More from Naz Hamid — Journal + Links
We are tenants with landlords who want to make sure that we can’t leave the building or go hang out with friends elsewhere, all while showing us how happy we should be with the limitations imposed on us. — Den Delimarsky A long, weighty one, but very worth the read. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
01/05 PREDATORS, AMERICAN GREED — Steven Soderbergh Director Steven Soderbergh's media recap of 2024. It's fascinating to see how many movies he watched multiple times, and the reverse watch of the original Star Wars trilogy. Phantom of the Menace twice too? Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
I’m including the most memorable, impactful, or beloved works of—creative genius, or something, that I’ve encountered this year. I’m not a critic; I am mostly just talking about things I liked. These are tremendous to me. I hope they can be tremendous to you, too. — Anh The list is great, but this one is also visually gorgeous. Best experienced in a browser near you. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
It’s idealistic and very millennial of me to reminiscence the early days of Web innocence, unbound creativity it hosted and wonderful lack of monetisation of virtually every aspect of being online. We can’t turn back time. But, individually and collectively, we can strive for better as the Web evolves as a home for work, knowledge, community, and love. We can resist the ongoing enshittification and corporate capitalism. So I jotted down an non-exhaustive list of what I’d love the future Web to be. — Karolina Szczur A great list. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
More in literature
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world’s first algorithm for the world’s first computer. Meanwhile, she was reckoning with the nature of creativity, distilling it to a trinity: “an intuitive perception of hidden things,” “immense reasoning faculties,” and the “concentrative faculty” of bringing to any creative endeavor “a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant and extraneous sources” — that is, intuition, the analytical prowess to evaluate the fruits of intuition, and a rich reservoir of… read article
Notes from the margins of my research.
“A knowledge of men and of books is also to be desired; for it is a writer’s best reason of being, and without it he does well to hold his tongue. Blessed with these attributes he is an essayist to some purpose. Give him leisure and occasion, and his discourse may well become as popular as Montaigne’s own.” If pressed to name my favorite literary form I would choose the essay, the form without a strict form, seemingly designed for free spirits with brains and emotional depth – “a knowledge of men and of books,” as W.E. Henley puts it above. The most unlikely things can be successful essays – reviews, memoirs, scientific papers, recipes, fiction. The best ones have a point, even an argument or lesson, but never hector or harangue the reader. An essayist confides. Without condescending, he puts his arm around your shoulder and talks softly, turning you into the sole member of his audience, a person worthy of his trust. Sure, Montaigne started it all (except for Plutarch and Seneca), but the English came to perfect it – Johnson, Hazlitt, Lamb, Stevenson, Chesterton, Beerbohm and the rest. William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) will never be a member of that front rank. He was a poet, lauded in his day, and will always be remembered for a poem my eighth-grade English teacher had us memorize sixty years ago: "Invictus." It’s a natural for recitation, up there with Kipling. The passage at the top is taken from Henley’s “Essays and Essayists” collected in Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation (1892).He writes: “Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is in a literary sense the friend of everybody. As one of the brotherhood has phrased it, it is his function ‘to speak with ease and opportunity to all men.’ He must be personal, or his hearers can feel no manner of interest in him. He must be candid and sincere, or his readers presently see through him. He must have learned to think for himself and to consider his surroundings with an eye that is both kindly and observant, or they straightway find his company unprofitable.” Henley was born on this date, August 23, in 1849. His friend Stevenson, who based the character of Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1883) on the one-legged Henley, wrote him a letter from Nebraska on August 23, 1879 -- the poet's thirtieth birthday. Stevenson writes a brief, impromptu essay from Willa Cather's (b. 1873) future turf: “I am sitting on the top of the cars with a mill party from Missouri going west for his health. Desolate flat prairie upon all hands. Here and there a herd of cattle, a yellow butterfly or two; a patch of wild sunflowers; a wooden house or two; then a wooden church alone in miles of waste; then a windmill to pump water. When we stop, which we do often, for emigrants and freight travel together, the kine first, the men after, the whole plain is heard singing with cicadae.”
Here’s to the English writer who waited until her ninth decade to finally experience fame in America The post The Patient Penelope Fitzgerald appeared first on The American Scholar.
Marbling the waters of every ocean with their billows of black and white, orcas are Earth’s most creative and most successful apex predator. Although they are known as killer whales, they are the largest member of the dolphin family. Older than great white sharks, they hunt everything from seals a tenth their size to moose bathing in the shallows to Earth’s largest animal — the blue whale, whose tongue alone can weigh as much as a female orca. The secret to these staggering feats is not brute force but strategy and synchrony. Beneath the shimmering surface that divides us from… read article