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This Space
39 Books: 1997 I found this ghastly 60-page Grove Press hardback edition in a second-hand bookshop, its large...
8 months ago
55
8 months ago
I found this ghastly 60-page Grove Press hardback edition in a second-hand bookshop, its large typeface and generous spacing very similar to Beckett's late works (Barbara Bray, Beckett's translator, also translated this). Such productions are rare now, and perhaps were when it...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The War Had Won' “The war had taken his innocence and replaced it with something else. That something – ‘the destined...
a year ago
14
a year ago
“The war had taken his innocence and replaced it with something else. That something – ‘the destined anguish’ - revealed itself gradually and became a presence in his poetry for the rest of his life.”  Margi Blunden, speaking in 2014, is remembering her father, the poet and Great...
Anecdotal Evidence
'We Take Measure of the Loss' The youngest poet included by Yvor Winters and Kenneth Fields in Quest for Reality: An Anthology of...
11 months ago
19
11 months ago
The youngest poet included by Yvor Winters and Kenneth Fields in Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969) was M. Scott Momaday, a former Winters graduate student at Stanford who was then thirty-five years old. Winters, who died in 1968, also considered...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Where They Grind the Grain of Thought' Let me sing the praises of Miss Milly, Miss McClain, Miss Esson, Miss Shaker, Miss Martin, Miss...
a year ago
28
a year ago
Let me sing the praises of Miss Milly, Miss McClain, Miss Esson, Miss Shaker, Miss Martin, Miss Rose, Miss Whistler – my teachers, K-6, at Pearl Road Elementary School. Most were young and pretty, more like big sisters than mothers. On the television in Miss Shaker’s class we...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Personal Affections' Only recently have I learned of the entrenched snobbery in certain quarters against anthologies. It...
2 months ago
34
2 months ago
Only recently have I learned of the entrenched snobbery in certain quarters against anthologies. It seems to be rooted in the conviction that readers ought to read writers in their original volumes, not someone’s curated selection, or something like that. In common with most...
Ben Borgers
App Identity
over a year ago
Wuthering...
Books I read in December 2023 - No one’s worse than you, she says Lots of short fantasy fiction this month, perhaps everything in the first section except the May...
a year ago
36
a year ago
Lots of short fantasy fiction this month, perhaps everything in the first section except the May Sarton novel and Eugene O’Neill play, balanced by a complementary pair of Holocaust memoirs. NOVELS, STORIES & A PLAY Ocean of Story, Vol. 1 (11th cent.),  Somadeva, tr. C. H....
Anecdotal Evidence
'Always Singular, and Never Trite or Vulgar' “He was never seen to be transported with Mirth, or dejected with Sadness; always Chearful, but...
a year ago
14
a year ago
“He was never seen to be transported with Mirth, or dejected with Sadness; always Chearful, but rarely Merry, at any sensible Rate, seldom heard to break a Jest; and when he did, he would be apt to blush at the Levity of it: His Gravity was Natural and without Affectation.”  The...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Commonplace Insights' The Center for Popular Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio was founded in...
3 months ago
22
3 months ago
The Center for Popular Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio was founded in 1970, the year I entered BG as a freshman. Today it’s the only institution in the country to have a Department of Popular Culture. As an English major I hung around with professors who...
Josh Thompson
A New Old Financial Product I’m going to weave together talk of land value, and financing, and some of the primitives1 around...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
I’m going to weave together talk of land value, and financing, and some of the primitives1 around financial products. How much would you pay for a box that lives in your mailbox and delivers $1000 on the first of every month? Would you pay at least $5000, if you felt really...
Anecdotal Evidence
'O Friend Unseen, Unborn, Unknown' Rabbi David Wolpe tells me Monday’s post reminds him of a poem, “To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence,”...
a month ago
21
a month ago
Rabbi David Wolpe tells me Monday’s post reminds him of a poem, “To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence,” by a poet I knew only by name: James Elroy Flecker. “I've always been moved,” David said, “especially by the penultimate stanza”:  “O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,     Student of...
Wuthering...
You drool from it. You are happy. - Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit Finally, I have finished Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), known in English...
4 months ago
47
4 months ago
Finally, I have finished Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), known in English as Journey to the End of Night.  That “end of night” is death.  The existence of death makes everything hateful and nullifies the value of anything else.  I gotta say that the...
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
40
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 Elysian
The rich are controlling our government Ok but what can we do about it?
3 weeks ago
The Marginalian
Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say: A Tender Painted Lexicon of Consolation and Connection “To be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Emily Dickinson wrote. From the moment she pressed the...
7 months ago
59
7 months ago
“To be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Emily Dickinson wrote. From the moment she pressed the first wildflower into her astonishing teenage herbarium until the moment Susan pinned a violet to her alabaster chest in the casket, she filled her poems with flowers and made of...
The Marginalian
Hermann Hesse on What Books Give Us and the Heart of Wisdom Books show us what it is like to be another and at the same time return us to ourselves. We read to...
a year ago
15
a year ago
Books show us what it is like to be another and at the same time return us to ourselves. We read to learn how to live — how to love and how to suffer, how to grieve and how to be glad. We read to clarify ourselves and to anneal our values. We read for the assurance that others...
The Marginalian
How to Say Goodbye: An Illustrated Field Guide to Accompanying a Loved One at the End of Life "If you don't know what to say, start by saying that... That opens things up."
a year ago
The Marginalian
How We Render Reality: Attention as an Instrument of Love "Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both...
a year ago
56
a year ago
"Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged."
Josh Thompson
Turing Prep Chapter 4: Arrays, Hashes, and Nested Collections Preparing for Turing Series Index What follows is an eight-part series that will help you pick up...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
Preparing for Turing Series Index What follows is an eight-part series that will help you pick up useful information about a number of topics related to Ruby, specifically geared for students learning the Ruby programming language, as part of the Turing School’s Backend Software...
Anecdotal Evidence
'It Is Wonderful to Be a Writer' I met the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld in 1987 on the same day I met Raul Hilberg and Cynthia...
8 months ago
67
8 months ago
I met the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld in 1987 on the same day I met Raul Hilberg and Cynthia Ozick. I had read Appelfeld’s first novel, Badenheim 1939 (1978; trans. 1980), several years earlier and found it disturbing in a novel way. The action takes place on the cusp of...
Josh Thompson
Becoming an Early Riser Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.  -The man no child likes to...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.  -The man no child likes to hear about when being awoken by their parents Getting out of bed is a struggle. I’ve spent the better part of twenty four years setting my alarm as late as possible so I could have...
sbensu
Everybody is the main character People are motivated and engaged with the work only if they feel in charge of their own destiny....
a year ago
4
a year ago
People are motivated and engaged with the work only if they feel in charge of their own destiny. Make it clear to them that they are!
Anecdotal Evidence
'How Much Can Be Accomplished' Cleveland is traditionally divided between East Side and West Side. I’m a West-Sider, though I...
5 months ago
42
5 months ago
Cleveland is traditionally divided between East Side and West Side. I’m a West-Sider, though I haven’t lived in the city since 1977. The designation suggests working-class neighborhoods, many of them Slavic. Ethnicity was important, and not usually in the sense of bigotry. I was...
This Space
39 Books: 2011 How does one respond to Nietzsche's revelation at Sils Maria? I read Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche...
7 months ago
58
7 months ago
How does one respond to Nietzsche's revelation at Sils Maria? I read Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle because the thought of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same occurred to me as a literary concept, perhaps the ultimate experience of the literary, but needed...
Josh Thompson
Growing in your first software development job I started my first software developer role a year ago. (November 2017) This is tremendously...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
I started my first software developer role a year ago. (November 2017) This is tremendously exciting, of course, but introduces its own set of challenges, like: I finished Turing and I’ve got a job! Oh snap. I just finished a grueling program, and my reward is I’m fit to sit at...
Escaping Flatland
In praise of insular groups Last spring, as we were exploring the coastline of our island, Johanna, the kids, and I crossed a...
8 months ago
50
8 months ago
Last spring, as we were exploring the coastline of our island, Johanna, the kids, and I crossed a meadow where two men were artificially inseminating a longhaired cow. We stopped to observe the work. When it was done, one of the men came over to where we stood by the electric...
Wuthering...
Books I read in October 2024 - the old, care-free days of Wuthering Heights I should do one of these “what I read” bits before October becomes too distant. I should also...
a month ago
25
a month ago
I should do one of these “what I read” bits before October becomes too distant. I should also mention my health.  A little over a year ago a surgeon of genius removed a cancerous tumor from my liver, taking much of my liver along with it.  My recovery went well, and my liver grew...
Wuthering...
The sophists and their rehabilitation - they clearly cause the ruin and corruption of their... I have been pursuing the sophists, the great antagonists of Socrates and Plato.  Minimized for...
a year ago
34
a year ago
I have been pursuing the sophists, the great antagonists of Socrates and Plato.  Minimized for centuries in the history of philosophy as, following Plato (but not Socrates), hucksters, they, or some of them, are now taken seriously as an intermediate step between the cosmological...
The Marginalian
Yes: William Stafford’s Poetic Calibration of Perspective "No guarantees in this life."
11 months ago
Wuthering...
The books I read in November 2024 - like a hideous spinster who has learned the grim humor of the... Thank goodness I write these down. FICTION The Story of the Stone, Vol. 2: The Crab-flower...
