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Anecdotal Evidence
'Hardly the Most Fashionable of Writers' Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715-47), died at the age of thirty-one after a life...
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Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715-47), died at the age of thirty-one after a life spent mostly as a soldier, though he lived for some time in Paris and was befriended by Voltaire. His health was never good. No longer in the army, Vauvenargues died of complications...
Wuthering...
What I Read in July 2025 - books are quiet and unobtrusive, and do not try to hustle the reader In general, however, he [Louis XVI] preferred writing down his thoughts instead of uttering them by...
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In general, however, he [Louis XVI] preferred writing down his thoughts instead of uttering them by word of mouth; and he was fond of reading, for books are quiet and unobtrusive, and do not try to hustle the reader. (Stefan Zweig, Marie Antoinette, 1932, p. 77 of the 1933...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Old Men Are Generally Narrative' A blunt fact of modern life: When young, everyone we knew – family, friends, neighbors – lives...
yesterday
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A blunt fact of modern life: When young, everyone we knew – family, friends, neighbors – lives nearby. Our lives are well-populated. With age, that alignment of geography and acquaintance attenuates. Live long enough and our birthplace turns incrementally, across the decades,...
The American Scholar
Streams of Consciousness A writer’s intrepid exploration of troubled waters The post Streams of Consciousness appeared first...
yesterday
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yesterday
A writer’s intrepid exploration of troubled waters The post Streams of Consciousness appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Every Garden Is a Vast Hospital' On Saturday I saw the first hummingbird of the season in our front garden. I’ve counted...
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On Saturday I saw the first hummingbird of the season in our front garden. I’ve counted eight butterfly species there this summer and found a monarch chrysalis hanging from a tropical milkweed plant. Brown and green anoles have densely colonized the garden, which has never been...
The American Scholar
Horse and Runner The post Horse and Runner appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 days ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Writer Relies on Instinct and Intuition' V.S. Pritchett is asked in his Paris Review interview, “Do you think living and writing conflict?”...
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V.S. Pritchett is asked in his Paris Review interview, “Do you think living and writing conflict?” – a rather silly question -- and he replies: “I have always thought that life and literature are intermingled and that this intermingling has been my quest.” Spoken like the kind of...
The American Scholar
{…} by Fady Joudah Poems read aloud, beautifully The post {…} by Fady Joudah appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 days ago
The Marginalian
Blink Twice to Quell a Quasar: Carl Sagan on Superstition Growing up in Bulgaria, in a city teeming in stray dogs and cars, I was deeply distressed by the...
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Growing up in Bulgaria, in a city teeming in stray dogs and cars, I was deeply distressed by the sight of each dead animal in the streets between home and school — deaths I could not prevent and could not bear. To cope with the aching helplessness, I developed a private...
The Elysian
The TERRAFORM print pamphlet is now available—here's what we earned Plus, join our literary salon discussion this week!
4 days ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Shakespeare of the Essay Form' “ordinary sanity in extraordinary prose”  The phrase is the American poet David Mason’s in his essay...
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“ordinary sanity in extraordinary prose”  The phrase is the American poet David Mason’s in his essay “The Freedom of Montaigne.” In characterizing the Frenchman and his essays, Mason describes an ideal seldom attained and occasionally scorned. Today, extreme, sweeping statements...
The American Scholar
“Dead Man’s Hand” The post “Dead Man’s Hand” appeared first on The American Scholar.
4 days ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Ten-pound Life Will Give You Every Fact' On this, the tenth anniversary of poet-historian Robert Conquest’s death at ninety-eight,...
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On this, the tenth anniversary of poet-historian Robert Conquest’s death at ninety-eight, let’s recall the sonnet he wrote about the treachery of biographers, “Second Death”:  “A ten-pound Life will give you every fact -- Facts that he’d hoped his friends would not rehearse To a...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Delight Crowns All My Days, and Here I’ll Die' R.L. Barth has been translating the epigrams of Marcus Valerius Martialis – the first-century...
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R.L. Barth has been translating the epigrams of Marcus Valerius Martialis – the first-century Roman poet Martial, as we know him – for more than forty years and now has self-published a collection of 104 of his translations (of the 1,561 Latin originals extant): Pleasing the...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Book That Everybody Can Understand' A partner at the Houston law firm where my youngest son is working as an intern this summer has...
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A partner at the Houston law firm where my youngest son is working as an intern this summer has loaned him two nineteenth-century law books. Both were compiled by John G. Wells (1821-80) and were bestsellers in their day, long before the practice of law was fully...
The Marginalian
How to Be a Happier Creature It must be encoded there, in the childhood memories of our synapses and our cells — how we came out...
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It must be encoded there, in the childhood memories of our synapses and our cells — how we came out of the ocean 35 trillion yesterdays ago, small and slippery, gills trembling with the shock of air, fins budding feet, limbs growing sinewy and furred, then unfurred, spine...
Escaping Flatland
A constellation of lookers Fragments, vol. 5
a week ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Only a Facsimile That Is Called Literature' I’ve learned with time that my mind has periods of attentiveness followed by drifts into passive,...
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I’ve learned with time that my mind has periods of attentiveness followed by drifts into passive, relaxed states of consciousness. I’m awake but almost empty. I might be taking a shower or staring out the window at nothing. That’s when I occasionally find myself in an old song or...
The Elysian
We could return three continents of land to the wild And create an interspecies future that benefits humans and ecologies alike.
a week ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Put Out Their Eyes When It Was Dark' “The man who is both happy and an optimist is an imbecile.”  Happiness has always felt like the...
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“The man who is both happy and an optimist is an imbecile.”  Happiness has always felt like the byproduct of life properly lived, not a goal unto itself. If I “behave” – live up to my own standards, not exaggerate my importance, pay minute attention to my conscience, respect...
The American Scholar
Hundreds and Thousands The post Hundreds and Thousands appeared first on The American Scholar.
a week ago
The Marginalian
The Paradox of Knowing Who You Are and What You Want: Cristina Campo on Fairy Tales, Time, and the... “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one...
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“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Given that the deepest measure of intelligence is a...
Anecdotal Evidence
'He Seemed to Think Lucidity All-sufficing' “[T]here is a very widespread and comfortable belief that we are all of us born writers. Not long...
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“[T]here is a very widespread and comfortable belief that we are all of us born writers. Not long ago I heard that agile and mellifluous quodlibetarian, Dr. Joad, saying in answer to a questioner who wanted to write good letters, that anybody could write good letters: one had but...
The American Scholar
“Ornithology” by Lynda Hull Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Ornithology” by Lynda Hull appeared first on The American...
a week ago
Wuthering...
Daniel Kehlmann's G. W. Pabst novel The Director - Keeping it light. Keeping it carefree. Daniel Kehlmann’s previous novel, Tyll (2017), was about a magical clown wandering through the...
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Daniel Kehlmann’s previous novel, Tyll (2017), was about a magical clown wandering through the hellscape of the Thirty Years’ War.  Apparently that was not grim enough for him so his new novel, The Director (2023), although there is some early hopeful Hollywood sunshine, is about...
Anecdotal Evidence
'This Greedy Appetite for New and Unknown Things' Montaigne’s Travel Journal recounts his wanderings through Germany, Switzerland and Italy between...
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Montaigne’s Travel Journal recounts his wanderings through Germany, Switzerland and Italy between June 1580 and November 1581. He sought relief from the pain of kidney stones and visited numerous spas with mineral baths. As always, Montaigne is curious about everything – not just...
The American Scholar
Dan Lynh Pham Labor of love The post Dan Lynh Pham appeared first on The American Scholar.
a week ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Something Which Longs to Be Filled' An American children’s book published in 1908 reminded me of a metaphysical figment conjured...
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An American children’s book published in 1908 reminded me of a metaphysical figment conjured by Jean-Paul Sartre. The book is The Hole Book, written and illustrated by Peter Newell. A friend who collects vintage children’s books told me about it. The verse is serviceable...
The Marginalian
Kiss: Ellen Bass’s Stunning Ode to the Courage of Tenderness as an Antidote to Helplessness There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow...
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There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance — the accident, the wildfire, the random intracellular mutation — are these little acts...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Someone, I Think, Heard the Name I Named' It’s not fair to think of our dead as “The Dead,” a demographic category that erases all...
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It’s not fair to think of our dead as “The Dead,” a demographic category that erases all distinctions but absence. My brother (d. 2024) and Jane Greer, the North Dakota poet who died this week, would have had little in common in life. Ken had no use for poetry and he framed...
The Marginalian
Hold On Let Go: Urns for Living and the Art of Trusting Time Ceramics came into my life the way the bird divinations had a year earlier — suddenly, mysteriously,...
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Ceramics came into my life the way the bird divinations had a year earlier — suddenly, mysteriously, as a coping mechanism for the confusions and cataclysms of living. I was reeling from a shattering collision with one of life’s most banal and brutal truths — that broken people...
The American Scholar
The Linguistics of Brain Rot Adam Aleksic on how social media is transforming our words The post The Linguistics of Brain Rot...
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Adam Aleksic on how social media is transforming our words The post The Linguistics of Brain Rot appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Actual and the Unexceptional' In its Summer 1965 issue, the editors of The American Scholar asked forty-two writers and...
2 weeks ago
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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...
Anecdotal Evidence
'What People Said and Did and Wore and Ate' Occasionally one encounters two writers, each unknown to the other, expressing sentiments similar...
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Occasionally one encounters two writers, each unknown to the other, expressing sentiments similar but varied enough to define their differences. There’s no question of influence or plagiarism. The first is C.H. Sisson, the English poet/critic/translator, explaining his tastes in...
Anecdotal Evidence
'She’s Gone, She Was Here and Then Gone' Mike Juster tells me Jane Greer – “North Dakota Jane” – a gifted poet with an ever-ready sense of...
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Mike Juster tells me Jane Greer – “North Dakota Jane” – a gifted poet with an ever-ready sense of humor, has died, age seventy-two. In her final Tweet, Jane wrote on July 3: “I’ve been in the hospital and am not sure when they’ll release me. I have diverticulitis and a perforated...
The Marginalian
A Plasticity of Being: What a Rare Bird of Prey Reveals about the Deepest Meaning of Intelligence “True teachers are called into being by the contradictions generated by civilization,” the poet Gary...
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“True teachers are called into being by the contradictions generated by civilization,” the poet Gary Snyder reflected in his reckoning with the real work of life. “We need them.” We have always needed them because we need each other, because we have always been each other’s...
