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Astral Codex Ten
What Happened To NAEP Scores? ...
5 months ago
Naz Hamid — Journal...
🔗 Album Whale While we appreciate Apple Music and Spotify suggesting new music for us, we miss the good ol’ days...
9 months ago
19
9 months ago
While we appreciate Apple Music and Spotify suggesting new music for us, we miss the good ol’ days when recommendations came from friends. In those days of yore, we had to think about which albums we’d recommend, and what those albums say about us. Each album came with a personal...
The Marginalian
Jonathan Franzen on How to Write About Nature, with a Side of Rachel Carson and Alice in Wonderland I grew up loving Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. My grandmother read it to me before I could read....
a year ago
93
a year ago
I grew up loving Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. My grandmother read it to me before I could read. I read it to myself as soon as I could. I loved the strangeness of it, and the tenderness. As a child mathematician, I loved knowing that a grown mathematician had written it. But...
The Marginalian
Of Wonder, the Courage of Uncertainty, and How to Hear Your Soul: The Best of The Marginalian 2023 Hindsight is our finest instrument for discerning the patterns of our lives. To look back on a year...
a year ago
29
a year ago
Hindsight is our finest instrument for discerning the patterns of our lives. To look back on a year of reading, a year of writing, is to discover a secret map of the mind, revealing the landscape of living — after all, how we spend our thoughts is how we spend our lives. In...
The Elysian
Multi-country civilizations are good, actually A vibe shift in favor of annexation would be counterproductive 🌏
5 months ago
sbensu
The battlefield where arguments fight A lot of speech is about convincing others of what type of arguments have merit
a year ago
The Marginalian
Comets, Orbits, and the Mystery We Are: The Enchanted Celestial Mechanics of Australian Artist Shane... “We are bathing in mystery and confusion,” Carl Sagan told his best interviewer. “That will always...
5 months ago
53
5 months ago
“We are bathing in mystery and confusion,” Carl Sagan told his best interviewer. “That will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.” We have wielded our tools of reason at the mystery — theorems and telescopes, postulates...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Essayists, Like Poets, Are Born and Not Made' “A knowledge of men and of books is also to be desired; for it is a writer’s best reason of being,...
19 hours ago
3
19 hours ago
“A knowledge of men and of books is also to be desired; for it is a writer’s best reason of being, and without it he does well to hold his tongue. Blessed with these attributes he is an essayist to some purpose. Give him leisure and occasion, and his discourse may well become as...
The Elysian
We should own the economy A new book about the future of capitalism and an invitation to participate in it.
5 months ago
Astral Codex Ten
Open Thread 380 ...
3 months ago
The Marginalian
How to Love Yourself and How to Love Another: A Playful and Poignant Vintage Illustrated Fable about... The great problem of consciousness is that all it knows is itself, and only dimly. We can override...
8 months ago
50
8 months ago
The great problem of consciousness is that all it knows is itself, and only dimly. We can override this elemental self-reference only with constant vigilance, reminding ourselves again and again as we forget over and over how difficult it is — how nigh impossible — to know what...
The American Scholar
The Support Ship The post The Support Ship appeared first on The American Scholar.
a year ago
The Marginalian
Wholeness and the Implicate Order: Physicist David Bohm on Bridging Consciousness and Reality How to "include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided,...
over a year ago
The American Scholar
Anchoring Shards of Memory We don’t often associate Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler, but both The post Anchoring Shards of...
11 months ago
46
11 months ago
We don’t often associate Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler, but both The post Anchoring Shards of Memory appeared first on The American Scholar.
Josh Thompson
Issues related to the city of Golden While I was biking around recently, I saw notes about an upcoming neighborhood meeting about some...
over a year ago
24
over a year ago
While I was biking around recently, I saw notes about an upcoming neighborhood meeting about some rezoning, a big lot in downtown Golden. I went to the meeting (Thursday, July 22) and learned a lot. Here’s the lot in question: I have ridden my bike past this property hundreds of...
Anecdotal Evidence
'It Brought Us This Far' Self-knowledge is fine but some things are best left unexamined. “Why do you read so many books?” a...
2 months ago
22
2 months ago
Self-knowledge is fine but some things are best left unexamined. “Why do you read so many books?” a reader asks. His assumption, never directly articulated, is that reading is compensation for the absence of something far more important. I suppose people have been facing...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Intensely and Permanently Interested in Literature' Another request for a reading list from a young reader. Any reply will be incomplete and...
6 months ago
30
6 months ago
Another request for a reading list from a young reader. Any reply will be incomplete and risk discouraging aspiring literati. The only infallible inducement to literature is personal pleasure, a notoriously subjective criterion. I love Gibbon and Doughty, and you may find them...