2 weeks ago
22
2 weeks ago
Thank goodness I write these down. FICTION The Story of the Stone, Vol. 2: The Crab-flower Club (c. 1760), Cao Xueqin – written up long ago. Cartucho (1931) & My Mother's Hands (1938), Nellie Campobello – Brutal vignettes of the Mexican revolution by a diehard partisan, a...
The Marginalian
Necessary Losses: The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go "We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate...
a year ago
37
a year ago
"We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go."
Ben Borgers
Winter break project list
a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Georgeade as a Summer Drink' While looking for something else I blundered on an Anglo-American writer and cartoonist new to me...
a year ago
14
a year ago
While looking for something else I blundered on an Anglo-American writer and cartoonist new to me whose name and one-time popularity long ago evaporated: Oliver Herford (1860-1935), author, co-author and illustrator of more than sixty books for adults and children. There was a...
The Marginalian
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
32
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."
Ben Borgers
One Year Ago Email
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'He Does Not Make a Nice Old Man' A friend who is a great admirer of Thomas Carlyle sent me an excerpt from a letter the Scotsman...
10 months ago
24
10 months ago
A friend who is a great admirer of Thomas Carlyle sent me an excerpt from a letter the Scotsman wrote to his mother on September 12, 1843:  “I spent a forenoon with Jeffery who is very thin and fretful I think; being at any rate weakly, he is much annoyed at present by a hurt on...
Astral Codex Ten
Hidden Open Thread 360.5 ...
2 weeks ago
Escaping Flatland
Reading challenging books with kids is fun and probably useful I was looking through my diary from the summer of 2020 and found this entry about Maud, then three...
9 months ago
26
9 months ago
I was looking through my diary from the summer of 2020 and found this entry about Maud, then three years old, in late toddlerhood. 25th of July 2020. I was doing the dishes. Maud came in. “I have looked a little in books,” she said.
The American Scholar
Rhyme, Not Repetition All that’s past isn’t necessarily present The post Rhyme, Not Repetition appeared first on The...
7 months ago
25
7 months ago
All that’s past isn’t necessarily present The post Rhyme, Not Repetition appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
Typing in Colemac 2.0 I want to learn to type in Colemak, but I’m afraid to try to invest twenty hours in it. That’s a...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
I want to learn to type in Colemak, but I’m afraid to try to invest twenty hours in it. That’s a long commitment, and I’m afraid I would not follow through, and feel like it was a failure, because I didn’t allot enough time, nor reach a desired level of skill. My hope is that as...
The Marginalian
William James on Love "If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms...
9 months ago
29
9 months ago
"If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved."
Ben Borgers
Stubborn Consistency [100 daily blog posts]
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'What American Beauty Should Be' An old friend called and reminded me of the September almost forty years ago when we hiked along...
3 months ago
35
3 months ago
An old friend called and reminded me of the September almost forty years ago when we hiked along Otter Creek in southern Vermont near Dorset. Often we hiked in Otter Creek, which is filled with granite boulders. It was less hiking than climbing horizontally. Between the stones...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Butterflies Have Nothing to Do With Butter' Call me an aesthete but I’ve always favored the definition of butterfly given by Dr. Johnson in his...
5 months ago
41
5 months ago
Call me an aesthete but I’ve always favored the definition of butterfly given by Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary: “A beautiful insect, so named because it first appears at the beginning of the season for butter.” Their seemingly gratuitous beauty, coupled with not stinging like...
Anecdotal Evidence
'If the Nation Is to Be Saved From This Menace' “To the thinking man there are few things more disturbing than the realization that we are becoming...
10 months ago
24
10 months ago
“To the thinking man there are few things more disturbing than the realization that we are becoming a nation of minor poets.”  P.G. Wodehouse is being kind. He wrote “The Alarming Spread of Poetry” in 1916 when the blight was fresh and perhaps still reversible. His Exhibit A is...
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
3
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
Lichens and the Meaning of Life "We are lichens on a grand scale."
a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'As a Whole It Is a Gallimaufry' “[O]ne is tempted—though it might be dangerous—to maintain that the best books in the world were...
10 months ago
18
10 months ago
“[O]ne is tempted—though it might be dangerous—to maintain that the best books in the world were written chiefly for pleasure and with an after-hope to please.”  Things get sticky when you start plumbing a writer’s intentions. Let’s just say that a dwindling species of serious...
Steven Scrawls
Maybe your desires are delusional Maybe your desires are delusional The vast majority of my desires are not the reasonable desires...
8 months ago
4
8 months ago
Maybe your desires are delusional The vast majority of my desires are not the reasonable desires that I had once believed them to be. They’re actually completely delusional desires dressed up in shoddy “reasonable desire” costumes, and I’ve just been pretending not to notice. How...
Ben Borgers
Monday, January 17, 2022
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'And Then Became a Name Like Others Slain' In a six-word paragraph in “Preliminary,” his brief introduction to Undertones of War, Edmund...
a month ago
24
a month ago
In a six-word paragraph in “Preliminary,” his brief introduction to Undertones of War, Edmund Blunden articulates the impulse that would drive his poetry for the next half-century: “I must go over it again.” Psychically, there was no Armistice. Whether to purge its memory or...
The American Scholar
“The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry appeared first on...
6 months ago
66
6 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
''He Knew It Was All Wrong for the Season' Once I listened to a guy who had decided to stop drinking while sitting alone in a diner eating his...
a week ago
16
a week ago
Once I listened to a guy who had decided to stop drinking while sitting alone in a diner eating his Christmas dinner, separated from his wife and children. He recalled the moment with good humor. What had depressed him was eating canned corn. He had grown up associating good food...
Escaping Flatland
A greeting They think it was a monk at the Monastery of St Alban in Trier, present-day Germany. On Christmas...
a year ago
15
a year ago
They think it was a monk at the Monastery of St Alban in Trier, present-day Germany. On Christmas day, sometime in the 1570s, he was out walking when he came upon a rose that had, in the blistering cold, put forth a flower. It was a hellebore, a winter rose. Moved by the...
Robert Caro
Robert Caro on the Art of Biography I was never interested in writing biographies merely to tell the lives of famous men. From the first...
a year ago
4
a year ago
I was never interested in writing biographies merely to tell the lives of famous men. From the first time I thought of becoming a biographer
Josh Thompson
Two Critical Books and Two Critical Articles (For 'Software People') I speak with many persons who are considering becoming software developers (usually by way of a...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
I speak with many persons who are considering becoming software developers (usually by way of a program like the Flatiron School or the Turing School). I’m a graduate of the Turing School, and have written a lot about the program, like: My reflections on Turing an 8-part guide to...
The Marginalian
Uses of the Erotic: Audre Lorde on the Relationship Between Eros, Creativity, and Power "There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the...
a year ago
The American Scholar
“The Gaffe” by C. K. Williams Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “The Gaffe” by C. K. Williams appeared first on The American...
3 months ago
40
3 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “The Gaffe” by C. K. Williams appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
RailsConf CFP Outline I’m pitching some ideas for RailsConf. I only heard about it a few days ago (oops) so this is a bit...
over a year ago
2
over a year ago
I’m pitching some ideas for RailsConf. I only heard about it a few days ago (oops) so this is a bit rushed: Idea 1: “Junior” Developers are the Solution to Many of Your Problems Abstract: Our industry telegraphs: “We don’t want (or know how to handle) ‘Jr. Devs’.” Jr. Devs, or as...
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...
4 months ago
27
4 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...
Wuthering...
Orestes by Euripides - And what had seemed so right, / as soon as done, became / evil, monstrous,... I want to invite anyone interested to join me in reading Aristotle’s Poetics, the foundation of...
over a year ago
43
over a year ago
I want to invite anyone interested to join me in reading Aristotle’s Poetics, the foundation of Western literary criticism, influential to the present day and bizarrely dominant, almost sacred, for centuries.  I hope to write about it at the end of the month, having just reread...
Anecdotal Evidence
'He Could Take Part in This Savouring of the World' One of the ways biologists distinguish the animate from the inanimate, and the dead, is motility....
5 months ago
28
5 months ago
One of the ways biologists distinguish the animate from the inanimate, and the dead, is motility. Life moves independently, under its own power. Stasis suggests the end of life. Travel is especially prized by those unable to do so, whether confined to bed or a Soviet Bloc regime....
Anecdotal Evidence
'That Judgment Day of Man’s Illusions' In 1956, The American Scholar asked forty-three writers, critics and scholars to name the book...
7 months ago
66
7 months ago
In 1956, The American Scholar asked forty-three writers, critics and scholars to name the book published in the preceding twenty-five years they believed to have been “the most undeservedly neglected.” For this reader, sorry to say, most of them remain neglected. I don’t even...
Anecdotal Evidence
'He Has Embalmed So Many Eminent Persons' Over the years I wrote thousands of pieces – hard news stories, features, columns, obituaries,...
9 months ago
28
9 months ago
Over the years I wrote thousands of pieces – hard news stories, features, columns, obituaries, reviews of books, movies and music – for the newspapers where I worked in Ohio, Indiana and New York. They’re clipped and saved in a chaotic file cabinet. Most, I, like the rest of the...
Ben Borgers
Bronze, Silver, Gold
over a year ago
Escaping Flatland
Garlic and gravel fragments
5 months ago
Josh Thompson
Corollas and U-Hauls These last few posts have a theme. We moved. I’m writing about it a lot because I thought about it a...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
These last few posts have a theme. We moved. I’m writing about it a lot because I thought about it a lot, and a lot of work went into it. When moving across the country, you have a few options. You could higher a moving company, who comes and boxes up your house, packs a truck,...