Anecdotal Evidence
'That's How a Tale Should End' With an old friend I was reminiscing about the remarkably stupid things we did when young. Neither...
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With an old friend I was reminiscing about the remarkably stupid things we did when young. Neither of us had much money when we were students – this was in the early seventies – and we didn’t own cars. To travel any significant distance, we thought nothing of hitchhiking. I often...
The American Scholar
No Time at All The post No Time at All appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 weeks ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'He Would Not Be Bored' “The very catalogue of the authors whom he knew is apt to repel modern readers. We forget that we...
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“The very catalogue of the authors whom he knew is apt to repel modern readers. We forget that we read countless ephemeral books, magazines, and newspapers, far less worth reading: stuff which bears the same relation to literature as chewing-gum does to food.”  And that was...
The American Scholar
“Lament” by Thom Gunn Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Lament” by Thom Gunn appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 weeks ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Beware Also of Tellers of Tall Tales' Advice can be dangerous stuff. If taken and the result is unfortunate, disappointment and resentment...
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Advice can be dangerous stuff. If taken and the result is unfortunate, disappointment and resentment will likely follow. “Advice is offensive,” Dr. Johnson warns. Often it is motivated not by a wish to be helpful but simply by presumptuous egotism, a desire to impose one’s will....
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Record of Whatever Intrigues Him' I’ve always been a hoarder not of objects but words. I may be the least acquisitive person you’ll...
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I’ve always been a hoarder not of objects but words. I may be the least acquisitive person you’ll ever meet outside of a monastery, but how I accumulate language. As a teenager I read that a fellow Ohioan, the poet Hart Crane, kept lists of words he liked for future use in poems....
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Offendings of the Millions' My youngest son this summer is working as an intern with a Houston law firm and one of the...
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My youngest son this summer is working as an intern with a Houston law firm and one of the partners loaned him a copy of The Regional Vocabulary of Texas (University of Texas Press, 1962) by E. Bagby Atwood, whose foreword begins:  “The present study deals with a vocabulary...
The Elysian
An annotated reading of "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" The techno-utopian poem by Richard Brautigan.
2 weeks ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Some Temperamental Undercurrent' We squabble and seethe about it but our tastes in literature – and other realms, like food and...
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We squabble and seethe about it but our tastes in literature – and other realms, like food and music -- ultimately remain mysterious. It has taken me a lifetime to accept this realization. You are not a cretin for enjoying the work of Norman Mailer or Toni Morrison, though I find...
The American Scholar
Puzzled In the world of jigsaws, there can be a fine line between productivity and pleasure The post Puzzled...
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In the world of jigsaws, there can be a fine line between productivity and pleasure The post Puzzled appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
Doris Lessing on How to Read a Book and How to Read the World Born in Iran and raised in Zimbabwe, Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919–November 17, 2013) was fourteen...
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Born in Iran and raised in Zimbabwe, Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919–November 17, 2013) was fourteen when she dropped out of school and eighty-eight when she won the Nobel Prize for smelting language into keys to “the prisons we choose to live inside.” Having lived in writing for...
The Elysian
We need a fourth branch of government A discussion with Marjan Ehsassi, executive director of FIDE North America, about citizens'...
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A discussion with Marjan Ehsassi, executive director of FIDE North America, about citizens' assemblies and how they can be used in politics, business, and academia.
Anecdotal Evidence
'In My Hands the Morning They Find Me' Who remembers the first book he ever “read”? Qualifying quotes because I don’t mean some wordless...
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Who remembers the first book he ever “read”? Qualifying quotes because I don’t mean some wordless board-book given to an infant by optimistic relatives. I mean the real thing, with decryptable signs on the page. I can’t remember this pivotal event, though it would change my life...
The American Scholar
A Splendor Wild and Terrifying Lost in the woods, a writer confronts the duality of nature The post A Splendor Wild and Terrifying...
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Lost in the woods, a writer confronts the duality of nature The post A Splendor Wild and Terrifying appeared first on The American Scholar.
Escaping Flatland
I went looking for friends, see what I found Of all the ways this blog have changed my life, the most exciting was in December 2021 when I wrote...
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Of all the ways this blog have changed my life, the most exciting was in December 2021 when I wrote a post about Ivan Illich that ended up, to my utter astonishment, to get read by almost a hundred people.
The Marginalian
The Canyon and the Meaning of Life Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror. Anything to which you give yourself fully,...
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Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror. Anything to which you give yourself fully, vest all your strength and risk all your vulnerability, will return you to your life annealed, magnified, both unselved and more deeply yourself. It can be a garden, or a desert,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Martyrs of a Future World Religion' A longtime reader and fellow blogger shares with me a taste for aphoristic writing, prose that...
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A longtime reader and fellow blogger shares with me a taste for aphoristic writing, prose that is concise, of course, but also dense with meaning and often packing a sting. Aphorisms can be marketed as such but often they appear as a functional part of a larger text. George Eliot...
The American Scholar
Flummoxed The post Flummoxed appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 weeks ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'A New Past' Robert Conquest writing thirty-one years ago:  “Literature is the expression of our whole past, of...
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Robert Conquest writing thirty-one years ago:  “Literature is the expression of our whole past, of our whole context in life and time – and not only ours. Anatole France said that the word pleurer (to cry, to weep) in French is different from the same sort of word in every other...
The American Scholar
“Parachutes My Love, Could Carry Us Higher” by Barbara Guest Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Parachutes My Love, Could Carry Us Higher” by Barbara Guest...
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Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Parachutes My Love, Could Carry Us Higher” by Barbara Guest appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Elysian
Building an operating system for Earth How we went from an architecture of collapse to a simulation for survival
3 weeks ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Essays in Flesh and Bone' One of my friends is reliably cheerful. We should all have friends like him. His emails and...
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One of my friends is reliably cheerful. We should all have friends like him. His emails and telephone calls are never annoyingly cloying, in the sense that they knock me out of whatever self-centered snit I’m nursing. Without ever saying so, he reminds me that I have it pretty...
The American Scholar
Jeanne F. Jalandoni Weaving past and present together The post Jeanne F. Jalandoni appeared first on The American...
3 weeks ago
The Marginalian
Is It Not Wonderful to Be Alive: Edward Lear’s Parrots In the late summer of 1832, England was set aflame with wonder — a glimpse of something wild and...
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In the late summer of 1832, England was set aflame with wonder — a glimpse of something wild and flamboyant, shimmering with the lush firstness of a world untrammeled by the boot of civilization. Edward Lear (May 12, 1812–January 29, 1888), barely out of his teens, had been...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Minority Pursuit' In comparison to the late D.G. Myers, I’m a quietist, waiting for something to happen rather...
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In comparison to the late D.G. Myers, I’m a quietist, waiting for something to happen rather than stepping on the accelerator myself. He supplied me with more ideas and inspirations than I was ever able to offer him. A longtime reader reminds me of “The Function of Book Blogging...
Anecdotal Evidence
'His Work Must Be Perfect' How do we reconcile the saddest of English writers being at the same time among the wittiest?...
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How do we reconcile the saddest of English writers being at the same time among the wittiest? And when I say “saddest,” I don’t mean depressed or suicidal; rather, wistful, ever aware of human ephemerality, calibrating his words until they attain the precise edge of irony he...
The Marginalian
Why Bats Shouldn’t Exist: The Limits of Knowledge, the Pitfalls of Prediction, and the Triumph of... Prediction is the sharpest tool the human animal has devised — the chisel with which we sculpted...
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Prediction is the sharpest tool the human animal has devised — the chisel with which we sculpted survival out of chance, the fulcrum by which we lifted civilization out of survival. Among the greatest gifts of the imagination, that crowning curio of consciousness, is our ability...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Things That Might Have Been and Were Not' An old friend has grown uncharacteristically introspective and is finding much to regret. It’s a...
4 weeks ago
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4 weeks ago
An old friend has grown uncharacteristically introspective and is finding much to regret. It’s a function of age. A widower in retirement from teaching high school, he seems no longer the buoyant social creature I’ve always known. In fact, I envied his gregariousness when we...
The American Scholar
Michael Douglas Explains It All Jessa Crispin on what the actor’s roles tell us about the crisis of masculinity The post Michael...
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Jessa Crispin on what the actor’s roles tell us about the crisis of masculinity The post Michael Douglas Explains It All appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Elysian
No, KKR is not “equity washing” Contra Katie Boland on the private equity company’s employee-ownership model.
4 weeks ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'After the Rain, Perhaps, Something Will Show' Most of us are born with a brain but without a user’s manual. This soggy organ weighs on average...
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4 weeks ago
Most of us are born with a brain but without a user’s manual. This soggy organ weighs on average about three pounds and contains 86 billion neurons. That’s our birthright, and we did nothing to earn it. We tend to operate our brains passively, ignoring most available perceptions....
The Elysian
How much of the planet should we harm for our comfort? Becky Chambers’ gentle sci-fi on the right amount of carbon, AC, airplanes, and yachts.
4 weeks ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Without Any Hope of Fame or Money' Friends and relatives, people whose judgment I actually trust, have urged me to move Anecdotal...
a month ago
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a month ago
Friends and relatives, people whose judgment I actually trust, have urged me to move Anecdotal Evidence from Blogger to Substack and I don’t understand why. All I need is a place to write, the “platform” is of no importance. I’d do this in a notebook, like in the old days,...
The American Scholar
Snake in the Grass The post Snake in the Grass appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
This Space
The way of arrival Two intellectual memoirs dominated my reading over Spring, three if WG Sebald's Silent Catastrophes...
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a month ago
Two intellectual memoirs dominated my reading over Spring, three if WG Sebald's Silent Catastrophes can be included given that its analysis of the careers of various Austrian writers illuminates Sebald's own literary trajectory.1 Peter Brown's Journeys of a Mind: A Life in...
Anecdotal Evidence
'It Is Always Summer, Always the Golden Hour' I fight the urge to wallow in nostalgia but it seeps back in like moisture in an unfinished...
a month ago
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a month ago
I fight the urge to wallow in nostalgia but it seeps back in like moisture in an unfinished basement. I take that image from my childhood home. The walls and floor were bare concrete. Stacks of newspaper and lumber felt flesh-like with dampness. Down there it was always chilly,...