The Marginalian
The Science of Tears and the Art of Crying: An Illustrated Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Deepest... “All the poems of our lives are not yet made. We hear them crying to us,” Muriel Rukeyser writes in...
9 months ago
62
9 months ago
“All the poems of our lives are not yet made. We hear them crying to us,” Muriel Rukeyser writes in her timeless ode to the power of poetry. “Cry, heart, but never break,” entreats one of my favorite children’s books — which, at their best, are always philosophies for living. It...
Wuthering...
Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and their Stoic self-help books - I shall not be afraid when my last hour... The curious thing about Stoicism is its long-lasting survival in the self-help genre, curious at...
a year ago
87
a year ago
The curious thing about Stoicism is its long-lasting survival in the self-help genre, curious at least until I read Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic (1st C.) several years ago and discovered that it was a self-help book, one of the founding self-help books.  The Meditations of...
Josh Thompson
Exploring source code via Griddler and Griddler-Mailgun Proofpoint had a two-day “hack day” recently. My coworker John and I teamed up on a cool little...
over a year ago
18
over a year ago
Proofpoint had a two-day “hack day” recently. My coworker John and I teamed up on a cool little feature. I’ll give some context in a moment, but this post isn’t about the hack day, or email - it’s about exploring source code. Here’s the context: In my day-to-day, I work on a...
Josh Thompson
Jaywalking: What, So What, What To Do What Is “Jaywalking” authors note: This feels very draft-y. There’s two distinct perspectives I note...
a year ago
17
a year ago
What Is “Jaywalking” authors note: This feels very draft-y. There’s two distinct perspectives I note in my mind, as I write this. Some people might “believe in jaywalking” and view non-car-users as an underclass, and act in such a way that makes this belief manifestly obvious....
ribbonfarm
Sons of the Soil, Migrants, and Civil War, We read an interesting paper today (ht Sachin Benny with an assist from ChatGPT) in the Yak...
a year ago
20
a year ago
We read an interesting paper today (ht Sachin Benny with an assist from ChatGPT) in the Yak Collective weekly governance study group (Fridays at 9 AM Pacific). Sons of the Soil, Migrants, and Civil War, by James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin (World Development, V 39, No. 2,...
sbensu
The person behind the idea When reading, it is worth understanding the kind of person authors are.
8 months ago
Josh Thompson
An Open Letter about Golden 2022-06-15 Update I wrote this document the first time in a very small number of minutes, three...
over a year ago
15
over a year ago
2022-06-15 Update I wrote this document the first time in a very small number of minutes, three weeks ago, on my way out the door on a particularly busy day. I follow “write it now”. I’ve gotten to discuss this letter with a few different people, because I mentioned it in email....
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Actual and the Unexceptional' In its Summer 1965 issue, the editors of The American Scholar asked forty-two writers and...
4 weeks ago
13
4 weeks ago
In its Summer 1965 issue, the editors of The American Scholar asked forty-two writers and critics the following question: “To what book published in the past ten years do you find yourself going back--or thinking back--most often?” I take the question personally because I turned...
The American Scholar
The March Down Main The post The March Down Main appeared first on The American Scholar.
10 months ago
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
17
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...
Astral Codex Ten
Hidden Open Thread 359.5 ...
8 months ago
The Marginalian
On Giving Up: Adam Phillips on Knowing What You Want, the Art of Self-Revision, and the Courage to... "Not being able to give up is not to be able to allow for loss, for vulnerability; not to be able to...
a year ago
The American Scholar
Lingua Obscura Laura Spinney on the spread of Proto-Indo-European The post Lingua Obscura appeared first on The...
3 months ago
23
3 months ago
Laura Spinney on the spread of Proto-Indo-European The post Lingua Obscura appeared first on The American Scholar.
Wuthering...
Books Read in June 2024 - "Why can't we steal the calm vegetable clairvoyance of these great rooted... Three weeks in Portugal meant less and different reading. FICTION Wolf Solent (1929), John Cowper...
a year ago
97
a year ago
Three weeks in Portugal meant less and different reading. FICTION Wolf Solent (1929), John Cowper Powys – among the most eccentric novels I have ever read, up there with his contemporaries D. H. Lawrence and Ronald Firbank!  I feel I should write about it; I feel I should read...
Wuthering...
The books I read in December 2024 - From her earliest youth she had discovered a fondness for... A different kind of month with a different category of reading. CHINA Mountain Home: The Wilderness...
7 months ago
72
7 months ago
A different kind of month with a different category of reading. CHINA Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China (5th-13th cent.), tr. David Hinton – The teenagers in The Story of the Stone play various games based on their memorization of massive amounts of...