The American Scholar
Up Close The post Up Close appeared first on The American Scholar.
4 months ago
sbensu
Vibes are music, arguments are lyrics Losing My Religion is not about religion and Arguments are not about arguments
5 months ago
Ben Borgers
5 Pages a Day
over a year ago
The Perry Bible...
Turn That Frown The post Turn That Frown appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.
5 months ago
The American Scholar
Cancer The post Cancer appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 months ago
The Marginalian
Simone Weil on Love and Its Counterfeit How to tell a plaything from a necessity.
a year ago
Astral Codex Ten
Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House ...
a month ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Knowing Only What Is Shown, Nothing Learned' In Wednesday’s installment of his newsletter “Prufrock,” Micah Mattix praises the American poet...
a year ago
10
a year ago
In Wednesday’s installment of his newsletter “Prufrock,” Micah Mattix praises the American poet Ernest Hilbert’s “understated realism”  -- as opposed to hyperbolic fantasy, I suppose. There’s a sobriety to Hilbert’s work, a mature acceptance of the real world unaccompanied by...
The Marginalian
Octavio Paz on Freedom "Without freedom, what we call a person does not exist."
a year ago
Ben Borgers
Driving School Corruption
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Comfort, Solace, Inspiration' “A few books, however,” writes Michael Dirda, “become lifelong companions, works we regularly turn...
a year ago
16
a year ago
“A few books, however,” writes Michael Dirda, “become lifelong companions, works we regularly turn to for comfort, solace, inspiration.” The reviewer identifies a slightly different category, “the books we find ourselves crazy about and hope to revisit someday,” as distinguished,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'All Forms of Evil ’Neath the Sun' Isaac Waisberg is an Israeli academic and friend who lives with his family near Tel Aviv. He also...
a year ago
13
a year ago
Isaac Waisberg is an Israeli academic and friend who lives with his family near Tel Aviv. He also runs IWP Books, an eclectic online library of titles ranging from Walter Bagehot and A.E. Housman to Theodor Haecker and Agnes Repplier. In short, he is a civilized man with...
Ben Borgers
Listserv
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'She Exhibits the Unrepentant Bad Taste Which Belongs to Good Taste in Its Good Sense' “Most poetry is as poor as most fiction or most biography, or most books. But it is often...
7 months ago
52
7 months ago
“Most poetry is as poor as most fiction or most biography, or most books. But it is often so aggressively, so conceitedly poor and undistinguished that readers cannot be altogether blamed for not bothering with the new books as they come out, and I am always hesitant to make them...
Josh Thompson
Mocks & Stubs & Exceptions in Ruby Some of my recent work has been around improving error handling and logging. We had some tasks that,...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
Some of my recent work has been around improving error handling and logging. We had some tasks that, if they failed to execute correctly, were supposed to raise exceptions, log themselves, and re-queue, but they were not. The class in which I was working managed in large part API...
The American Scholar
My Cousin Manya One survivor’s story The post My Cousin Manya appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
The American Scholar
Queen of the Night Leigh Ann Henion embraces the creatures that light up the dark The post Queen of the Night appeared...
3 months ago
43
3 months ago
Leigh Ann Henion embraces the creatures that light up the dark The post Queen of the Night appeared first on The American Scholar.
This Space
Twentieth anniversary post On this day in 2004, I posted the first entry on this blog.  In recent years many posts have...
3 months ago
45
3 months ago
On this day in 2004, I posted the first entry on this blog.  In recent years many posts have reflected on the past and present of literary blogging (there is no future) so I will not go over that waste land again except to wish more had followed the example of This Space. One of...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Fundamental Truth of His Periodic Law” My middle son is given to serial enthusiasms, what others call hobbies. He’s a second lieutenant in...
a year ago
15
a year ago
My middle son is given to serial enthusiasms, what others call hobbies. He’s a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, now in training at Quantico, and spends his weekends rock climbing in Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. This lends a pleasing symmetry to his life, as one...
Josh Thompson
2018 In Review & Thoughts on 2019 I find a lot of value in other people’s reviews of their years. It’s the time of year to be...
over a year ago
5
over a year ago
I find a lot of value in other people’s reviews of their years. It’s the time of year to be contemplative and reflective on the last 12 months, so here we are. Note to reader: I’m posting this in May, 2019. I wrote it in late December, 2018, didn’t get around to finishing it up...
The Marginalian
The First Scientist’s Guide to Truth: Alhazen on Critical Thinking Born into a world with no clocks, telescopes, microscopes, or democracy, Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham...
a year ago
13
a year ago
Born into a world with no clocks, telescopes, microscopes, or democracy, Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–c. 1040), known in the West as Alhazen, began his life studying religion, but grew quickly disenchanted by its unquestioned dogmas and the way it turned people on each other with...
Wuthering...
Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music - enchantment is the precondition of all... When I read Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872) several...
over a year ago
37
over a year ago
When I read Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872) several years ago I was interested in it as a 19th century work, as a key text in the cult of Richard Wagner and an early example of the vogue for fantasizing that stuffy Prussian or...
This Space
39 Books: 2014 One could say that Mallarmé, through an extraordinary effort of asceticism, opened an abyss in...
7 months ago
60
7 months ago
One could say that Mallarmé, through an extraordinary effort of asceticism, opened an abyss in himself where his awareness, instead of losing itself, survives and grasps its solitude in a desperate clarity. This is from The Silence of Mallarmé, an essay in Blanchot's first...
Ben Borgers
The Brain Can Observe Itself
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Demographer of the Common Woe' Only in the last twenty years or so have I started accumulating deaths, logging them on a...
a year ago
29
a year ago
Only in the last twenty years or so have I started accumulating deaths, logging them on a internal list and weighing them against my own precious self. I’ve led a improbably healthy life which only encouraged the universal young man’s conviction that I was immune to mortality and...
Wuthering...
Notes on Aristotle's Poetics - What are the conditions on which the tragic effect depends? Aristotle did not invent literary criticism with Poetics(late 4th c. BCE, maybe) – we just read The...
over a year ago
41
over a year ago
Aristotle did not invent literary criticism with Poetics(late 4th c. BCE, maybe) – we just read The Frogs – but for centuries it was the base of Western literary criticism, not a source of insight but rather a set of rules.  The Unities, the Tragic Flaw, catharsis, the ranking of...
The Marginalian
Poetry as Prayer: The Great Russian Poet Marina Tsvetaeva on Reclaiming the Divine "In our age, to have the courage for direct speech to God (for prayer) we must either not know what...
5 months ago
Ben Borgers
Three People Talking
over a year ago
Wuthering...
Planning next year's readalong opportunities - Greek philosophy and Roman plays If only I had another idea as good as reading all the Greek plays in order.  But I do have ideas. ...
over a year ago
47
over a year ago
If only I had another idea as good as reading all the Greek plays in order.  But I do have ideas. 1. Roman plays.  Up to five Roman playwrights have survived: the comedians Plautus and Terence and the tragedian Seneca, along with two plays under his name that were likely...
The American Scholar
The Next New Thing In architecture, the gulf between the traditional and the modern seems wider than ever before The...
6 months ago
21
6 months ago
In architecture, the gulf between the traditional and the modern seems wider than ever before The post The Next New Thing appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
The Experience Machine: Cognitive Philosopher Andy Clark on the Power of Expectation and How the... "We are never simply seeing what’s 'really there,' stripped bare of our own anticipations or...
a year ago
29
a year ago
"We are never simply seeing what’s 'really there,' stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions."
The American Scholar
We Are the Borg Is the convergence of human and machine really upon us? The post We Are the Borg appeared first on...
7 months ago
15
7 months ago
Is the convergence of human and machine really upon us? The post We Are the Borg appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
The Art of Allowing Change: Neurobiologist Susan R. Barry’s Moving Correspondence with Oliver Sacks... There is a thought experiment known as Mary’s Room, brilliant and haunting, about the abyss between...
11 months ago
20
11 months ago
There is a thought experiment known as Mary’s Room, brilliant and haunting, about the abyss between felt experience and our mental models of it, about the nature of knowledge, the mystery of consciousness, and the irreducibility of aliveness: Living in a black-and-white chamber,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'We Find It Hard to Read Great Books at All' A young reader tells me he is unable to read most books written before “about the middle of the 60s....
8 months ago
23
8 months ago
A young reader tells me he is unable to read most books written before “about the middle of the 60s. I like Vonnegut. A lot of the stuff before that is like a foreign language to me.” I’m reminded of an English professor who told me more than half a century ago that most of her...
Anecdotal Evidence
'His Empty Heart is Full at Length' Two-hundred-fifty years ago, in the late summer and fall of 1773, Dr. Johnson and Boswell made their...
a year ago
14
a year ago
Two-hundred-fifty years ago, in the late summer and fall of 1773, Dr. Johnson and Boswell made their grand tour of Scotland, including the Hebrides, and both would publish accounts of their adventures. Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland appeared in...
The American Scholar
A Forgotten Turner Classic Who was George Eyser, the one-legged German-American gymnast who astounded at the Olympic Games? The...
7 months ago
23
7 months ago
Who was George Eyser, the one-legged German-American gymnast who astounded at the Olympic Games? The post A Forgotten Turner Classic appeared first on The American Scholar.
sbensu
Pricing APIs Lessons from AWS S3 and others on how to price APIs.