The American Scholar
“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath appeared first on The American...
a month ago
The Marginalian
Uncoding Creativity in the Age of AI: What Makes a Great Poem, What Makes a Great Storyteller, and... I once asked ChatGPT to write a poem about a total solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It...
a month ago
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a month ago
I once asked ChatGPT to write a poem about a total solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a dozen couplets of cliches that touched nothing, changed nothing in me. The AI had the whole of the English language at its disposal — a lexicon surely manyfold the poet’s...
The Elysian
Participatory science makes everyone a researcher So we can study the Earth at scale.
a month ago
The American Scholar
Why Go On? The post Why Go On? appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
Escaping Flatland
On agency Or, how to handle being sentenced to freedom, and handle it effectively, and authentically, and...
a month ago
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a month ago
Or, how to handle being sentenced to freedom, and handle it effectively, and authentically, and responsibly
Anecdotal Evidence
"Some of His Work Was Gold' From a dusty, thoroughly disorganized Houston bookstore I bought a copy of Turnstile One: A...
a month ago
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a month ago
From a dusty, thoroughly disorganized Houston bookstore I bought a copy of Turnstile One: A Literary Miscellany (Turnstile Press, 1948), edited by V.S. Pritchett. Much of its literary quality shames today's readers and writers. It collects poems, stories, essays and reviews...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Absolute Anthology' The American poet Len Krisak asks a question common to all serious readers, one that, if...
a month ago
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a month ago
The American poet Len Krisak asks a question common to all serious readers, one that, if posed privately, serves as an honest way to reveal one’s deeper tastes without the social pressures of fashion and snobbery. Think of it as a variation on the “Desert Island” parlor game. It...
Anecdotal Evidence
'I Should Never Mention It' Spoken by a man after my own heart:  “You must grant me a dispensation for saying any thing, whether...
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Spoken by a man after my own heart:  “You must grant me a dispensation for saying any thing, whether it be sense or nonsense, upon the subject of politics. It is truly a matter in which I am so little interested, that, were it not that it sometimes serves me for a theme when I...
The Marginalian
A Defense of Joy One of the most important things to have learned in life is that choosing joy in a world rife with...
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One of the most important things to have learned in life is that choosing joy in a world rife with reasons for despair is a countercultural act of courage and resistance, choosing it not despite the abounding sorrow we barely survive but because of it, because joy — like music,...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Great Euthanasia' I can’t think of another poet who wrote so often or so amusingly about death as Thomas Disch. I once...
a month ago
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I can’t think of another poet who wrote so often or so amusingly about death as Thomas Disch. I once tried tallying his death-themed poems and lost count. Here’s a sample: “How to Behave When Dead,” “Symbols of Love and Death,” “In Defense of Forest Lawn,” “At the Tomb of the...
The American Scholar
America the Beautiful The poem that became a hymn to the nation came about in troubled, polarizing times The post America...
a month ago
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a month ago
The poem that became a hymn to the nation came about in troubled, polarizing times The post America the Beautiful appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Lord, Make Me Not Too Rich. Nor Make Me Poor' “In spite of the Deconstructionists who say that communication is not really possible, we most of us...
a month ago
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a month ago
“In spite of the Deconstructionists who say that communication is not really possible, we most of us manage to honor stop signs, and we all honor the dollar sign, whether or not we are willing to admit it.”  In 1995, R.L. Barth published The Golden Calf: Poems of Money, edited by...
The American Scholar
Lessons in the Diplomatic Arts Notes from a musical tour of South Africa The post Lessons in the Diplomatic Arts appeared first on...
a month ago
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a month ago
Notes from a musical tour of South Africa The post Lessons in the Diplomatic Arts appeared first on The American Scholar.
Wuthering...
What I Read in June 2025 - A life of agony was all for naught. My summer plan was to read, short, easy books, and I almost succeeded.  I read short, difficult...
a month ago
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a month ago
My summer plan was to read, short, easy books, and I almost succeeded.  I read short, difficult books in French, and accidentally read several grim, sad, violent books, alongside some playful nonsense.   FICTION The Field of Life and Death (1935), Xiao Hong – For example.  Ninety...
The Marginalian
Vision of the Womb and Vision of the Brain: H.D. on the Two Kinds of Seeing and the Key to Over-mind... “One must be a seer, make oneself a seer,” Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “by a long, gigantic and rational...
a month ago
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a month ago
“One must be a seer, make oneself a seer,” Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.” As more and more of our senses are being amputated by the blade of our image-centric culture, reducing the vast and delicate sensorium of human...
The Elysian
Maybe an exowomb is better than pregnancy The Pod Generation’s near-future satire pits nature against technology. Which is the better curator?
a month ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'One Is Looking in the Right Direction' News of certain public deaths remains rooted in memory to an indelible time and place. Famously,...
a month ago
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a month ago
News of certain public deaths remains rooted in memory to an indelible time and place. Famously, millions of mundane lives intersected forever with the assassination of President Kennedy, which people recall in vivid detail more than sixty years later their reactions at that...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Will We Ever Be So Young Again?' On July 2, 1944, the Polish poet and fiction writer Tadeusz Borowski begins a letter to his mother...
a month ago
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a month ago
On July 2, 1944, the Polish poet and fiction writer Tadeusz Borowski begins a letter to his mother written while he was a prisoner in Auschwitz:  “What’s of greatest interest first: the eggs are amazingly fresh and very much desired, the butter is wonderful, straight from the...
The American Scholar
Big Rock, High Plateau The post Big Rock, High Plateau appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Superintending What He Cannot Regulate' In my family we can’t get away from the “Y” chromosome. Having children is known as “going to the...
a month ago
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a month ago
In my family we can’t get away from the “Y” chromosome. Having children is known as “going to the Y.” I have three sons, no daughters, and my brother, who died last summer, was my sole sibling. My mother had five brothers, no sisters. My father, two brothers, no sisters, etc....
The American Scholar
“The Fig Tree” by Ruth Stone Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “The Fig Tree” by Ruth Stone appeared first on The American...
a month ago
The Elysian
How can we rewild the Earth at scale? From global targets to backyard projects
a month ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Fun Which Is Ebullient All Over Yours' A pun is best delivered without announcing itself as a pun. Those ungifted at wordplay tend...
a month ago
15
a month ago
A pun is best delivered without announcing itself as a pun. Those ungifted at wordplay tend to underline, boldface and italicize their every attempt at a pun, most of which are already feeble. Thus, the pun’s bad reputation and the ensuing groans. In contrast I love a good,...
The American Scholar
Greg Ito The life cycle of a candle The post Greg Ito appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
The Marginalian
Uncaging the Bird in the Mind: William Henry Hudson and the Gift of the Ruin of Your Best Laid Plans “The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” wrote...
a month ago
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a month ago
“The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” wrote Milton in Paradise Lost. Because the mind (which may in the end be a full-body phenomenon) is the cup that lifts the world to our lips to be tasted — a taste we call reality — it is...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Ledge Itself Invents the Leap' Good hearts try to talk us out of phobias. After all, people are naïve about the powers of...
a month ago
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a month ago
Good hearts try to talk us out of phobias. After all, people are naïve about the powers of rationalism: “Explain it, and it goes away.” As a kid I fell for that, almost literally, when I tried to muscle my way with sheer will power past the Terminal Tower in downtown...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Seminal Crime of the 20th Century' Some years ago I happened on an account of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination that read like a...
a month ago
15
a month ago
Some years ago I happened on an account of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination that read like a coroner’s report. The author described in minute medical detail what happened after John Wilkes Booth pulled the trigger – the blood, bone fragments, tissue damage in the president’s...
The Elysian
Democrats Need a Mamdani-Type to Win If you're still talking about his rent freeze and grocery policies, you're missing the point.
a month ago
The Marginalian
Anima: One Woman’s Search for Meaning in the Footsteps of Bulgarian Mountain Shepherds "All our lives we perform tasks while waiting for something to click into place. For somewhere to...
a month ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Susceptible to Education' I grew up fetishizing a university education. I knew no one in my family or in my working-class...
a month ago
22
a month ago
I grew up fetishizing a university education. I knew no one in my family or in my working-class neighborhood who had “gone to college,” as the common phrase had it. In my experience, that status was confined to doctors and teachers. My father was a high-school dropout....
The American Scholar
Once in a Lifetime Jonathan Gould on how Talking Heads transformed rock music The post Once in a Lifetime appeared...
a month ago
20
a month ago
Jonathan Gould on how Talking Heads transformed rock music The post Once in a Lifetime appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Neglected By-ways' Thomas Parker is a longtime reader and frequent commenter on this blog. On Monday’s post he recalled...
a month ago
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a month ago
Thomas Parker is a longtime reader and frequent commenter on this blog. On Monday’s post he recalled a passage he thought may have been the work of George Saintsbury. Unable to track it down for attribution, he quoted from uncertain memory: “Nothing pains me more than the...
The Elysian
The future used to be better How contemporary art reflects our waning belief in progress.
a month ago
Escaping Flatland
The hare vaguely impressionistic reflections about what I've been up to + links to stuff I've enjoyed...
a month ago
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a month ago
vaguely impressionistic reflections about what I've been up to + links to stuff I've enjoyed recently
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Kitchen Perpetually Crowded with Savages' Jonathan Swift often stayed at Quilca, the country home of his friend the Rev. Thomas Sheridan...
a month ago
22
a month ago
Jonathan Swift often stayed at Quilca, the country home of his friend the Rev. Thomas Sheridan (1687-1738) in County Cavan, Ireland. There he wrote portions of Gulliver’s Travels. Not surprisingly, Swift was an inspired kvetcher. There’s a long tradition of English writers...
The American Scholar
Crystal Ball The post Crystal Ball appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
The Marginalian
Divinations of the First Light: A Cosmic Poem for the Vera Rubin Observatory At the end of her trailblazing life, having swung open the gate of the possible for women in science...
a month ago
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a month ago
At the end of her trailblazing life, having swung open the gate of the possible for women in science with her famous comet discovery, astronomer Maria Mitchell confided in one of her Vassar students that she would rather have authored a great poem than discovered a comet. A...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Silly, Trivial Things You Did When Young' “Of course, you live life forward and think about it backwards.”  I’ve spent the last month or so...
a month ago
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a month ago
“Of course, you live life forward and think about it backwards.”  I’ve spent the last month or so thinking about the summer of 1973, when I visited Europe for the first time. This retrospective was prompted by my youngest son, who graduated in May from Rice University and the...
