March 2010
40 posts
“By nature, we do not perceive ourselves or others accurately. We magnify the...”
– Barry Grosskopf, Hidden in Plain Sight
“language isn’t just an internal process. Rather, linguistic components overflow...”
– The Progressive Ingression of Intelligence into Matter | h+ Magazine
The overpopulation myth →
azspot:
Many of today’s most-respected thinkers, from Stephen Hawking to David Attenborough, argue that our efforts to fight climate change and other environmental perils will all fail unless we “do something” about population growth. In the Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking declares that, “in the last 200 years, population growth has become exponential… The world population doubles every forty...
Bring it on, Ayn Rand geeks →
azspot:
It is merciful, perhaps, that Buckley did not live to see the detested Ayn Rand become the central intellectual figure on the right. Until recently the only prominent conservative known to have been influenced at one point by the Evita of the nerds was Alan Greenspan, and he was given a pass for a youthful indiscretion. Now two of the stars of the emergent right, Ron Paul and Paul Ryan,...
David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, (first pick of the Vancouver book club) has a new book out, a collection of his New Yorker pieces called, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession.
Guess Grann has his marketing strategy all figured out.
“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the...”
– Jonathan Swift
“Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting”
Starting to read “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole. It’s off to a good start.
“The number one predictor of a child’s academic success is parental involvement....”
– Bill Maher
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion...”
– - Samuel P. Huntington
See Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond for a fuller treatment.
“Whatever relationships you have attracted in your life at this moment, are...”
– Deepak Chopra
“Why are we educated? Anyone who values the liberal arts will know that it is not...”
– Making men without chests: RJ Snell on the intellectual life and moral imagination.
This essay was a real boost to me today as I am struggling in finding the value of going to class. The whole thing is really good.
Poetry 365: Always, Mark Strand →
for Charles Simic Always so late in the day
In their rumpled clothes, sitting
Around a table lit by a single bulb,
The great forgetters were hard at work.
They tilted their heads to one side, closing their eyes.
Then a house disappeared, and a man in his yard
With all his flowers in a row.
“Online communities don’t generally resemble small towns so much as hobo jungles....”
– Trust Falls (via azspot)
Weird new covers for Penguin classics →
hannahjenkins:
