach and Juan Palomar. Adored by those that appreciate architecture, and those looking for Instagram fodder, the space feels like you’re in the...
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.
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...
6 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...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Lasting Vivification of a Word'
I’ve read
Walter de la Mare’s essay “A Book of Words” (Pleasures and Speculations, 1940) for the...
10 months ago
I’ve read
Walter de la Mare’s essay “A Book of Words” (Pleasures and Speculations, 1940) for the second time in a week,
and have decided one might easily write a book about it. The prose is dense
with interesting and useful ideas:
“The
prevalent weakness, too, of many minds–the...
Journal and Links by...
✏️ Bookmark to Bear
Recently, I discovered that the creator of Pinboard posted transphobic views from that account on...
4 months ago
Recently, I discovered that the creator of Pinboard posted transphobic views from that account on (RIP) Twitter. This is disappointing, and a little digging revealed that it wasn't his first time espousing such views. I don't have time nor tolerance for this. I swiftly exported...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Colder Here Than Organized Charity'
Hugh Kenner’s
first extant letter to Guy Davenport is dated March 7, 1958. Its manner is at
once...
10 months ago
Hugh Kenner’s
first extant letter to Guy Davenport is dated March 7, 1958. Its manner is at
once business-like and chatty: “I hope subsequent activities haven’t yet
sufficed to obliterate our Boston dinner last fall from your memory.” The men had
first met in 1953 when each...
The American Scholar
Numbers Game
A novelist’s indictment of how we account for our history
The post Numbers Game appeared first on...
7 months ago
A novelist’s indictment of how we account for our history
The post Numbers Game appeared first on The American Scholar.
Journal and Links by...
🔗 SEEN, READ 2024
01/05 PREDATORS, AMERICAN GREED
— Steven Soderbergh
Director Steven Soderbergh's media recap of...
a week ago
01/05 PREDATORS, AMERICAN GREED
— Steven Soderbergh
Director Steven Soderbergh's media recap of 2024. It's fascinating to see how many movies he watched multiple times, and the reverse watch of the original Star Wars trilogy. Phantom of the Menace twice too?
Visit original link →...
Journal and Links by...
✏️ Music in 2024
The last few years have been great for discovering even more artists, and the revivals and reunions...
2 weeks ago
The last few years have been great for discovering even more artists, and the revivals and reunions of some of them have produced music that is fresh, with new takes and, even better, genre-bending and blending. Here are the albums and songs that were a definite hell yes for me...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Let Us See Them There in the Shadows'
A childhood
acquaintance has died. We were never close. In fact, I didn’t know he was still
alive...
7 months ago
A childhood
acquaintance has died. We were never close. In fact, I didn’t know he was still
alive until a friend told me he was dead. What I remember is his face, his
general demeanor, roughly the sort of behavior I could expect of him. I last
saw him more than half a century...
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
'One of the Least Appealing Aspects of Our Species'
The twentieth
century was a graduate-level education in irony. Our medical advances...
2 months ago
The twentieth
century was a graduate-level education in irony. Our medical advances were
extraordinary – antibiotics, insulin, the Salk and Sabin vaccines. Airplanes, television,
computers, space exploration. And yet Guy Davenport was not being needlessly morbid
when he...
Anecdotal Evidence
'He Knows to Get a Dollar'
The word tummler I learned from A.J. Liebling. It’s
the title of a story he collected in his first...
10 months ago
The word tummler I learned from A.J. Liebling. It’s
the title of a story he collected in his first book, Back Where I Came From (1938). “Tummler” was published in the
February 26, 1938 issue of The New Yorker
and begins:
“To the boys
of the I.&Y., Hymie Katz is a hero. He is a...
Journal and Links by...
🔗 Hundred Rabbits
Hundred Rabbits is a small artist collective. Together, we explore the planned failability of modern...
3 months ago
Hundred Rabbits is a small artist collective. Together, we explore the planned failability of modern technology at the bounds of the hyper-connected world. We research and test low-tech solutions and document our findings with the hope of building a more resilient future.
This is...
sbensu
Team-oriented, outcome-oriented
Some people care about helping their team. Others care about achieving outcomes. It is important to...
a year ago
Some people care about helping their team. Others care about achieving outcomes. It is important to know who is who.
Josh Thompson
Can You Recover From Months (YEARS!) of Not Climbing?
A few weeks ago, I headed into the gym thinking that I felt a little off-kilter. I’d not climbed in...
over a year ago
A few weeks ago, I headed into the gym thinking that I felt a little off-kilter. I’d not climbed in a week, I though, and maybe I was getting weaker or something. Turns out that wasn’t the problem - I had actually been climbing too much, and was feeling it.
This is an odd...
Josh Thompson
The How and Why of BlockValue
I wrote the following post, and built the application in question, in 2017, in my “end of Turing”...
over a year ago
I wrote the following post, and built the application in question, in 2017, in my “end of Turing” project, before I’d ever been hired as a software developer.
I really enjoyed the app that I built, and I keep wanting to get around to cleaning it up and making it work again. Maybe...
The Elysian
Idea Labs! An open thread for collaborative worldbuilding
Let's brainstorm the future together.
10 months ago
Let's brainstorm the future together.
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