The American Scholar
Verse 31 from Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore Poems read aloud, beautifully The post Verse 31 from <em>Gitanjali</em> by Rabindranath Tagore...
a month ago
28
a month ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post Verse 31 from <em>Gitanjali</em> by Rabindranath Tagore appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Elysian
A self-governing forest Terra0 thinks nature should become economically independent.
a month ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Needlessly Limited Accommodation' That certain mediocre books are judged “classics,” at least by teachers and librarians desperate to...
a month ago
15
a month ago
That certain mediocre books are judged “classics,” at least by teachers and librarians desperate to stock their shelves, fill bulletin boards and placate administrators, is well-known and nobody says much about it. I’m uncertain what mysterious collective formulates this canon...
Anecdotal Evidence
'With Purple Prose and a Bad Actor’s Gestures' On April 9, 1778, Johnson and Boswell dined at the home of Sir Joshua Reynolds, where Edward Gibbon...
a month ago
14
a month ago
On April 9, 1778, Johnson and Boswell dined at the home of Sir Joshua Reynolds, where Edward Gibbon and Davide Garrick, among others, were also present. The subject of translations, including Pope’s Homer, emerged. “We must try its effect as an English poem,” Johnson said, “that...
The Marginalian
How to Be a Stone: Three Poems for Trusting Time If you want to befriend time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone. Climb a...
a month ago
22
a month ago
If you want to befriend time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone. Climb a mountain and listen to the conversation between eons encoded in each stripe of rock. Walk a beach and comb your fingers through the golden dust that was once a mountain. Pick up a...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Between Virgil and Young People Engrossed in Rock' In a 2009 interview with a publication in Barcelona, Spain, Adam Zagajewski is asked a question...
a month ago
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a month ago
In a 2009 interview with a publication in Barcelona, Spain, Adam Zagajewski is asked a question about political correctness, euphemisms and other debasements of language. He replies: “There is the harsher side of existence -- disease and death -- and the loftier reasons for...
The Elysian
An online version of Da Vinci's journal? Marginalia: An experiment sharing notes from the margins of my research.
a month ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Full of the Little Obscurities' “A man may profess to understand the President of the United States, but he seldom alleges, even...
a month ago
22
a month ago
“A man may profess to understand the President of the United States, but he seldom alleges, even to himself, that he understands his own wife.”  Anecdotal Evidence attracts an admirably knowledgeable set of readers, mostly proud amateurs like its author. As best I can judge,...
The Marginalian
Against Death: Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti on Grieving a Parent, Grieving the World, and What Makes... The year is 1937. Elias Canetti (July 25, 1905–August 14, 1994) — Bulgarian, Jewish, living in...
a month ago
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a month ago
The year is 1937. Elias Canetti (July 25, 1905–August 14, 1994) — Bulgarian, Jewish, living in Austria as the Nazis are rising to power — has just lost his mother; his mother, whose bottomless love had nurtured the talent that would win him the Nobel Prize in his seventies; his...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Let Them at Any Rate Be Your Acquaintances' “Nothing makes a man more reverent than a library.”  An interesting gauge of human sensibility, a...
a month ago
17
a month ago
“Nothing makes a man more reverent than a library.”  An interesting gauge of human sensibility, a sort of litmus test to judge personality and values, might be to place your subject in a large, well-stocked library (or bookstore), wire him for blood pressure, heart rate, skin...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Spirit of Urbanity Incarnate' Last week Nige wrote about a book previously unknown to me: The Eighteen Nineties (1913; rev....
a month ago
21
a month ago
Last week Nige wrote about a book previously unknown to me: The Eighteen Nineties (1913; rev. 1922) by Holbrook Jackson. I’ve read only Jackson’s The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930) and browsed in some of his other book-related titles. I bought the Anatomy in 1998 from a used...
The American Scholar
No Murder in the Mews The post No Murder in the Mews appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
The Marginalian
The Whole of It Because we are creatures made of time, what we call suffering is at bottom a warping of time, a form...
a month ago
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a month ago
Because we are creatures made of time, what we call suffering is at bottom a warping of time, a form of living against it and not with it — the pain of loss, aching for what has been and no longer is; the pain of longing, aching for what could be but is not yet and may never be;...
Anecdotal Evidence
'It Pulls the Reader In' I grew up observing the Holy Trinity, the literary one: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. Faith told me...
a month ago
17
a month ago
I grew up observing the Holy Trinity, the literary one: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. Faith told me these were the foundational figures who would sustain us. Reason and a lifetime of reading have confirmed my faith. I think of them as formulating the cultural oxygen that sustains...
The American Scholar
“Sakura Park” by Rachel Wetzsteon Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Sakura Park” by Rachel Wetzsteon appeared first on The...
a month ago
24
a month ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Sakura Park” by Rachel Wetzsteon appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Elysian
No, we shouldn't return to the climate of the 18th century Improving the climate is a better goal than trying to fight change.
a month ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Idiot Hopefulness or Fathomless Exasperation' When my oldest son was about seven and already a movie enthusiast, we drove up to the Crandall...
a month ago
25
a month ago
When my oldest son was about seven and already a movie enthusiast, we drove up to the Crandall Library in Glens Falls, N.Y. to watch Laurel and Hardy movies. I’d seen a notice in the paper. A film collector brought his own projector and a box of 16mm reels and set up in one of...
The American Scholar
Stephanie Santana Preserving family history The post Stephanie Santana appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
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...
a month ago
19
a month 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
'I’ve Been Setting the Table for the Dead' “Sometimes the what takes over so much that the how disappears. I think poetry works best when these...
a month ago
20
a month ago
“Sometimes the what takes over so much that the how disappears. I think poetry works best when these are indistinguishable, when they keep such good balance that you don't feel you're being preached to or grasping at the abstract.”  Back in the early 1990s I had a chance to meet...
The Elysian
Democracy should happen online A Guest Lecture with Margo Loor, co-founder of the Estonian participatory democracy platform Citizen...
a month ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'At a Quarter a Tome' I owe a significant chunk of my education to the existence of paperback books. By “education” I...
a month ago
31
a month ago
I owe a significant chunk of my education to the existence of paperback books. By “education” I don’t mean what I pretended to do while in the company of professors, though many of them assigned books published in soft covers. I mean self-assigned literature, beginning as a kid...
The American Scholar
Family Values Augustine Sedgewick on the history of paternity and patriarchy The post Family Values appeared first...
a month ago
22
a month ago
Augustine Sedgewick on the history of paternity and patriarchy The post Family Values appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
Silence, Solitude, and the Art of Surrender: Pico Iyer on Finding the World in a Benedictine... "Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the center of the world. Now the world...
a month ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'[C]onservatives Should Embrace the Novel' Fifteen years ago, in a blog post titled “Conservative novels,”  my friend the late D.G. Myers...
a month ago
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a month ago
Fifteen years ago, in a blog post titled “Conservative novels,”  my friend the late D.G. Myers critiqued a “top-ten” list of that literary species assembled by a writer at The National Review. David called the list “strangely disappointing,” and it’s tough to argue with that...
The Marginalian
The Arguers: A Charming Illustrated Parable about the Absurdity of Self-righteousness Perhaps the most perilous consequence of uncertain times, times that hurl us into helplessness and...
a month ago
29
a month ago
Perhaps the most perilous consequence of uncertain times, times that hurl us into helplessness and disorientation, is that they turn human beings into opinion machines. We dope our pain and confusion with false certainties that stifle the willingness to understand (the nuances of...
The Elysian
We can terraform the Earth—not just Mars If we can revive a dead planet, we can revive our own.
a month ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'What He Knows Who Looks Into Life and Sees' Most of my preoccupations lie elsewhere but I retain a casual interest in what used to be called...
a month ago
20
a month ago
Most of my preoccupations lie elsewhere but I retain a casual interest in what used to be called field biology. That is, the non-molecular, outside-the-laboratory practice of observing plants and animals, even in the middle of Houston. The motives are pleasure, wonder and...
The American Scholar
A Pair of Elephants The post A Pair of Elephants appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
Wuthering...
A draft Elizabethan Not Shakespeare syllabus In case yesterday’s invitation was a bit abstract, here is my current sense of a twenty-play...
a month ago
20
a month ago
In case yesterday’s invitation was a bit abstract, here is my current sense of a twenty-play Elizabethan Not Shakespeare syllabus that I would like to investigate beginning next fall.  I’ve read twelve of them. Please note that almost every date below should be preceded by “c.” ...
The American Scholar
Reasons for Living The post Reasons for Living appeared first on The American Scholar.
a month ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Most Natural Thing in the World' Why write? Indulge my glibness: Why not? Still in high school, I learned I had little...
a month ago
89
a month ago
Why write? Indulge my glibness: Why not? Still in high school, I learned I had little understanding of a given subject until I tried to express it in a precise selection of words, words that corresponded not to my feelings or theories but to what I could perceive. Not gushing – a...
The American Scholar
“The Last One” by W. S. Merwin Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “The Last One” by W. S. Merwin appeared first on The American...
a month ago
Wuthering...
Not Shakespeare - a preliminary, semi-formed invitation to read plays by Shakespeare's... Here’s something I’ve been wanting to do.  I’ve been wanting to return to the plays of...
a month ago
27
a month ago
Here’s something I’ve been wanting to do.  I’ve been wanting to return to the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson and so on.  The Spanish Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, The Knight of the Burning Pestle,  Bartholomew Fair.  It has been a while...
The Elysian
TERRAFORM: An essay collection about the future of our planet Six writers explore the future of our world for an online series and print pamphlet.
a month ago
Escaping Flatland
Caring for others At Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen, I see a passport fall out of the back pocket of a man and...
a month ago
23
a month ago
At Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen, I see a passport fall out of the back pocket of a man and immediately (at least) three strangers call out.
This Space
On the Calculation of Volume 1 by Solvej Balle The premise of this multi-volume novel is simple: a modern-day French woman called Tara finds...
a month ago
24
a month ago
The premise of this multi-volume novel is simple: a modern-day French woman called Tara finds herself stuck inside the eighteenth day of a November. The nineteenth never appears. On the 121st iteration of the same day she begins to write by describing the sounds made by her...
The American Scholar
The Unjolly Green Giant How C. F.  Seabrook became the Lear of the vegetable fields The post The Unjolly Green Giant...
a month ago
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a month ago
How C. F.  Seabrook became the Lear of the vegetable fields The post The Unjolly Green Giant appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Information of a High School Janitor' A former colleague reminded me of the babysitting job I was given by a newspaper editor some...
