February 2011
21 posts
Branch Library
By Edward Hirsch
I wish I could find that skinny, long-beaked boy who perched in the branches of the old branch library.
He spent the Sabbath flying between the wobbly stacks and the flimsy wooden tables on the second floor,
pecking at nuts, nesting in broken spines, scratching notes under his own corner patch of sky.
I’d give anything to find that birdy boy again bursting out into the dusky...
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the...”
– Franz Kafka
“Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continue
when it is the lives of others that...”
– Jorge Luis Borges
Job interviews… so nerve racking… trying not to sound desperate…
“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous -...”
– Thomas Mann
Earbud
By Bill Holm
Earbud—a tiny marble sheathed in foam to wear like an interior earring so you can enjoy private noises wherever you go, protected from any sudden silence. Only check your batteries, then copy a thousand secret songs and stories on the tiny pod you carry in your pocket. You are safe now from other noises made by other people, other machines, by chance, noises you have not chosen as...
Reinventing a Failed Prison System →
Imprisoning massive numbers of people—including many thousands for drug possession, parole violation, and other victimless crimes—turns out to be an expensive failure. People in prison gain few of the skills needed to live successfully on the outside. Instead, they get lessons in crime, isolation, violence, and powerlessness. In fact, imprisoning people at this scale actually increases crime. And...
“We have been conducting a great social experiment to test the hypothesis that...”
– James Gilligan
“I think Emerson wrote somewhere that a library is a kind of magic cavern which...”
– Jorge Luis Borges
“A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still...”
– Jerry Seinfeld
jessb:
Something I did before bed.
“You laugh at the absurdities of your own dream, and at the same time you feel...”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