11 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Bright Books! the Perspectives to Our Weak Sights' April is the kindest and cruelest month.  Think of the births: George Herbert (April 3, 1593),...
8 months ago
63
8 months ago
April is the kindest and cruelest month.  Think of the births: George Herbert (April 3, 1593), Shakespeare (April 23, 1564), Henry Vaughan (April 17, 1621), Daniel Defoe (April 24, 1731), Edward Gibbon (April 27, 1737), William Hazlitt (April 10, 1778), Anthony Trollope (April...
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
45
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...
The Marginalian
The Great Blind Spot of Science and the Art of Asking the Complex Question the Only Answer to Which... “Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you,” says the Skin Horse — a stuffed toy...
a month ago
27
a month ago
“Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you,” says the Skin Horse — a stuffed toy brought to life by a child’s love — in The Velveteen Rabbit. Great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise; this is a fundamental question: In a reality of matter,...
Josh Thompson
The Complete Guide to Rails Performance: basic setup You know the feeling. You are excited to start a guide or a tutorial. You buy it, crack it open, and...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
You know the feeling. You are excited to start a guide or a tutorial. You buy it, crack it open, and start working through the environment setup. Then… something goes wrong. Next thing you know, you’ve spent two three too many hours debugging random crap, and you’re not even done...
The Marginalian
Endling: A Poem I turned the corner one afternoon to find my neighborhood grocer gone. No warning, just gone —...
10 months ago
24
10 months ago
I turned the corner one afternoon to find my neighborhood grocer gone. No warning, just gone — padlocked and boarded off, closed for good, a long chain of habit suddenly severed. We know that entropy drags everything toward dissolution, that life is a vector pointed at loss, but...
The American Scholar
New Year, Old Year The post New Year, Old Year appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 days ago
Anecdotal Evidence
''In Prose, Plain as Pike, Pillory' Austin Clarke (1896-1974) was an Irish poet of the generation after Yeats, the slightly...
2 months ago
38
2 months ago
Austin Clarke (1896-1974) was an Irish poet of the generation after Yeats, the slightly older contemporary of Louis MacNeice and Patrick Kavanagh. In 1968 he published A Sermon on Swift and Other Poems, and the 117-line title poem appeared in The Massachusetts Review in 1970....
The American Scholar
The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend How a classic paean to the honest virtues of a Maine fisherman obscured several ugly truths The...
a month ago
10
a month ago
How a classic paean to the honest virtues of a Maine fisherman obscured several ugly truths The post The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend appeared first on The American Scholar.
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
4
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...
Astral Codex Ten
Highlights From The Comments On Prison ...
3 weeks ago
The American Scholar
“Tristan da Cunha” by Roy Campbell Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Tristan da Cunha” by Roy Campbell appeared first on The...
5 months ago
38
5 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Tristan da Cunha” by Roy Campbell appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Elysian
Who's qualified to save the world? Two climate dystopias on unlikeable saviors.
6 months ago
Josh Thompson
Feedback pt. 2 Traditional Feedback is Explicit Feedback is the means by which any system makes changes. From the...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
Traditional Feedback is Explicit Feedback is the means by which any system makes changes. From the gene pool to the swimming pool, feedback works to eliminate the insufficient and improve the sufficient. (See what I did with the “pool” thing?) Your car gives you feedback if the...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Pure Essay' “A good deal that he wrote took the form of the ‘pure’ essay, written, as Lord David Cecil says,...
7 months ago
62
7 months ago
“A good deal that he wrote took the form of the ‘pure’ essay, written, as Lord David Cecil says, ‘not to instruct or edify but only to produce aesthetic satisfaction.’ I do not know why it should be so, but today the ‘pure’ essay is a literary genre to which no reader under sixty...
Josh Thompson
Rails Migration: When you can't add a uniqueness constraint because you already have duplicates I get to occasionally contribute to the Wombat Security dev blog. I wrote the following for...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
I get to occasionally contribute to the Wombat Security dev blog. I wrote the following for development.wombatsecurity.com. This post has been updated to reflect some lessons learned while running this migration in production. Don’t leave a column without an index at any point in...
Ben Borgers
Bin System
over a year ago
Ben Borgers
War Room “Bib”
a year ago
The Marginalian
How to Apologize: Reflections on Forgiveness, Self-Forgiveness, and the Paradox of Doing the Right... "It's permitted to receive solace for whatever you did or didn't do, pitiful, beautiful human."
a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'All Sorts of Characters in the World' “His poems are not much read now.” Sad words, often deserved but occasionally unjust. Of course,...
a year ago
12
a year ago
“His poems are not much read now.” Sad words, often deserved but occasionally unjust. Of course, much of poetry is no longer read, not even by those who consider themselves poets. Who besides eccentrics and cranks reads Pope, Tennyson and Longfellow? The opening question is posed...
Ben Borgers
How I got scammed on Facebook Marketplace
a year ago
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...
11 months ago
20
11 months 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
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
4
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...
Josh Thompson
Be a little better at personal email The next bunch of posts will be me “clearing out the drawers” of notes I have scattered across my...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
The next bunch of posts will be me “clearing out the drawers” of notes I have scattered across my phone, computer, and brain. There is no unifying theme to what will be written here. Three recommendations to email better TL;DR Email should usually be as short as possible. More of...
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
37
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....
Astral Codex Ten
Take The 2025 ACX Survey ...
2 weeks ago
ribbonfarm
Stack Map of the World I’ve been buried neck deep in work stuff this week, but I did find time to make this stack diagram...
8 months ago
4
8 months ago
I’ve been buried neck deep in work stuff this week, but I did find time to make this stack diagram of the world, inspired by the xkcd Dependency cartoon. Randall Munroe draws better than me, but in my favor, I use more colors. Did you know most of the high-purity quartz needed...
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
10
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...
Wuthering...
On the greatness of The Story of the Stone - it is in a vigorous, somewhat staccato style Some notes on The Story of the Stone, Volume 1: The Golden Days (c. 1760 or maybe 1792) by Cao...
2 months ago
39
2 months ago
Some notes on The Story of the Stone, Volume 1: The Golden Days (c. 1760 or maybe 1792) by Cao Xueqin, the first of the five volumes of the Penguin edition of the greatest Chinese novel. I don’t like writing about a book before I have finished it, but in a sense I did finish a...
Josh Thompson
Accomplishments and Achievements We’re encouraged to accomplish and achieve, yes? From birth, we pass milestones. Generally these...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
We’re encouraged to accomplish and achieve, yes? From birth, we pass milestones. Generally these milestones grow in complexity as we add to our abilities - it’s been a while since I’ve been rewarded for not wetting myself - but they are usually on par with our abilities. For...
The Marginalian
Thich Nhat Hanh on True Love and the Five Rivers of Self-Knowledge “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work...
11 months ago
13
11 months ago
“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Rilke wrote to his young correspondent. The great difficulty of loving arises from the great difficulty of bridging the abyss between...
Anecdotal Evidence
'I Am Entirely Sure That I Like It' On March 27, 1905, Theodore Roosevelt had just started his second term as president of the United...
9 months ago
32
9 months ago
On March 27, 1905, Theodore Roosevelt had just started his second term as president of the United States when he wrote a letter to a little-known poet living in Boston:  Dear Mr. Robinson: I have enjoyed your poems especially The Children of the Night so much that I must write to...
sbensu
How to avoid breaking APIs The main trick is to design them with extension in mind so that you won't have to break them later.
a year ago
4
a year ago
The main trick is to design them with extension in mind so that you won't have to break them later.
Wuthering...
The endlessly adaptable plays of Plautus - I’ll make it into a comedy with some tragedy mixed in The plays of Plautus are the foundation of Western comedy.  That they are based on the plays of...
a year ago
51
a year ago
The plays of Plautus are the foundation of Western comedy.  That they are based on the plays of Menander and the other Greek New Comedy writers was irrelevant, since all of those texts were soon lost.  Plautus (and his successor Terence) carried the stage traditions, the...
The Marginalian
The Moon and the Yew Tree: Patti Smith Reads Sylvia Plath’s Haunting Portrait of Depression "This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary."
a year ago
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
The Marginalian
From the Labor Camp to the Pantheon of Literature: How Dostoyevsky Became a Writer "I have nothing, except for certain, and perhaps very minor, literary abilities."
4 months ago
Wuthering...
there is no wisdom in me; and that is true enough - what is knowledge? - Theaetetus and Parmenides The epistemological crisis of Greek philosophy has surprised me.  The early attempts to...
a year ago
39
a year ago
The epistemological crisis of Greek philosophy has surprised me.  The early attempts to systematically understand, without the help of the revealed truth of religion, difficult concepts like existence and virtue led, almost immediately, to the question of whether anyone can...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Diana Steads Him Nothing, He Must Stay' For earned emotional intensity, especially coming from a man seldom associated with emotion, you...
a year ago
15
a year ago
For earned emotional intensity, especially coming from a man seldom associated with emotion, you can hardly outdo A.E. Housman, as recounted by one of his students in Richard Perceval Graves’ A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet (1979):   “One morning in May, 1914, when the trees in...
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
42
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
'Honest Before Anything Else' A reader doesn’t understand how tastes in books and writers might evolve across a lifetime, how...
a week ago
16
a week ago
A reader doesn’t understand how tastes in books and writers might evolve across a lifetime, how indifference might replace enthusiasm and love, indifference. He mentions Hart Crane, a poet I’m unlikely ever to reread. I swooned over The Bridge in high school, spurred on by our...