2 months ago
19
2 months ago
A former colleague reminded me of the babysitting job I was given by a newspaper editor some forty years ago. I was the court reporter, covering every level from city police court to the New York Court of Appeals, plus the federal court in the beautiful Art Deco building on...
Anecdotal Evidence
'We Shuttle Back and Forth' Metempsychosis is another word I learned from Ulysses. Up till then I used the more plebian-sounding...
2 months ago
25
2 months ago
Metempsychosis is another word I learned from Ulysses. Up till then I used the more plebian-sounding reincarnation. In the fourth chapter, “Calypso,” Molly Bloom is in bed reading a novel, Ruby: Pride of the Ring. She encounters metempsychosis in the text and asks Leopold, who...
The Marginalian
The Grammar of Fantasy and the Fantastic Binomial: Beloved Italian Children’s Book Author Gianny... "The mind forms a whole. Its creativity must be cultivated in all directions."
2 months ago
The Marginalian
Against the Pleasurable Luxury of Despair and the Aridity of Self-pity: Doris Lessing on the... "The choice before us... is not merely a question of preventing an evil, but of strengthening a...
2 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'He Thrived on Giving Offense' Why did my teachers devote more class time to John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell –...
2 months ago
17
2 months ago
Why did my teachers devote more class time to John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell – American exemplars of the Age of Thrice-Named Writers -- than to Lord Byron? After more than half a century, I can only speculate. Literary patriotism? We spent a lot of time reading...
The Elysian
Newsletter bundles don't work A Guest Lecture with Even Armstrong on why he left Every to go independent.
2 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Peaceabale Morning' Boys of my age grew up fighting Nazis and Japs. We inherited our fathers’ war and were too old to...
2 months ago
23
2 months ago
Boys of my age grew up fighting Nazis and Japs. We inherited our fathers’ war and were too old to “play Army” – always the phrase – by the time Vietnam heated up. A German refugee, Mrs. Becker, lived next door and we were ordered to kill only Japs if we were playing near her...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Person With No Public Appeal' Interviews with writers are now accepted as a discrete literary form, like rondeaus and...
2 months ago
14
2 months ago
Interviews with writers are now accepted as a discrete literary form, like rondeaus and villanelles, probably for the same reason people read the biographies of writers whose work they have never read. I suppose the Paris Review encouraged the trend starting in the Fifties by...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Cultivation As a Proficient Amateur' Perhaps the most interesting and even important person in Montaigne’s life – especially for...
2 months ago
15
2 months ago
Perhaps the most interesting and even important person in Montaigne’s life – especially for his readers -- was not his wife nor his friend Étienne de La Boétie, whose death in 1563 left him bereft, but Marie de Gournay (1565-1645), the model of an autodidact, who taught herself...
The American Scholar
Ask Already The post Ask Already appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 months ago
The Marginalian
The Majesty of Mountains and the Mountains of the Mind Mountains are some of our best metaphors for the mind and for the spirit, but they are also living...
2 months ago
16
2 months ago
Mountains are some of our best metaphors for the mind and for the spirit, but they are also living entities, sovereign and staggering. I remember the first time I saw a mountain from an airplane — forests miniaturized to moss, rivers to capillaries, the Earth crumpled like a...
The Elysian
Creating a global safety net without nation-states A Guest Lecture featuring Sondre Rasch, co-founder and CEO of SafetyWing.
2 months ago
The Marginalian
Mushrooms and Our Search for Meaning This essay was originally published as the cover story in the Summer 2025 issue of Orion Magazine....
2 months ago
25
2 months ago
This essay was originally published as the cover story in the Summer 2025 issue of Orion Magazine. “Who are you?” the caterpillar barks at Alice from atop the giant mushroom, and Alice, never quite having considered the question, mutters a child’s version of Emily Dickinson’s...
Anecdotal Evidence
'To Illustrate With Marginal Notes' I no longer write in books, a decision I made decades ago that I occasionally regret. It came...
2 months ago
18
2 months ago
I no longer write in books, a decision I made decades ago that I occasionally regret. It came to feel like defacement. But it’s interesting to see what attracted, delighted or puzzled my younger self. Here are the three books on my shelves most heavily underlined and...
The American Scholar
“In the Summer” by Nizar Qabbani Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “In the Summer” by Nizar Qabbani appeared first on The...
2 months ago
27
2 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “In the Summer” by Nizar Qabbani appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Commonly Lost Because It Never Was Deserved' Often, I hardly recognize my younger self. I did foolish things I would never contemplate today....
2 months ago
18
2 months ago
Often, I hardly recognize my younger self. I did foolish things I would never contemplate today. My self-centeredness was appalling, my taste frequently shameful, even in books. I read critics uncritically and was cowed by their fame and influence. Taste doesn’t arrive...
The American Scholar
Jeremy Spoke in Class Today On guns, MTV, Stephen King, and the nightmare from which we cannot awake The post Jeremy Spoke in...
2 months ago
14
2 months ago
On guns, MTV, Stephen King, and the nightmare from which we cannot awake The post Jeremy Spoke in Class Today appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
The Justice Worker Rebecca Sandefur’s mission is to provide help to tens of millions of Americans in solving their...
2 months ago
12
2 months ago
Rebecca Sandefur’s mission is to provide help to tens of millions of Americans in solving their legal problems The post The Justice Worker appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
A Portrait of the Scholar The life of Ireland’s towering literary figure became a work of art in its own right The post A...
2 months ago
12
2 months ago
The life of Ireland’s towering literary figure became a work of art in its own right The post A Portrait of the Scholar appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
The Art of Coping In a time of anger, frustration, and anxiety, the humanities have much to teach us about how to deal...
2 months ago
12
2 months ago
In a time of anger, frustration, and anxiety, the humanities have much to teach us about how to deal with life The post The Art of Coping appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
The Rascal of Pont-Aven Reassessing a renowned painter’s troubling life The post The Rascal of Pont-Aven appeared first on...
2 months ago
12
2 months ago
Reassessing a renowned painter’s troubling life The post The Rascal of Pont-Aven appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
Who Killed the Mercy Man? An obscure murder keeps resurfacing in Black story and song The post Who Killed the Mercy Man?...
2 months ago
8
2 months ago
An obscure murder keeps resurfacing in Black story and song The post Who Killed the Mercy Man? appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
Hiding in Plain Sight What happens when a progressive city is forced to reckon with its connections to an unjust past? The...
2 months ago
8
2 months ago
What happens when a progressive city is forced to reckon with its connections to an unjust past? The post Hiding in Plain Sight appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
Sticking With It A sobering chronicle of our toxic times The post Sticking With It appeared first on The American...
2 months ago
9
2 months ago
A sobering chronicle of our toxic times The post Sticking With It appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
‘God-Knows-What-Kind-of-Classic’ Why shouldn’t America’s federal buildings speak to us in a language encompassing the old as well as...
2 months ago
9
2 months ago
Why shouldn’t America’s federal buildings speak to us in a language encompassing the old as well as the new? The post ‘God-Knows-What-Kind-of-Classic’ appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Marginalian
The One Hundred Milliseconds Between the World and You: Oliver Sacks on Perception “If the doors of perception were cleansed,” William Blake wrote, “everything would appear to man as...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
“If the doors of perception were cleansed,” William Blake wrote, “everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” But we are finite creatures, in time and in space, and there is a limit to how much reality we can bear — evolution gave us consciousness so that we may sieve the...
The American Scholar
On (Middle-Class) Frugality Does cutting costs mean robbing oneself of life’s small delights? The post On (Middle-Class)...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
Does cutting costs mean robbing oneself of life’s small delights? The post On (Middle-Class) Frugality appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
A Fight With Cudgels Meditations on death, Goya, and the immutability of art The post A Fight With Cudgels appeared first...
2 months ago
8
2 months ago
Meditations on death, Goya, and the immutability of art The post A Fight With Cudgels appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
Unbuilding the Mystery What might Indigenous spiritual practices have in common? The post Unbuilding the Mystery appeared...
2 months ago
8
2 months ago
What might Indigenous spiritual practices have in common? The post Unbuilding the Mystery appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
When True Crime Became All Too Real How my family survived a harrowing home invasion The post When True Crime Became All Too Real...
2 months ago
9
2 months ago
How my family survived a harrowing home invasion The post When True Crime Became All Too Real appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
We Contain Multitudes Why do so few of us exercise the many talents with which we are born? The post We Contain Multitudes...
2 months ago
8
2 months ago
Why do so few of us exercise the many talents with which we are born? The post We Contain Multitudes appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
A Blast of a Time The scientific underpinnings of Armageddon The post A Blast of a Time appeared first on The American...
2 months ago
9
2 months ago
The scientific underpinnings of Armageddon The post A Blast of a Time appeared first on The American Scholar.
The American Scholar
What’s Not to Like? On similes, good and bad The post What’s Not to Like? appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 months ago
Wuthering...
What I Read in May 2025 – “There’s the store that’s shaped like a duck,” Franca said. First, my poor email subscribers missed some of the installments of my newsletter about Anthony...
2 months ago
23
2 months ago
First, my poor email subscribers missed some of the installments of my newsletter about Anthony Powell.  If this keeps happening I will have to think of something or even do something.  Here they are: A skippable piece of throat-clearing about the roman fleuve. What I think...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Things Which Make a Life of Ease' R.L. Barth, our finest living epigrammist (admittedly, not a vast job description), has sent me his...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
R.L. Barth, our finest living epigrammist (admittedly, not a vast job description), has sent me his translation of a well-known epigram by Martial, the Roman master of the pithy form. Bob found it among his papers and doesn’t remember making it. “[T]ranslating something [Ben]...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Pictures and the Books That Here Surround Me'' Some five years before his death from cancer, Clive James published the poem “Change of Domicile” in...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
Some five years before his death from cancer, Clive James published the poem “Change of Domicile” in one of the lesser-known literary magazines – the British Medical Journal’s Supportive and Palliative Care, the September 2014 issue. Coincidentally, that’s the month my friend...
The Marginalian
Imagine Water Otherwise: Robert Macfarlane on the Personhood of Rivers and the Meaning of Aliveness “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,” Borges wrote in his timeless...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
“Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,” Borges wrote in his timeless “refutation” of time. “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Nietzsche wrote a century earlier in his directive on how to find yourself....
