February 2012
7 posts
We're All State Capitalists Now →
“Household borrowing through credit cards, car loans, student loans and other...”
– Wall Street Journal, February 8
The Wish to Be Generous
All that I serve will die, all my delights, the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field, the silent lilies standing in the woods, the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all will burn in man’s evil, or dwindle in its own age. Let the world bring on me the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know my little light taken from me into the seed of the beginning and the end, so I...
“In our Web 3.0 world, as we share our identities so publicly with everyone else,...”
– Does society benefit when we share personal information online? Or do social networks prompt us to publish unhealthy amounts of personal data, while little enriching our lives? Author Andrew Keen and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis lead the arguments in our debate.
(via theeconomist)
A Cat in an Empty Apartment
Die—you can’t do that to a cat. Since what can a cat do in an empty apartment? Climb the walls? Rub up against the furniture? Nothing seems different here but nothing is the same. Nothing’s been moved but there’s more space. And at nighttime no lamps are lit. Footsteps on the staircase, but they’re new ones. The hand that puts fish on the saucer has changed, too. Something doesn’t...
Maybe All This
Maybe all this is happening in some lab? Under one lamp by day and billions by night? Maybe we’re experimental generations? Poured from one vial to the next, shaken in test tubes, not scrutinized by eyes alone, each of us separately plucked up by tweezers in the end? Or maybe it’s more like this: No interference? The changes occur on their own according to plan? The graph’s needle slowly etches...
“American manufacturers produced roughly the same amount of goods in 2010 as they...”
– New York Times, February 3
January 2012
20 posts
The End of Solitude →
What Are You Going to Do With That? →
“In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus famously say, about growing up in Ireland in the late 19th century, “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”
Today there are other nets. One of those...
Watchfilmprojections:
The first official trailer for Wes Anderson’s latest film, Moonrise Kingdom, starring Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Bruce Willis, Ed Norton, Frances McDormand, and more. The film will be released on May 25, 2012.
tesslynch:
van morrison — into the mystic
Tear it Down
We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows. By redefining the morning, we find a morning that comes just after darkness. We can break through marriage into marriage. By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond affection and wade mouth-deep into love. We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars. But going back toward childhood will not help. The village is not...
“Well begun is half done.”
– Aristotle
December 2011
7 posts
“I wanted a bookstore because the book business is... →
George Whitman, the American-born owner of Shakespeare & Company, a fabled English-language bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris and a magnet for writers, poets and tourists for close to 60 years, died on Wednesday in his apartment above the store. He was 98.
Go Forth and Destroy Your Community Sayeth Amazon →
“Science does not purvey absolute truth, science is a mechanism. It’s a way of...”
– Isaac Asimov on science, creativity, and education in a rare Bill Moyers interview circa 1988 (via taylorlorenz) (via wallytheidol)
On Starbucks' Let's Merry Holiday Slogan →
“Merry” is an adjective. “Let’s,” as in “let us,” as in “permit us to,” demands a verb. Presumably, this slogan represents some effort to make a pun. The effort fails. Would Starbucks write, “Let’s funny” or “Let’s delicious”? Apparently, Starbucks would. Customers ought to be concerned: Word play at the expense of grammar is not play at all. It’s antisocial. (via)
“The relevant constitutional text is the Fourth Amendment which says, ‘The right...”
– On today’s Fresh Air, law professor Jeffrey Rosen talks about United States v. Jones, a case the Supreme Court is currently considering. At issue is whether police need to have a warrant from a judge before attaching a secret GPS monitor to a car to track a suspect around the clock. (via...
November 2011
9 posts
Convalescing by Jack Gilbert
I spend the days deciding
on a commemorative poem.
Not, luckily, an epitaph.
A quiet poem
to establish the fact of me.
As one of the incidental faces
in those stone processions.
Carefully done.
Not claiming that I was
at any of the great victories.
But that I volunteered.
WatchEdgar Meyer makes the bass sound like it should
The Horror Show at Penn State →
Blue Inequality vs. Red Inequality →
October 2011
20 posts
Ode to Joy - Frank O’Hara
“My turn shall also come:
I sense the spreading of a wing.”
– Osip Mandelstam
“Oh, tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire.”
– Emerson
“Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we’re going to...”
– On today’s Fresh Air, poet Marie Howe discusses several of her poems, which deal with topics such as loss, love, spirituality, gender, sexuality and intimacy. (via nprfreshair)