The American Scholar
“Death Fugue” by Paul Celan Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Death Fugue” by Paul Celan appeared first on The American...
7 months ago
57
7 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Death Fugue” by Paul Celan appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'We Find Other Things Which We Liked Better' One night in the spring of 1766, Boswell and Goldsmith visited Dr. Johnson unannounced and asked if...
10 months ago
20
10 months ago
One night in the spring of 1766, Boswell and Goldsmith visited Dr. Johnson unannounced and asked if he wished to join them at the Mitre Tavern on Fleet Street in London. Johnson was “indisposed” and Goldsmith said, “[W]e will not go to the Mitre to-night, since we cannot have the...
The Elysian
Hint #1 I'm publishing a new print collection in three weeks.
4 months ago
This Space
"And no real fate" – reading in the interval A sportswriter on the radio said that the lack of football in covid lockdown has disrupted the...
over a year ago
39
over a year ago
A sportswriter on the radio said that the lack of football in covid lockdown has disrupted the rhythm of the lives of those who follow the sport. The word stuck in my mind. Does rhythm differ from routine? When a routine is broken, there is an interval of confusion and anxiety,...
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...
6 months ago
43
6 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.”...
Josh Thompson
Training for climbing (progress update) I am at the end of my second iteration of climbing training, and this is how it went and what I...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
I am at the end of my second iteration of climbing training, and this is how it went and what I learned: I completed the workout twelve times, but I took a twelve-day break between workout eleven and twelve. I first skipped a workout because I had ripped skin open on one of my...
The Marginalian
From Cells to Souls: The Poetic Science of How the Brain Became The making of our densely networked crucible of thought and tenderness.
a year ago
ribbonfarm
History is More Like Science Fiction Than Fantasy I’ve been slow-reading Bettany Hughes’ Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities for months now, ever since I...
9 months ago
4
9 months ago
I’ve been slow-reading Bettany Hughes’ Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities for months now, ever since I visited the city (on Kindle, so I didn’t realize when I started that it’s 600 pages plus another 250 odd notes). It’s dense and absorbing and I’ll probably do a reflections post...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Top Thing of the World' John Keats’ meditation on a reader’s paradise:  “I had an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant...
2 months ago
21
2 months ago
John Keats’ meditation on a reader’s paradise:  “I had an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner. Let him on a certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it and reflect from it, and dream...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Profoundly Bitter Lesson' My friend Moshe Vardi is a computer scientist at Rice University, the Karen Ostrum...
a year ago
15
a year ago
My friend Moshe Vardi is a computer scientist at Rice University, the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering. He has published an essay, “A Moral Rot at Rice University”:  “I was well aware that antisemitism is alive and well in the US,...
The Marginalian
The Value of Being Wrong: Lewis Thomas on Generative Mistakes In praise of our "property of error, spontaneous, uncontrolled, and rich in possibilities."
a year ago
This Space
39 Books: 1996 It's a commonplace that in reading novels one can escape the ravages of time. In 1994, I borrowed my...
8 months ago
38
8 months ago
It's a commonplace that in reading novels one can escape the ravages of time. In 1994, I borrowed my student housemate's innocent-looking hardback edition of Nicholson Baker's The Fermata in which Arno Strine writes about how he can actually stop time. The title refers to the...
The Marginalian
The Shape of Wonder: N.J. Berrill on the Universe, the Deepest Meaning of Beauty, and the Highest... "We, each of us, you and I, exhibit more of the true nature of the universe than any dead Saturn or...
3 months ago
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
4
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
'He Belonged Essentially to the Order of Wags' A gift I prize is seeing the humor in writers not taxonomically labeled “Humorists.” If you tell me...
10 months ago
53
10 months ago
A gift I prize is seeing the humor in writers not taxonomically labeled “Humorists.” If you tell me a piece by S.J. Pearlman has made you laugh my response is, “Enjoy yourself.” I don’t find Pearlman as funny as I did when I was a kid, though I’m happy for you. But if you tell me...
Ben Borgers
The Magic of the Common Room
over a year ago
The Marginalian
The Paradox of Free Will The neuroscience, physics, and philosophy of freedom in a universe of fixed laws.
a year ago
The American Scholar
A Story for Christmas The post A Story for Christmas appeared first on The American Scholar.
a week ago
Ben Borgers
Good Software Has a Clear Geography
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Very Close to the Caliber of Mark Twain' I found a 2001 interview with Shelby Foote in The American Enterprise. The author of the three...
3 months ago
39
3 months ago
I found a 2001 interview with Shelby Foote in The American Enterprise. The author of the three volumes of The Civil War: A Narrative (1958-1974) was asked by Bill Kauffman about the scarcity of politicians who are today capable of formulating their own coherent let alone eloquent...
The American Scholar
Changing the Lens Exploding the Canon, Episode 5 (Finale) The post Changing the Lens appeared first on The American...
7 months ago
59
7 months ago
Exploding the Canon, Episode 5 (Finale) The post Changing the Lens appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Some Could, Some Could Not, Shake Off Misery' Last week I wrote a post about the poet Bob Barth, the patrol he led as a 21-year-old...
4 months ago
27
4 months ago
Last week I wrote a post about the poet Bob Barth, the patrol he led as a 21-year-old Marine Corporal in Vietnam, and the war correspondent who wrote a dispatch about him for a newspaper. Two days later, after learning that the stringer, Albert W. Vinson, soon took his own life,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'I'm Not a Funny Man' “All writers that are worth anything are humorists.”  It’s one of those preposterously broad...
a year ago
18
a year ago
“All writers that are worth anything are humorists.”  It’s one of those preposterously broad observations you want to immediately endorse or dismiss, but if “humor” is defined liberally and we accept it as a spectrum ranging from the driest wit to slapstick, farce and bawdy,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'One Thing Always to Be Guarded Against' “Poetry, geography, moral essays, the divers [sic] subjects of philosophy, travels, natural history,...
6 months ago
59
6 months ago
“Poetry, geography, moral essays, the divers [sic] subjects of philosophy, travels, natural history, books on sciences; and, in short, the whole range of book-knowledge is before you; but there is one thing always to be guarded against; and that is, not to admire and applaud...
The American Scholar
Born to Be Wild One founding family’s centuries-long journey The post Born to Be Wild appeared first on The American...
7 months ago
32
7 months ago
One founding family’s centuries-long journey The post Born to Be Wild appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
How to Have Enough: Wendell Berry on Creativity and Love “Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily...
2 weeks ago
25
2 weeks ago
“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a short and lovely poem, distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an...
Ben Borgers
Ben-Edit
over a year ago
The American Scholar
A Messy Mix The post A Messy Mix appeared first on The American Scholar.
8 months ago
Wuthering...
What has happened to me may well be a good thing - the death of Socrates Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, the extended version of the death of Socrates.  These texts,...
a year ago
43
a year ago
Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, the extended version of the death of Socrates.  These texts, especially the last three, are a large part of the fame of Socrates, the reason he is an exemplar of the wise man to this day.  He asked annoying questions, he rejected material...
Josh Thompson
Bootstrapping streetcars in Golden I was describing this two or three stage plan to a friend the other day. They almost understood it,...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
I was describing this two or three stage plan to a friend the other day. They almost understood it, but since they don’t live in Golden, and have not spent a lot of their life nerding out on “urban mobility infrastructure”, they didn’t quite get it. Since I’m trying to write...
This Space
39 Books: 2020 It may be a sign of something that I read Louis-René des Forêts's Poems of Samuel Wood several years...
7 months ago
61
7 months ago
It may be a sign of something that I read Louis-René des Forêts's Poems of Samuel Wood several years after reading A Voice from Elsewhere in which Maurice Blanchot dedicates three unusually personal (and often bewildering) essays to them. The book's title is adapted from a line...
The American Scholar
Corona Chasers You never forget your first solar eclipse The post Corona Chasers appeared first on The American...
7 months ago
24
7 months ago
You never forget your first solar eclipse The post Corona Chasers appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
What Makes Life Alive: Vassily Grossman on Consciousness, Freedom, and Kindness “Every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life,” William Blake wrote in an era when science...
5 months ago
43
5 months ago
“Every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life,” William Blake wrote in an era when science first began raising questions with spiritual undertones: What is life? Where does it begin and end? What makes it alive? But in the epochs since, having discovered muons and...
Ben Borgers
Website redesign, December 2022
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'So Important That It Ought to Absorb Him' In his brief portrait of Joseph Conrad, Desmond MacCarthy tells us the novelist “felt himself...
a month ago
22
a month ago
In his brief portrait of Joseph Conrad, Desmond MacCarthy tells us the novelist “felt himself impelled to attempt an intenser vividness in description. Try, just try, so to describe something that the inattentive reader must see it, and the attentive one can never forget that he...
Josh Thompson
An announcement, and a teaser (for you rock climbers) Here’s a clip from a video I shot today.  Can you guess what’s coming? (This is all going to happen...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
Here’s a clip from a video I shot today.  Can you guess what’s coming? (This is all going to happen on The Climber’s Guide) (Warning to mobile users: big gif) In case you didn’t guess, or you guessed wrong… I’m shooting tons of video for a course. It’s going to be awesome. It’s...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Though Lightly Made, Are Hard to Keep' Even the most chillingly honest among us remain liars, at least to ourselves. Self-delusion is...
a year ago
13
a year ago
Even the most chillingly honest among us remain liars, at least to ourselves. Self-delusion is endemically human and not always a bad thing. It can serve as a useful motivator. Take the annual farce of New Year’s resolutions, those earnestly mustered plans for...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Fruit of My Studies' I’ve been invited to join an online book club and have politely declined. I even like some of the...