Anecdotal Evidence
'When the Heart is Full . . .' “You say truly, that death is only terrible to us as it separates us from those we love, but I...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
“You say truly, that death is only terrible to us as it separates us from those we love, but I really think those have the worst of it who are left by us, if we are true friends. I have felt more (I fancy) in the loss of Mr. Gay, than I shall suffer in the thought of going away...
The American Scholar
The Birthmark The post The Birthmark appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 months ago
The Elysian
Our community round has opened—let's fund this book! + Join our call tonight!
2 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
Compatible Observations of Great Men Andrew Taylor on Charles Montagu Doughty, author of Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888): “He appealed...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
Andrew Taylor on Charles Montagu Doughty, author of Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888): “He appealed instinctively to the past, against what he saw as the corruption of language, manners and morality of his own time, but Travels in Arabia Deserta is not backward-looking for its own...
The Marginalian
The Wanting Monster: An Almost Unbearably Tender Illustrated Spell Against the Curse of Not Enough Wanting is the menacing margin of error between desire and need. It is the blade that vivisects your...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
Wanting is the menacing margin of error between desire and need. It is the blade that vivisects your serenity, the hammer that shatters your wholeness — to want anything is to deem your life incomplete without it. It is a perpetual motion machine that keeps you restlessly...
The Elysian
How Silicon Valley got rich And how everyone else can get rich too.
2 months ago
Escaping Flatland
On the pleasure of reading private notebooks One reason I like this genre is that people censor themselves less when they are writing in private.
2 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'All of Time is Cut in Two—Before and After' Rhina Espaillat writes the sonnet “How Like a Winter . . .” (And After All: Poems, 2018) in...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
Rhina Espaillat writes the sonnet “How Like a Winter . . .” (And After All: Poems, 2018) in response to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17:  “So Shakespeare describes absence. Yes—but no, since every winter ends, gentling to spring’s tentative yellows, then the green and blue and bolder...
The Marginalian
Raising Hare: The Moving Story of How a Helpless Creature Helped a Workaholic Wake Up from the... Narrow the aperture of your attention enough to take in any one thing fully, and it becomes a portal...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
Narrow the aperture of your attention enough to take in any one thing fully, and it becomes a portal to everything. Anneal that attention enough so that you see whatever and whoever is before you free from expectation, unfiltered through your fantasies or needs, and it becomes...
The American Scholar
Apagón The post Apagón appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 months ago
The American Scholar
Visions From Jura What the world looked like to George Orwell during his final days The post Visions From Jura...
2 months ago
18
2 months ago
What the world looked like to George Orwell during his final days The post Visions From Jura appeared first on The American Scholar.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Alone in a Room with the English Language' “One of the offices of poetry: to use shapely speech to express the radicals of existence in all...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
“One of the offices of poetry: to use shapely speech to express the radicals of existence in all their ambiguity.”  “Shapely speech” is nicely put. Guys I knew, when being polite, might describe a girl as “shapely.” You know what that means. It means pleasing. What about “the...
The American Scholar
“A Blessing” by James Wright Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “A Blessing” by James Wright appeared first on The American...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “A Blessing” by James Wright appeared first on The American Scholar.
This Space
A mighty contagious absence, part two On submission and resistance to AI-generated literature   To great writers, finished works weigh...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
On submission and resistance to AI-generated literature   To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives. For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in conclusions, feeling themselves...
Anecdotal Evidence
''T is But the Graves That Stay' “Above the town of Frankfort, on the top of the steep bluff of the Kentucky River, is a burial-place...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
“Above the town of Frankfort, on the top of the steep bluff of the Kentucky River, is a burial-place where lie the bones of many heroes, sons the Commonwealth has lovingly gathered in one fold. It is a beautiful site for this simple Valhalla, with its wide outlook over the noble...
The American Scholar
Tessa G. O’Brien Expansiveness and wonder The post Tessa G. O’Brien appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Conception of Life As an Enchanted State' On summer mornings in the mid-nineteen-sixties, I would follow the path behind our house through a...
2 months ago
21
2 months ago
On summer mornings in the mid-nineteen-sixties, I would follow the path behind our house through a growth of poplars and sassafras to the place where the white oaks and tulip trees took over. The path ended at the top of the hill where we went sledding in winter. Most mornings...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Your Point Is to Be Incomplete, Fugitive, Incidental.” “And I very much like your love of pleasure, and your humour and malice: it is so delightful to live...
2 months ago
29
2 months ago
“And I very much like your love of pleasure, and your humour and malice: it is so delightful to live in a world that is full of pictures, and incidental divertissements, and amiable absurdities. Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we...
The Marginalian
Owl Lake: A Vintage Treasure from Japanese Artist Keizaburo Tejima That we will never know what it is like to be another — another person, another creature — is one of...
2 months ago
29
2 months ago
That we will never know what it is like to be another — another person, another creature — is one of the most exasperating things in life, but also one of the most humbling, the most catalytic to our creative energies: the great calibrator of our certainties, the ultimate...
Anecdotal Evidence
'He’s Not the Only One' My newly graduated youngest son is visiting Thailand with friends from his alma mater, Rice...
2 months ago
21
2 months ago
My newly graduated youngest son is visiting Thailand with friends from his alma mater, Rice University. Most of the photos he has sent document meals eaten and temples visited, but among them is this one, my favorite image:  The smiling head of the Buddha sunk among the...
The American Scholar
Lingua Obscura Laura Spinney on the spread of Proto-Indo-European The post Lingua Obscura appeared first on The...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
Laura Spinney on the spread of Proto-Indo-European The post Lingua Obscura appeared first on The American Scholar.
Escaping Flatland
When writing, look at what you are trying to describe more than at your words 9 reflections
2 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'For I Have Renounced Happiness' “Happiness is the search for happiness.”  I’m not so sure. My understanding is that there are no...
2 months ago
18
2 months ago
“Happiness is the search for happiness.”  I’m not so sure. My understanding is that there are no happy lives, only happy moments. Those moments seem to be the byproduct of right living. A life dedicated fulltime to achieving happiness is likely to be filled with respites of...
The American Scholar
An Enigma at the Center The story of the American West in one photograph The post An Enigma at the Center appeared first on...
2 months ago
21
2 months ago
The story of the American West in one photograph The post An Enigma at the Center appeared first on The American Scholar.
Wuthering...
Anthony Powell's style and sensibility - Life is full of internal dramas, instantaneous and... Nicholas Jenkins – I did not register his name at all for the entire first novel, but I know it now...
2 months ago
31
2 months ago
Nicholas Jenkins – I did not register his name at all for the entire first novel, but I know it now – goes to school, gets a job in publishing, writes a novel, gets a girlfriend, gets a job as a script writer, splits with the girlfriend, and writes another novel or two, none of...
The Marginalian
Is Peace Possible Is Peace Possible?, originally published in 1957, is the second title in Marginalian Editions. Below...
2 months ago
29
2 months ago
Is Peace Possible?, originally published in 1957, is the second title in Marginalian Editions. Below is my foreword to the new edition as it appears in on its pages. How ungenerous our culture has been in portraying science as cold, unfeeling, and aloof from the human sphere. No...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Books Which Can Be Read Again and Again' “The great bulk of the world’s prose fiction, contemporary and past, does not wear well. Almost all...
2 months ago
26
2 months ago
“The great bulk of the world’s prose fiction, contemporary and past, does not wear well. Almost all of it is soon forgotten and of those books which survive the wear of time, only a few withstand the effects of time on the reader himself. Out of all the novels ever written there...
The American Scholar
Engulfed The post Engulfed appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 months ago
The Elysian
Who should control AI? Nonprofits aren't our only option.
2 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'He Wanted Only Time' My brother’s yahrzeit – the first anniversary of his death last summer – is approaching. His death...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
My brother’s yahrzeit – the first anniversary of his death last summer – is approaching. His death was the most intimate I have experienced. I spent most of the last two weeks of his life with him, in hospital and hospice, and observed the moment of his death.  Ken could be...
The American Scholar
“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden appeared first on The...
2 months ago
28
2 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden appeared first on The American Scholar.
Wuthering...
How A Dance to the Music of Time works, so far - I always enjoy hearing the details of other... My writing here is often about what surprised me or did not.  So let’s have that about the first...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
My writing here is often about what surprised me or did not.  So let’s have that about the first four novels of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, the twelve volume sequence published from 1951 to 1975 and covering a refracted version of Powell’s life from his later...
Anecdotal Evidence
'There Is Only Man' “You either fell under his spell and loved the wild ride of his prose, or you shunned or ignored...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
“You either fell under his spell and loved the wild ride of his prose, or you shunned or ignored it.”   Infatuation of the literary sort is likely possible only among the young. That’s my experience. I have discovered good writers in recent decades – Yvor Winters, C.H. Sisson –...
The American Scholar
“The Jester’s Magma” The post “The Jester’s Magma” appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 months ago
The Marginalian
The Pain and the God Within You: Carl Jung on the Relationship Between Psychological Suffering and... When AI first began colonizing language — which is still our best instrument for bridging the abyss...
2 months ago
32
2 months ago
When AI first began colonizing language — which is still our best instrument for bridging the abyss between us, a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents — I asked chatGPT to compose a poem about a solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Poetry That Nobody Nowadays Reads' Once I patronized a library book sale where volumes were sold not by age, condition, whether...
2 months ago
23
2 months ago
Once I patronized a library book sale where volumes were sold not by age, condition, whether paperback or hard cover, and certainly not by literary worth but by weight. On the table by the exit was a scale, the flat-topped sort associated with butcher shops. The arrangement was a...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Negligible or Negative Return' A reader is pressing Ezra Pound on me again. This happens semi-annually, like visits to the dentist....
2 months ago
24
2 months ago
A reader is pressing Ezra Pound on me again. This happens semi-annually, like visits to the dentist. I find few writers as distasteful as Pound. My reasons are simple and not at all original. He was rabidly, tediously anti-Semitic and he betrayed his country. Earlier this year...
The Marginalian
How Should You Live Your Life: Marie Howe’s Spare, Stunning Poem “The Maples” “Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of...
2 months ago
42
2 months ago
“Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in one of the most sobering opening pages in literature. So here you are, having answered affirmatively, consciously or not, now facing the second...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Read Well, Read Little' A reader asks what novels by William Makepeace Thackeray I would suggest he read. My answer is brief...
2 months ago
26
2 months ago
A reader asks what novels by William Makepeace Thackeray I would suggest he read. My answer is brief and not terribly helpful: Vanity Fair. It’s the only book by Thackery I have read, and that was a long time ago. I saw Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Barry Lyndon in 1975....