Ben Borgers
Software Seems Resilient
over a year ago
This Space
Proust regained I recommend very highly for anyone who has read or not read In Search of Lost Time Brian Nelson's...
a year ago
29
a year ago
I recommend very highly for anyone who has read or not read In Search of Lost Time Brian Nelson's The Swann Way, the first volume in a new translation of the entire novel by diverse hands, in this fine paperback from Oxford World's Classics. His translation of the chapter Swann...
Astral Codex Ten
Open Thread 356 ...
9 months ago
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
35
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...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Mind Shorn of History Is Vacuous' “April 17 [in 1778], being Good Friday, I waited on Johnson, as usual.”  As was the custom in...
4 months ago
34
4 months ago
“April 17 [in 1778], being Good Friday, I waited on Johnson, as usual.”  As was the custom in school when I was growing up, I learned history as a rollcall of great men and memorized dates. “Abraham Lincoln” and “December 7, 1941” plugged leaks in my obligatory knowledge and that...
Naz Hamid — Journal...
🔗 Dookie Demastered THE LANDMARK 1994 ALBUM. 15 TRACKS DEMASTERED IN 15 FORMATS. THE WAY IT WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE...
10 months ago
20
10 months ago
THE LANDMARK 1994 ALBUM. 15 TRACKS DEMASTERED IN 15 FORMATS. THE WAY IT WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE HEARD. These are all brilliant. I'm partial to the wax cylinder version of When I Come Around, my favorite track from Dookie. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
The American Scholar
Bathing Badasses Vicki Valosik gets submerged in the history of synchronized swimming The post Bathing Badasses...
a year ago
65
a year ago
Vicki Valosik gets submerged in the history of synchronized swimming The post Bathing Badasses appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
What Rises from the Ruins: Katherine Anne Porter on the Power of the Artist and the Function of Art... "We understand very little of what is happening to us at any given moment."
over a year ago
Astral Codex Ten
Open Thread 366 ...
6 months ago
Naz Hamid
Less Precious Social networking is about reach. It started small: your friends first, then grew outwards towards...
6 months ago
45
6 months ago
Social networking is about reach. It started small: your friends first, then grew outwards towards acquaintances and your professional life. It grew out to people who might follow you because of some shared interest, and then to complete strangers. Social media likes to tell you...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Gives to Airy Nothing a Local Habitation' What attracted me was the anthologist’s audacity in titling his book: 100 Best Poems in the English...
5 months ago
42
5 months ago
What attracted me was the anthologist’s audacity in titling his book: 100 Best Poems in the English Language (1952). In his introduction, Stephen Graham does little to impress us with his literary humility. His anthology is, he writes, “perhaps the only one of its kind,...
The American Scholar
Raspberry Heaven A yearly back-yard harvest opens a door to the divine The post Raspberry Heaven appeared first on...
5 months ago
16
5 months ago
A yearly back-yard harvest opens a door to the divine The post Raspberry Heaven appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
George Saunders on How to Live an Unregretting Life "At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often...
a year ago
44
a year ago
"At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me."
Ben Borgers
We’re All Powered by Electric Meat
over a year ago
This Space
39 Books: 2005 Four years later, browsing in Waterstones, I picked a book from a table and read "What will we do to...
a year ago
105
a year ago
Four years later, browsing in Waterstones, I picked a book from a table and read "What will we do to disappear?" – the epigram to Enrique Vila-Matas's novel Montano's Malady. It's a line taken from Maurice Blanchot's Infinite Conversation, so I had to buy it. Later that year,...
The Elysian
Let's read the Terra Ignota series together Our summer reading is Ada Palmer's feat of utopian worldbuilding.
a year ago
Josh Thompson
Let Me Fix [some of] Your Parking Problems Hi there! I’m Josh, and I’m your local neighborhood advocate for overlooked spaces. Today, we’ll be...
over a year ago
19
over a year ago
Hi there! I’m Josh, and I’m your local neighborhood advocate for overlooked spaces. Today, we’ll be focusing on parking lots. Your parking lot has a job to do, and every day, every night, rain or shine, hot or cold, clear, rainy, or snowy, your parking lot does the best it can at...
The Marginalian
Alone Together: An Illustrated Celebration of the Art of Shared Solitude “One can never be alone enough to write,” Susan Sontag lamented in her diary. “Oh comforting...
a year ago
31
a year ago
“One can never be alone enough to write,” Susan Sontag lamented in her diary. “Oh comforting solitude, how favorable thou art to original thought!” the founding father of neuroscience exulted in considering the ideal environment for creative breakthrough. All creative people,...