3 months ago
34
3 months ago
I’ve been invited to join an online book club and have politely declined. I even like some of the readers who already belong, but by nature I’m not a joiner of anything. As soon as an arrangement among friendly individuals becomes formalized – by that I mean, organized, with...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Buttonhole Strangers on the Street' Dedicated readers have to be optimists. When we return to a book already read and enjoyed, often...
11 months ago
19
11 months ago
Dedicated readers have to be optimists. When we return to a book already read and enjoyed, often decades later, we’re acting on faith, trusting that we and it remain compatible. That’s not always the case, of course. My younger self is not a reliable critic. For too long I was an...
Ben Borgers
Not Developer Enough
over a year ago
Ben Borgers
Is It Worth It to Be Passive Aggressive?
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Richly, Sometimes Dreamily, Melodic' A friend has given me an unexpected gift: a first American edition of Poems for Children (Henry Holt...
9 months ago
38
9 months ago
A friend has given me an unexpected gift: a first American edition of Poems for Children (Henry Holt and Co., 1930), with a printed note before the title page:  “Three hundred copies of ‘Poems for Children’ have been specially printed and bound, and have been signed by the...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Interior Decoration Doesn't Count" Just last week, and not for the first time, I had a dream set in Kay’s Books in downtown Cleveland,...
9 months ago
32
9 months ago
Just last week, and not for the first time, I had a dream set in Kay’s Books in downtown Cleveland, where I visited often as a kid and worked in 1975. I was in the basement in the general hardback fiction section where I saw the copy of Under the Volcano I bought there forty-nine...
The Marginalian
Alain de Botton on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind "A healthy mind knows how to hope; it identifies and then hangs on tenaciously to a few reasons to...
a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'How It Sounds When Read Out Loud' Our eighth-grade English teacher, Miss Clymer, had us open the textbook to a poem written...
a month ago
28
a month ago
Our eighth-grade English teacher, Miss Clymer, had us open the textbook to a poem written seventy-five years earlier and picked students to read aloud each of its four, eight-line stanzas. She suggested we pay attention to who is speaking, as the poem is written as a dialogue...
Josh Thompson
HTTParty and to_json I was having some trouble debugging an HTTParty POST request. A few tools that were useful to...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
I was having some trouble debugging an HTTParty POST request. A few tools that were useful to me: post DEBUG info to STDOUT netcat to listen to HTTP requests locally I had this code: options = { headers: { "Content-Type": "application/json", authorization: "Bearer...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Human Impulse, the Human Aspiration' The upstairs neighbor, a diffident graduate student in English, knocked on the door to tell me W.H....
a year ago
11
a year ago
The upstairs neighbor, a diffident graduate student in English, knocked on the door to tell me W.H. Auden had died. He was close to tears and couldn’t stop shaking his head in disbelief. This was half a century ago, late September 1973. We talked books almost daily and a few...
The American Scholar
Mystery Solved! The post Mystery Solved! appeared first on The American Scholar.
6 months ago
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
54
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...
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...
8 months ago
65
8 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...
Anecdotal Evidence
'There Are No Millers Any More' I’ve just learned of the suicide of a woman I knew casually a long time ago. Such news is always...
a week ago
13
a week ago
I’ve just learned of the suicide of a woman I knew casually a long time ago. Such news is always unsettling, as though a fundamental law of nature had been violated. Given what we know of the person, and it may be very little, we apply her circumstances to our own and conclude,...
The American Scholar
The Given Child To what lengths would a mother go to ensure her family’s survival in a remote Himalayan village? The...
7 months ago
20
7 months ago
To what lengths would a mother go to ensure her family’s survival in a remote Himalayan village? The post The Given Child appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
Pry Tips and Tricks the following is cross-posted from development.wombatsecurity.com. I wrote about some handy extra...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
the following is cross-posted from development.wombatsecurity.com. I wrote about some handy extra features I’ve found using Pry much of my day. I joined the Wombat team a few months ago, and have been working on the threatsim product. We had a bit of a bug backlog, and myself and...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Friends They May Become To-morrow' “New books can have few associations. They may reach us on the best deckle-edged Whatman paper, in...
a month ago
16
a month ago
“New books can have few associations. They may reach us on the best deckle-edged Whatman paper, in the newest types of famous presses, with backs of embossed vellum, with tasteful tasselled strings,--and yet be no more to us than the constrained and uneasy acquaintances of...
The American Scholar
Kat Wiese Taking flight The post Kat Wiese appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
Ben Borgers
Thursday, January 20, 2022
over a year ago
The American Scholar
“I Have Had My Vision” Three prompts The post “I Have Had My Vision” appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
ribbonfarm
Intellectual Menopause I ran across the alarming phrase intellectual menopause a few months ago in John Gall’s...
4 months ago
4
4 months ago
I ran across the alarming phrase intellectual menopause a few months ago in John Gall’s Systemantics, and it naturally stuck in my brain given I’m pushing 50 and getting predictably angsty about it. The phrase conjures up visions of a phenomenon much more profound and unfunny...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Laurels All Are Cut' A thoughtful reader, knowing of my fondness for A.E. Housman’s poems, has sent me the English...
9 months ago
17
9 months ago
A thoughtful reader, knowing of my fondness for A.E. Housman’s poems, has sent me the English composer John Ireland’s 1928 setting for a verse from Last Poems (1922, that literary annus mirabilis). The baritone is Mark Stone; the pianist, Sholto Kynoch. Here is Housman’s poem,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'An Ordinary Life Where Things Make Sense' An old friend back in upstate New York and I were texting. We worked years ago as reporters for the...
a year ago
8
a year ago
An old friend back in upstate New York and I were texting. We worked years ago as reporters for the same newspaper. She was married then to her second husband, who had multiple sclerosis and died slowly and horribly. When she had to  go out of town, I would stay with him...
Ben Borgers
Portal
over a year ago
The Marginalian
The Wound Is the Gift: David Whyte on the Relationship Between Anxiety and Intimacy "Intimacy is presence magnified by our vulnerability, magnified by increasing proximity to the fear...
a month ago
The Marginalian
Facts about the Moon: Dorianne Laux’s Stunning Poem about Bearing Our Human Losses When Even the... “Hearing the rising tide,” Rachel Carson wrote in her poetic meditation on the ocean and the meaning...
8 months ago
63
8 months ago
“Hearing the rising tide,” Rachel Carson wrote in her poetic meditation on the ocean and the meaning of life, “there are echoes of past and future: of the flow of time, obliterating yet containing all that has gone before… of the stream of life, flowing as inexorably as any ocean...
The American Scholar
Esteban Cabeza de Baca History witnessed, from the picket lines The post Esteban Cabeza de Baca appeared first on The...
7 months ago
52
7 months ago
History witnessed, from the picket lines The post Esteban Cabeza de Baca appeared first on The American Scholar.
Ben Borgers
I’m a Sucker for the Brand
over a year ago
Ben Borgers
Gerald R. Gill Papers
over a year ago
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.
8 months ago
Blog -...
Book Review - Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples, 2019 Edition I don’t anticipate giving many perfect ratings, but this book is a rare gem – a captivating...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
I don’t anticipate giving many perfect ratings, but this book is a rare gem – a captivating page-turner packed full of aha moments. The authors have woven together decades of personal research and experience in the field of intimate relationships to create a classic...
The American Scholar
Ups and Downs The post Ups and Downs appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
Ben Borgers
Blocks recap
over a year ago
Wuthering...
Wealth by Aristophanes - gout here, pot bellies there, ... obesity beyond all bounds We saw Sophocles and Euripides end their long careers with masterpieces, but we do not have that...
over a year ago
46
over a year ago
We saw Sophocles and Euripides end their long careers with masterpieces, but we do not have that luck with Aristophanes.  Wealth (388 BCE) is thin, scattershot, perhaps even a bit defeated or exhausted. The conceit is as usual excellent.  Plutus, the god of wealth, is freed...
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
33
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...
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
4
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...
Ben Borgers
Is Advice Flawed?
over a year ago
The American Scholar
“Peter Quince at the Clavier” by Wallace Stevens Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Peter Quince at the Clavier” by Wallace Stevens appeared...
5 months ago
44
5 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Peter Quince at the Clavier” by Wallace Stevens appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
O Sweet Spontaneous: E.E. Cummings’s Love-Poem to Earth and the Glory of Spring The ultimate anthem of resistance to the assaults on life.
a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'O Deliquescence of Our Quartz-like Loves!' A chemical engineer describing his recent research to me used a lovely word: deliquescent. The word...
5 months ago
47
5 months ago
A chemical engineer describing his recent research to me used a lovely word: deliquescent. The word entered English in the eighteenth century and its original context was strictly scientific: deliquescence occurs when a substance absorbs moisture from the air and becomes a...