Wuthering...
Preface to notes on the first four novels of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time In France, at the Lyon public library, I was surprised to bump into so many romans fleuves, whatever...
2 months ago
31
2 months ago
In France, at the Lyon public library, I was surprised to bump into so many romans fleuves, whatever those are.  They were notable on the shelf because these long series of novels are now published in monumental, highly visible, omnibus editions.  The library assumes that...
The Marginalian
Annie Dillard on Unselfconsciousness Walking through the white-walled gallery at the graduation show of one of New York’s most esteemed...
2 months ago
29
2 months ago
Walking through the white-walled gallery at the graduation show of one of New York’s most esteemed art schools, between beautiful young people with Instagram faces, I was struck to see project after project take up as its subject the least durable, most illusory aspect of human...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The War with What He Does Not Understand' “. . . I am closer to the ‘life of the spirit’ than you are. You are talking about the right of one...
2 months ago
27
2 months ago
“. . . I am closer to the ‘life of the spirit’ than you are. You are talking about the right of one or another type of knowledge to exist, whereas I’m talking about peace, not rights. I want people not to see war where there isn’t any. Different branches of knowledge have always...
The Elysian
CITY STATE: A discussion about autonomous governance Here's the recording from our literary salon discussion.
2 months ago
The Marginalian
Isotopes, Vikings, Mars We are perishable matter yearning for meaning, and time is both the matter and the meaning of our...
2 months ago
23
2 months ago
We are perishable matter yearning for meaning, and time is both the matter and the meaning of our lives. “Time is a river that sweeps me along but I am the river,” Borges wrote in 1940. “Time is the substance I am made of.” Around the same time, the chemist Willard Libby had a...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Books Which Can Be Read Again and Again' “The great bulk of the world’s prose fiction, contemporary and past, does not wear well. Almost all...
2 months ago
12
2 months ago
“The great bulk of the world’s prose fiction, contemporary and past, does not wear well. Almost all of it is soon forgotten and of those books which survive the wear of time, only a few withstand the effects of time on the reader himself. Out of all the novels ever written there...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Different Faces, Formats All the Same' In Osip Mandelstam: A Biography, Ralph Dutli describes a chance meeting in March 1934 on...
2 months ago
20
2 months ago
In Osip Mandelstam: A Biography, Ralph Dutli describes a chance meeting in March 1934 on Tverskoy Boulevard in Moscow between Boris Pasternak and Mandelstam, who recited to his friend the now-famous poem known as the “Stalin Epigram.” Mandelstam never wrote down the poem but...
The American Scholar
White Easter The post White Easter appeared first on The American Scholar.
2 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
On a Phrase by Jane Greer “. . . I pounce on quiet when I find it.”  Do you hear that sound? A low vibrato in the distance?...
2 months ago
22
2 months ago
“. . . I pounce on quiet when I find it.”  Do you hear that sound? A low vibrato in the distance? Sometimes it swells and the windows seem to rattle. It’s a pedal point reminiscent of hornets in a jar, but less reassuring. It’s the collective drone of chatter, of casually...
The American Scholar
“That Day” by Nikki Giovanni Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “That Day” by Nikki Giovanni appeared first on The American...
2 months ago
27
2 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “That Day” by Nikki Giovanni appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Elysian
120 million employee-owners in one generation We have a moonshot opportunity to make the bottom half way richer. Here’s how we take it.
2 months ago
Escaping Flatland
What problem should you be working on now? How to filter problems worth solving from problems worth quitting?
2 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Fanaticisms and Factiousnesses Too' “History is not some past from which we are cut off. We are merely at its forward edge as it...
2 months ago
30
2 months ago
“History is not some past from which we are cut off. We are merely at its forward edge as it unrolls. And only if one is without historical feeling at all can one think of the intellectual fads and fashions of one’s own time as a ‘habitation everlasting.’ We may feel that at...
The Marginalian
Václav Havel on How to Live with Your Greatest Failure Few things in life are more devastating than to give something your all and still fail. Not the...
2 months ago
24
2 months ago
Few things in life are more devastating than to give something your all and still fail. Not the “fail better” of startup culture, not the “fail forward” of self-help, not the failure that is childhood’s fulcrum of learning, not the inspired mistakes that propel creative risk, but...
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Following Pages Are Frankly Bookish' If you're familiar with Andrew Lang (1844-1912) at all, it’s likely as a collector of folk and fairy...
2 months ago
24
2 months ago
If you're familiar with Andrew Lang (1844-1912) at all, it’s likely as a collector of folk and fairy tales. I remember as a kid reading some of his twelve “Coloured” Fairy Books. He was also a prolific poet and critic, though that work is largely forgotten. He remains best known...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Utterly Intoxicated by His Affection' Montaigne’s charming opening to his essay “Of the Education of Children”: “I have never seen a...
3 months ago
26
3 months ago
Montaigne’s charming opening to his essay “Of the Education of Children”: “I have never seen a father who failed to claim his son, however mangy or hunchbacked he was. Not that he does not perceive his defect, unless he is utterly intoxicated by his affection; but the fact...
Astral Codex Ten
The Twins Join The Linguistic-Symbolic Order ...
3 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Bolt of Inspiration Strikes Invariably' “Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.” A student and...
3 months ago
32
3 months ago
“Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.” A student and aspiring fiction writer wonders why I seldom refer to “inspiration.” What is it? Do I deny its existence? Have certain writers successfully relied on it? Can he? My answer is yes and...
The American Scholar
The Shipping News Ian Kumekawa tells the story of the global economy in one barge The post The Shipping News appeared...
3 months ago
28
3 months ago
Ian Kumekawa tells the story of the global economy in one barge The post The Shipping News appeared first on The American Scholar.
Wuthering...
What I Read in April 2025 – Have we cherished expectations? I should make that the new official slogan of the blog.  It is from p. 614 of Finnegans Wake, one of...
3 months ago
30
3 months ago
I should make that the new official slogan of the blog.  It is from p. 614 of Finnegans Wake, one of the books I recently read. FICTION The Sword in the Stone (1938), T. H. White – I for some reason did not read this as a youth.  It is wonderful, full of anachronism and parody...
Naz Hamid
Barbara “Nuggie” Schuetz-Hamid Rest in peace little one. I never would have guessed that a 4-lb Chihuahua would come into our...
3 months ago
33
3 months ago
Rest in peace little one. I never would have guessed that a 4-lb Chihuahua would come into our lives, let alone be the animal to steal my heart before Jen’s. Our previous animals — two cats and a Boxer dog — are a stark contrast to a tiny dog that we would carry around in a sling...
The Elysian
Let's read Moral Ambition together Rutger Bregman's new book is the subject of our next literary salon.
3 months ago
Astral Codex Ten
Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr ...
3 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Among Those Who Read There is Great Variety' Writing is famously the most narcissistic of professions, even worse than acting or being a...
3 months ago
23
3 months ago
Writing is famously the most narcissistic of professions, even worse than acting or being a politician. We’re forever carrying on about ourselves and our precious insights, like the kid in class who raises his hand and goes “Ooh! Ooh!” each time the teacher asks a question....
Astral Codex Ten
Hidden Open Thread 380.5 ...
3 months ago
The Marginalian
Ocean Vuong on Anger “To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let...
3 months ago
37
3 months ago
“To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer,” Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary as a young artist. “The poets (by which I mean all artists),” James Baldwin wrote in his late thirties, “are finally the...
Astral Codex Ten
Moldbug Sold Out "At long last, I've created the populist strongman from my classic 11,000 blog post series 'Don't...
3 months ago
32
3 months ago
"At long last, I've created the populist strongman from my classic 11,000 blog post series 'Don't Create The Populist Strongman'"
Anecdotal Evidence
'He Lies Until the Trauma Trots Away' At age fourteen, our dog, if human, would be eligible for Social Security. Luke sleeps more than he...
3 months ago
21
3 months ago
At age fourteen, our dog, if human, would be eligible for Social Security. Luke sleeps more than he did when a pup. His rear end aches and he takes nearly as many meds each day as I do. He throws up more often and has trouble jumping on the bed. We indulge him as we would a sick...
The American Scholar
Star Trek: Discovery The post <em>Star Trek: Discovery</em> appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'But No One Style, I Think, is Recommended' A reader tells me of her disgust with most insects and reptiles, the small creatures, almost...
3 months ago
20
3 months ago
A reader tells me of her disgust with most insects and reptiles, the small creatures, almost domestic, that surround us. She resents the “nature sentimentality” such “vermin” rouse in some people. They “make [her] skin crawl,” she writes – an idiom I’ve always found amusing....
The American Scholar
“Piano Fire” by Claudia Emerson Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Piano Fire” by Claudia Emerson appeared first on The...
3 months ago
28
3 months ago
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Piano Fire” by Claudia Emerson appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Elysian
We’ve raised $50,000—now I’m writing a book! My vision for the future of capitalism has been greenlit. Now let’s make it a reality.
3 months ago
Astral Codex Ten
Open Thread 380 ...
3 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'This Is My Time and Theme' “I delight sensually in Time, in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the...
3 months ago
26
3 months ago
“I delight sensually in Time, in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum.”  You may recognize the almost overripe prose. Ingesting so rich a diet too early in life can spoil one for plainer...
The American Scholar
Lorena Diosdado Multifaceted Latinx identities The post Lorena Diosdado appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 months ago
The Marginalian
Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, and with Fangs: The Alchemy of Unrequited Love and the Story Behind... This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring. In the first autumn of her...
3 months ago
29
3 months ago
This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring. In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson: I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy...
Anecdotal Evidence
'Death, Indeed, Continually Hovers About Us' A high-school friend writes to ask what I remember of May 4, 1970. We would graduate in a month and...
3 months ago
15
3 months ago
A high-school friend writes to ask what I remember of May 4, 1970. We would graduate in a month and go to university in the fall. The fear and excitement of that symbolic step toward adulthood was blunted by the killing of four students by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State...
The Marginalian
Stalactite & Stalagmite: A Brief Illustrated History of Earth and One Great Truth about Love We are always either drawing closer or drifting apart — there is no stasis in relationships. The...
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We are always either drawing closer or drifting apart — there is no stasis in relationships. The direction of movement may change over the course of a relationship, but there is no stasis. Despite our culture’s bias for the drama of cataclysm — the violent heartbreaks, the very...