Ben Borgers
Thinking in Silence
over a year ago
Ben Borgers
Prototyping an AI-powered note-taking app
a year ago
The Marginalian
Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Search for Meaning: Oliver Sacks on ChatGPT, 30... "We are not incoherent, a bundle of sensations, but a self, rising from experience, continually...
a year ago
48
a year ago
"We are not incoherent, a bundle of sensations, but a self, rising from experience, continually growing and revised... Through experience, education, art, and life, we teach our brains to become unique. We learn to be individuals. This is a neurological learning as well as a...
The American Scholar
Just When You Thought It Wasn’t Safe … How Wilbert Longfellow turned America into a nation of swimmers The post Just When You Thought It...
6 months ago
49
6 months ago
How Wilbert Longfellow turned America into a nation of swimmers The post Just When You Thought It <em>Wasn’t</em> Safe … appeared first on The American Scholar.
Ben Borgers
The Beginning of College Sucks
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'I’d Be the Man Dares Clearly Sing' I have no musical talent apart from a sometimes annoying gift for remembering lyrics, and not always...
8 months ago
33
8 months ago
I have no musical talent apart from a sometimes annoying gift for remembering lyrics, and not always the good stuff. I know all the words to a radio jingle for a car dealer in Cleveland, circa 1964, among other clutter. A related symptom is the long-lasting earworm. Much of this...
Josh Thompson
Aggregate and deduplicate your deprecation warnings in Rails We know we all stay on the cutting edge of Rails; no one, and I mean no one out there is making a...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
We know we all stay on the cutting edge of Rails; no one, and I mean no one out there is making a 4.2 -> 5.2 upgrade because Rails 4.2 is no longer supported. You, dear reader, have just suddenly found an interest in resolving deprecation warnings, and as one jumps a few Rails...
The American Scholar
Rap Rap Rap The post Rap Rap Rap appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'An Enormous Yes' “The voice was unmistakable. It made misery beautiful.”  My ideal setting for listening to music is...
5 months ago
42
5 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...
The American Scholar
Overconsumed Adam Minter on what happens to all the stuff we downsize, declutter, and discard The post...
a month ago
20
a month ago
Adam Minter on what happens to all the stuff we downsize, declutter, and discard The post Overconsumed appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
Typing for Programmers If you had to distill my ability to bring value to those around me, it would be “Josh types good”. I...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
If you had to distill my ability to bring value to those around me, it would be “Josh types good”. I can press these magical little keys on this little metal box here, and make these words come out. If you’re reading these words, you don’t care how these words actually got on...
Ben Borgers
Batching
over a year ago
ben-mini
Modality Switching Online I hate it when my dad leaves me a voicemail. Whenever I open my phone and see the pending voicemail,...
6 months ago
4
6 months ago
I hate it when my dad leaves me a voicemail. Whenever I open my phone and see the pending voicemail, I roll my eyes. He tends to meander. My dad’s messages can range from 40 seconds to 2 minutes. He typically wants to inform me of something, like an upcoming family event or an...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Time Is Tight' My brother is dying as he lived – stubbornly. He has been in hospice for two weeks and is...
4 months ago
29
4 months ago
My brother is dying as he lived – stubbornly. He has been in hospice for two weeks and is failing incrementally. On Monday we were swapping memories and he stopped talking on Tuesday, the same day he stopped eating. He lies on his back on the hospice bed, mouth open, eyes staring...
Blog -...
Book Review - Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant In the book Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant, author Roland Lazenby meticulously shares the...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
In the book Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant, author Roland Lazenby meticulously shares the journey of Kobe Bryant, from ancestral influences up through his final game in the NBA. He is a clear fan of Kobe’s inarguable work ethic, but he allows readers to reinforce their...
Ben Borgers
It Does Have to Be Every Day
over a year ago
The Marginalian
Turning to Stone: A Geologist’s Love Letter to the Wisdom of Rocks Among the great salvations of my childhood were the rocks and minerals lining the bookshelves of our...
4 months ago
40
4 months ago
Among the great salvations of my childhood were the rocks and minerals lining the bookshelves of our next door neighbor — a geologist working for the Bulgarian Ministry of Environment and Water. I spent long hours casting amethyst refractions on the ceiling, carving words into...
Wuthering...
Books I read in August 2024 My ambition this summer was to read extensively in Arabic literature.  Eh, I did all right, but I...
4 months ago
20
4 months ago
My ambition this summer was to read extensively in Arabic literature.  Eh, I did all right, but I will have to save Ibn Battuta’s Travels and the second half of Leg over Leg for some other time.  FICTION The Arabian Nights (14th c.), many hands – In the great Hassan Haddawy...
Josh Thompson
A Runbook for Upgrading Your Parent's Junky Old Laptop to a Chromebook tl;dr: I’m creating a runbook for a very specific, delicate, and potentially time-consuming and...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
tl;dr: I’m creating a runbook for a very specific, delicate, and potentially time-consuming and emotionally-charged operation to replace my 70-year-old newly-widowed mother-in-law's ancient desktop computer with a easy-for-me-to-manage Chromebook Update: I posted to r/ChromeOS...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Art and Practice of Reading Aloud to Others' A longtime reader in Philadelphia, a retired attorney, tells me that since the start of the COVID-19...
a year ago
34
a year ago
A longtime reader in Philadelphia, a retired attorney, tells me that since the start of the COVID-19 lockdown he has been reading books aloud to his wife, most recently The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis. His list of more than a dozen titles includes Moby-Dick (“our overall...
The American Scholar
Part of the Parade The post Part of the Parade appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 months ago
The American Scholar
Caprock Adventures worth the silence The post Caprock appeared first on The American Scholar.
8 months ago
The American Scholar
Let Us Compare Mythologies Exploding the Canon, Episode 4 The post Let Us Compare Mythologies appeared first on The American...
8 months ago
30
8 months ago
Exploding the Canon, Episode 4 The post Let Us Compare Mythologies appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
“The Horses” by Edwin Muir Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “The Horses” by Edwin Muir appeared first on The American...
3 days ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Nothing Makes a Man More Reverent' I have never thought of reading as a “hobby.” I put the word in quotes because I sense a patronizing...
a month ago
16
a month ago
I have never thought of reading as a “hobby.” I put the word in quotes because I sense a patronizing tinge to the word. A hobby is a lesser pastime than a job, something frivolous, a “leisure activity” that most people in the past couldn’t afford because they had to earn a...
The American Scholar
Cats and Dogs The post Cats and Dogs appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 weeks ago
The American Scholar
Dottie Lo Bue House and home The post Dottie Lo Bue appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 months ago
Ben Borgers
Sunk Cost Chinese
over a year ago
This Space
39 Books: 2017 The list of books piles up, thirty-three now, and I'm reading fewer and fewer novels. Not through...
7 months ago
38
7 months ago
The list of books piles up, thirty-three now, and I'm reading fewer and fewer novels. Not through choice, but so little of what's new appeals. Instead, this year I read and reread books like Peter Handke's To Duration and Once Again for Thucydides, both of which escape helpful...
Ben Borgers
iPad Impatience
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Poet's Hope' Erica Light is the daughter of my late friend Helen Pinkerton (1927-2017), the poet and Melville...
8 months ago
33
8 months ago
Erica Light is the daughter of my late friend Helen Pinkerton (1927-2017), the poet and Melville scholar. We exchange emails several times each year, usually devoted to what we are reading. This week she reported reading some of the writers and books I’ve mentioned recently at...
Blog -...
Book Review - Shots from the Hip In the fields of Taoism, herbalism, and Chinese culture, Daniel Reid is a legendary author who has...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
In the fields of Taoism, herbalism, and Chinese culture, Daniel Reid is a legendary author who has written books that have changed the course of lives. His most recent publication is a two-book memoir entitled Shots from the Hip, a colourful account of his many exotic...
Ben Borgers
Basecamp Talks to You
over a year ago
The Marginalian
Don’t Waste Your Wildness "What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable,...
2 months ago
41
2 months ago
"What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary. In...
Josh Thompson
On Cleaner Controllers A few days ago, I worked on a project that was mostly about serving up basic store data (modeled...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
A few days ago, I worked on a project that was mostly about serving up basic store data (modeled after Etsy) to an API. We had a few dozen end-points, and all responses were in JSON. Most of the action happened inside of our controllers, and as you might imagine, our routes.rb...
The American Scholar
The Baritone as Democrat How Lawrence Tibbett prophesied the Metropolitan Opera crisis of today The post The Baritone as...
a month ago
23
a month ago
How Lawrence Tibbett prophesied the Metropolitan Opera crisis of today The post The Baritone as Democrat appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'There’s No Such Thing As a Synonym' My favorite literary non-form may be commonplace books, those magpie collections unified only by the...
3 days ago
7
3 days ago
My favorite literary non-form may be commonplace books, those magpie collections unified only by the sensibilities of their hunter-gatherers. They are kept by industrious readers and serve as literary Wunderkammern, cabinets of bookish wonders that may reveal a reader’s truest...
The American Scholar
Such as It Is The post Such as It Is appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 weeks ago
The Marginalian
Marie Howe’s Stunning Hymn of Humanity, Animated "It began as an almost inaudible hum..."
9 months ago
Ben Borgers
War Room — using the native date picker
a year ago
Escaping Flatland
How to think in writing Part 1: The thought behind the thought
8 months ago
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
40
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...
Josh Thompson
How To Write A Letter of Recommendation for Yourself I meet regularly with early-career software developers. A few recurring meetings, 1x/week, plus...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
I meet regularly with early-career software developers. A few recurring meetings, 1x/week, plus ad-hoc calls as needed with others. A question came up recently: My three-month internship is close to wrapping up. The Co-founder/CEO/lead developer of the consulting company I’m at...
The American Scholar
Acting Out One tortuous journey from stage to screen The post Acting Out appeared first on The American...
7 months ago
37
7 months ago
One tortuous journey from stage to screen The post Acting Out appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Perry Bible...
Brushed The post Brushed appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.
7 months ago
Ben Borgers
How Recurring Tasks in War Room Work
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Maintaining a Stable and Orderly Civilization' On the same day I removed all the books from one of the bookcases, dusted the shelves...
7 months ago
52
7 months ago
On the same day I removed all the books from one of the bookcases, dusted the shelves and reorganized the volumes, one of our cats leaped into an open cupboard in the kitchen. One of the four pegs supporting the middle shelf was missing and Trane’s weight tipped it enough so a...
sbensu
Notes on UX and LLM integrations I analyze 8 apps (ChatGPT, Notion, Perplexity, etc.) that use or integrate LLM and try to break down...
a year ago
4
a year ago
I analyze 8 apps (ChatGPT, Notion, Perplexity, etc.) that use or integrate LLM and try to break down when and why they work well, or poorly.
Josh Thompson
Focus: One Thing at a Time The pressure to be working on more than one thing at a time is enormous. This pressure comes from no...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
The pressure to be working on more than one thing at a time is enormous. This pressure comes from no one but me. And before I dismiss this tendency as “proof that I work too hard”, I must take another tact. It comes from a need to satisfy my ego. It is much easier to say “I did...
This Space
The end of something Thirteen years ago I posted The beginning of something to mark the fifteenth anniversary of Spike...
a year ago
53
a year ago
Thirteen years ago I posted The beginning of something to mark the fifteenth anniversary of Spike Magazine (not to be confused with Spiked), which I helped to found when the world wide web was forming, and to comment on the direction online literary culture had taken. By that...
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...
a month ago
23
a month 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...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Someone Who Could Never Be a Peasant' I first encountered Robert Alter in 1970 in the issue of TriQuarterly devoted to Vladimir Nabokov,...
4 months ago
33
4 months ago
I first encountered Robert Alter in 1970 in the issue of TriQuarterly devoted to Vladimir Nabokov, already one of my favorite writers. Alter’s contribution was “Invitation to a Beheading: Nabokov and the Art of Politics,” which Nabokov later described as “practically flawless.” A...
The American Scholar
“Snake” by D. H. Lawrence Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Snake” by D. H. Lawrence appeared first on The American...
3 months ago
40
3 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Snake” by D. H. Lawrence appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Writer As Illusionist' My review of William Maxwell’s The Writer As Illusionist: Uncollected and Unpublished Work (ed. Alec...
7 months ago
25
7 months ago
My review of William Maxwell’s The Writer As Illusionist: Uncollected and Unpublished Work (ed. Alec Wilkinson, Nonpareil Books, 2024) is published in the June issue of The New Criterion.
Anecdotal Evidence
'To Make Something Beautiful' “There have been many things I’ve tried to write about and could not. Things too serious, too...
a month ago
17
a month ago
“There have been many things I’ve tried to write about and could not. Things too serious, too painful, and that’s not the purpose of writing a poem. The point of poetry is to make something beautiful—something in itself. I’m not trying to pour my sorrows down on the page.”  Janet...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Learning Is Not Defunct in the Republic' “As you probably don’t read National Review, I enclose proof that learning is not defunct in the...
3 months ago
38
3 months ago
“As you probably don’t read National Review, I enclose proof that learning is not defunct in the Republic. Buckley had printed a note . . . praising Waugh’s delightful whimsy in coining a nonsense phrase like tohu bohu. Catholics tend not to have read a word of Holy Writ.”  I...
The American Scholar
“To David, About His Education” by Howard Nemerov Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “To David, About His Education” by Howard Nemerov appeared...
a month ago
31
a month ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “To David, About His Education” by Howard Nemerov appeared first on The American Scholar.
Blog -...
Book Review - Dancing Naked in the Mind Field Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, the autobiography of Kary Mullis, published in 1998, is...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, the autobiography of Kary Mullis, published in 1998, is reminiscent of another Nobel Prize winning autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!. Dr. Mullis and Dr. Feynman had a great deal in common, including their incomprehensible...
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
25
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,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Passing Tribute of a Sigh' “The cemetery lives an intense, passion-filled life.”  Anyone who has walked a cemetery and paid...
a year ago
15
a year ago
“The cemetery lives an intense, passion-filled life.”  Anyone who has walked a cemetery and paid respectful attention -- and I mean as a tourist, when the visit is not obligatory – will understand. Once I tramped the beautifully landscaped Vale Cemetery (1857) in downtown...
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...
4 months ago
38
4 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...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Death Is Divestment, Death Is Communion' “Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed,...
6 months ago
53
6 months ago
“Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Read a Little, Listen to a Little Music' “To tend the world: read a little, listen to a little music.”  I was slow to warm to the late Adam...
a year ago
11
a year ago
“To tend the world: read a little, listen to a little music.”  I was slow to warm to the late Adam Zagajewski. I still prefer his essays to his poems, which often seem sentimental and formless, as though he demanded too little of himself when writing poetry. Only in the five...
Ben Borgers
Optimizing Kiwi for scale
over a year ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Profound Secret Both to Himself and the World' English majors will recall the evisceration of John Keats in an 1818 review of Endymion in...
a year ago
12
a year ago
English majors will recall the evisceration of John Keats in an 1818 review of Endymion in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. John Gibson Lockhart, using the pen name “Z,” mocked Keats’ “Cockney” poetry, his medical training and even his friendship with Leigh Hunt. He dismissed the...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Important Medium'' I grew up in a place I’ve been told for most of my life should embarrass me. When I went to college...
3 months ago
20
3 months ago
I grew up in a place I’ve been told for most of my life should embarrass me. When I went to college and someone asked where I came from, invariably I said “Cleveland” not “Parma Heights,” a suburb on the West Side of that city. By age seventeen I was already sensitive to the...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Entertain As Well As Illuminate' “Here’s a thought: literary criticism ought to entertain as well as illuminate.”  Bracing words to...
a year ago
11
a year ago
“Here’s a thought: literary criticism ought to entertain as well as illuminate.”  Bracing words to encounter while writing a book review. The writer is the poet David Mason. Quoted is the opening sentence of his review/essay “Two Poet-Critics,” devoted to Clive James and John...
Josh Thompson
Ethan Magnass' sermons from Grace Anglican Church in Grove City, PA I’ve been recommending a collection of sermons to many people recently. I’ve listened to each of...
over a year ago
4
over a year ago
I’ve been recommending a collection of sermons to many people recently. I’ve listened to each of these sermons quite a few times. They’re worth your time. Ethan Magness is the rector at Grace Anglican Church in Grove City, PA. Sermon Series on Joseph Grace Anglican Church podcast...
The American Scholar
On Book August Wilson’s play just hit the big screen, but even greater rewards await on the page The post On...
a month ago
22
a month ago
August Wilson’s play just hit the big screen, but even greater rewards await on the page The post On Book appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
Wonder-Sighting on Planet Earth: The Space Telescope Eye of the Scallop Inside Earth's most alien vision.
a year ago
Ben Borgers
Sunday, January 16, 2022
over a year ago
The American Scholar
The Support Ship The post The Support Ship appeared first on The American Scholar.
5 months ago
Josh Thompson
Tongue Ties: What, So What, What To Do “tongue tied” (my first time hearing the word, my newborn’s experience) ‘tongue tie’ was something...
7 months ago
4
7 months ago
“tongue tied” (my first time hearing the word, my newborn’s experience) ‘tongue tie’ was something I’d heard discussed (the little bit of fiber under a tongue) as the child we now know as Eden was incubating inside of Kristi’s womb. I didn’t think much of it then. Cut forward to...
Ben Borgers
Daily Habits
over a year ago
sbensu
The person behind the idea When reading, it is worth understanding the kind of person authors are.
a month ago
The American Scholar
Rage, Muse The novels that revisit Greek myths, giving voice to the women who were scorned, wronged, or...
5 months ago
45
5 months ago
The novels that revisit Greek myths, giving voice to the women who were scorned, wronged, or forgotten The post Rage, Muse appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'For My Small Ailments' Empathy, in some quarters, is becoming quite fashionable. Clearly, my doctor has been...
10 months ago
17
10 months ago
Empathy, in some quarters, is becoming quite fashionable. Clearly, my doctor has been benefiting from professional development. When he enters the examination room we shake hands, he moves a chair to face me and sits almost knee-to-knee. This is to eliminate any suggestion of...
The Marginalian
How the Sea Came to Be: An Illustrated Singsong Celebration of the Evolution of Life “Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses,” Rachel Carson wrote in...
a year ago
15
a year ago
“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses,” Rachel Carson wrote in the pioneering 1937 essay that invited the human imagination into the science and splendor of the marine world for the first time — a world then more mysterious than the Moon, a...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Flow, Like Waters After Summer Show’rs' “As two men sit silent, after having exhausted all their topics of conversation; one says, ‘It is...
5 months ago
27
5 months ago
“As two men sit silent, after having exhausted all their topics of conversation; one says, ‘It is very fine weather,’ and the other says, ‘Yes;’—one blows his nose, and the other rubs his eye-brows; (by the way, this is very much in Homer’s manner;) such seems to be the case...