Anecdotal Evidence
'It Was a Good Moment of Remembrance' Out of the aether after twenty-six years came an email from Mikhail Iossel: “Greetings -- and...
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Out of the aether after twenty-six years came an email from Mikhail Iossel: “Greetings -- and apologies for writing out of that metaphoric nowhere.” In May 1999, Mikhail was a writer-in-residence at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and I was a reporter for that city’s...
The Marginalian
States of Possession: Erich Neumann on Creativity, the Unconscious, and the Psychology of... There are things in life that come over you sudden as a flash flood, total as an eclipse — the great...
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There are things in life that come over you sudden as a flash flood, total as an eclipse — the great loves, the great creative passions, the great urges to conquer a mountain or a theorem. They can feel like an alien invasion, like the immense hand of some imperative has seized...
Astral Codex Ten
Testing AI's GeoGuessr Genius Seeing a world in a grain of sand
3 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Glass Filled With a Supersaturate Solution' “[S]he is one of the few truly compelling stylists now at work. Her voice is authoritative,...
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“[S]he is one of the few truly compelling stylists now at work. Her voice is authoritative, confident, unfussy, exacting. She is never overtly confessional, which sets her apart from many poets writing since the Romantics. She makes rare company.”  And isn’t that what we look for...
Wuthering...
Languages and literature - Finnegans Wake becomes unbeurrable from age More keys.  As Anna Livia Plurabelle says or thinks or dreams at the very end of Finnegans...
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More keys.  As Anna Livia Plurabelle says or thinks or dreams at the very end of Finnegans Wake, “The keys to.”  She is falling asleep so she unfortunately does not finish the sentence.  Some keys to the Wake: languages, literature, and themes. Languages In “Pierre Menard, Author...
Naz Hamid
The Abstraction Gap Bridging the design-development gap as AI rises. There’s a frustrating gap in how development...
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Bridging the design-development gap as AI rises. There’s a frustrating gap in how development projects present themselves. What looks straightforward on GitHub — ‘just run this command!’ — quickly spirals into an odyssey of sudo permissions, package managers, and missing...
Astral Codex Ten
You Can Keep Having An Opinion Even When The Government Also Has It ...
3 months ago
Escaping Flatland
Drift Right now it is April 18 and I am walking along the steep coast at the peninsula on the Northeastern...
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Right now it is April 18 and I am walking along the steep coast at the peninsula on the Northeastern corner of our island.
Anecdotal Evidence
'Poor Naked Wretches, Whereso’er You Are' Aleksander Wat (1900-67) was a Polish poet and one-time Communist hounded and imprisoned by Nazis...
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Aleksander Wat (1900-67) was a Polish poet and one-time Communist hounded and imprisoned by Nazis and Soviets alike. In 1964 while visiting California, he recorded lengthy conversations with fellow poet and Pole Czesław Miłosz. The transcripts were translated by Richard Lourie...
Wuthering...
Some of the difficulties of Finnegans Wake - Two dreamyums in one dromium? Yes and no error. I am too tired to write about Finnegans Wake which is a good state for writing about this dream...
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I am too tired to write about Finnegans Wake which is a good state for writing about this dream novel where characters keep falling asleep.  “Dream” is conventional wisdom but I will note that no part of the book resembles any dream I have ever experienced or read about, although...
Astral Codex Ten
Hidden Open Thread 379.5 ...
3 months ago
Josh Thompson
Related to Grief & Sadness & Supremacy Introduction this post is very drafty, but has been sitting around getting longer for a few weeks...
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Introduction this post is very drafty, but has been sitting around getting longer for a few weeks now, so I’m simply posting now and will do some more rounds of cleanup, probably. I’d started writing some of this in a letter to a friend, then noticed that, with a little...
Astral Codex Ten
The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs ...
3 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Frivolous Subjects?' “Frivolous subjects? Well, and thank God for it, not everybody can be writing about big,...
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“Frivolous subjects? Well, and thank God for it, not everybody can be writing about big, so-called important issues: population, genes, semantics, sex, death. Surely there is value in anything that makes us laugh, that makes us understand ourselves more.”  These wise words are...
The American Scholar
Another You The post Another You appeared first on The American Scholar.
3 months ago
Wuthering...
The key to Finnegans Wake - there is a limit to all things so this will never do Over the last month I read Finnegans Wake (1939).  I first read some bits of it in college, in a...
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Over the last month I read Finnegans Wake (1939).  I first read some bits of it in college, in a Norton Anthology of British Literature, and other, although mostly the same, bits occasionally, mostly to remind myself what they looked like.  Anyone interested in literature should...
The Marginalian
Chance, Choice, and How to Claim Your Life Only a fool or an egomaniac would deny that chance shapes the vast majority of life. The time,...
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Only a fool or an egomaniac would deny that chance shapes the vast majority of life. The time, place, culture, family, body, brain, and biochemistry we are born into, the people who cross our path, the accidents that befall us — these dwarf in consequence the sum total of our...
The Elysian
How we’re profit sharing on Metalabel A financial analysis of our first cooperative media project + where we could go from here.
3 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Every Word Is a World' When someone had eaten his fill and couldn’t take another bite, my maternal grandmother, born the...
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When someone had eaten his fill and couldn’t take another bite, my maternal grandmother, born the same year as T.S. Eliot, would say, “His sufficiency is suffonsified.” I’ve never heard another person utter those words. For most of my life I assumed the fourth word in that...
The American Scholar
“Pin Pricks of Loneliness” by Etheridge Knight Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Pin Pricks of Loneliness” by Etheridge Knight appeared first...
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Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Pin Pricks of Loneliness” by Etheridge Knight appeared first on The American Scholar.
Wuthering...
Two novels titled Attila - Maximal words striving to breach an angel I will write about two newly published translations of Spanish novels that comprise an amusing stunt...
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I will write about two newly published translations of Spanish novels that comprise an amusing stunt by Open Letter Books.  They are Attila by Aliocha Coll (1991) and Attila by Javier Serena (2014), both translated by Katie Whittemore.  Coll’s Attila is a Finnegans...
Astral Codex Ten
Open Thread 379 ...
3 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Opsimath That I Am in So Many Matters' I was a lazy student who worked hard when the task interested me and coasted the rest of the time....
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I was a lazy student who worked hard when the task interested me and coasted the rest of the time. I dropped out of Latin prematurely because I couldn’t be bothered to master the ablative absolute, among other things. Formal education was an evasive game played with teachers....
Anecdotal Evidence
'The Spiritual Situation of Our Age' “Balzac is one of the most shameless traders in stereotype among the great nineteenth-century...
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“Balzac is one of the most shameless traders in stereotype among the great nineteenth-century novelists. As a result, there are passages in his books that many of us today have to read in the spirit of camp as resounding expressions of the kitsch of his era.”  I’ve read so little...
Anecdotal Evidence
'He Is a Genial Companion' Tess Lewis has translated one of Montaigne’s early essays, “Of Pedantry” (c. 1572-78), in which the...
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Tess Lewis has translated one of Montaigne’s early essays, “Of Pedantry” (c. 1572-78), in which the Frenchman issues one caution and, mid-paragraph, seems to reverse himself:  “I would be inclined to conclude that just as plants are suffocated with too much moisture and...
Astral Codex Ten
AMA With AI Futures Project Team ...
3 months ago
The Marginalian
The Art of Befriending Time and Change: Debbie Millman’s Illustrated Love Letter to Gardening as a... You may or may not find the meaning of life while pacing a flower bed, but each time you plunge your...
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You may or may not find the meaning of life while pacing a flower bed, but each time you plunge your bare hands into the hummus of the Earth and run your fingers through the roots of something that hungers for the sun, you are resisting the dying of the light and saying “yes” to...
Anecdotal Evidence
'A Soliloquy for Two' The ideally named English neurologist Russell Brain died in 1966 but his textbook, Brain’s Diseases...
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The ideally named English neurologist Russell Brain died in 1966 but his textbook, Brain’s Diseases of the Nervous System (1933), remains in print. The Royal College of Physicians has called it “the standard British textbook on his subject.” Brain was also a poet and...
The American Scholar
Coming Home Craig Thompson digs up memories of farm labor and the history of ginseng The post Coming Home...
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Craig Thompson digs up memories of farm labor and the history of ginseng The post Coming Home appeared first on The American Scholar.
Naz Hamid
SXSW ’11 Memories are an interesting beast. I have certain core memories that are embedded deep in my mind....
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Memories are an interesting beast. I have certain core memories that are embedded deep in my mind. The years I attended SXSW from 2007-2012 encompass some of those. In 2011, I shared a house with longtime partner-in-crime Scott Robbin, Jeff Skinner, and Sam Felder. We were off...
The Marginalian
Introducing Marginalian Editions: Extraordinary Forgotten Books Brought Back to Life I have become a person on the pages and in the margins of books. In nearly two decades of reckoning...
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I have become a person on the pages and in the margins of books. In nearly two decades of reckoning with my reading in writing, it has been my ongoing lamentation to see works of enduring beauty and substance perish out of print — because the ideas they conduct are not the...
The Elysian
You can collect CITY STATE now The digital and print editions are now available.
3 months ago
Astral Codex Ten
AI Futures: Blogging And AMA ...
3 months ago
Anecdotal Evidence
'Refreshed His Senses, Heart, and Head' If I had been in the house all day reading during a long Ohio winter, invariably my mother would...
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If I had been in the house all day reading during a long Ohio winter, invariably my mother would say, “Go outside and blow the stink off.” My parents took a kid reading as a reproach, something unnatural and probably unhealthy – one more reason for me to be secretive. When I was...
The American Scholar
After the Fallout On jellyfish babies, my father’s pain, and the legacy of nuclear testing in the Pacific The post...
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On jellyfish babies, my father’s pain, and the legacy of nuclear testing in the Pacific The post After the Fallout appeared first on The American Scholar.
Astral Codex Ten
Hidden Open Thread 378.5 ...
3 months ago
Escaping Flatland
Sometimes the reason you can’t find people you resonate with is because you misread the ones you... Sometimes two people will stand next to each other for fifteen years, both feeling out of place and...
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Sometimes two people will stand next to each other for fifteen years, both feeling out of place and alone, like no one gets them, and then one day, they look up at each other and say, “Oh, there you are.”
Astral Codex Ten
With This Character's Death, The Thread Of Prophecy Is Severed RIP Pope Francis and a particularly interesting apocalyptic prophecy
3 months ago