Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Son's plea to let his mother go. "By promoting longevity and technologically inhibiting death, we have created a new biological status held by an ever-growing part of the nation, a no-exit state nearly as remote from life as death"
Notion that there are more universes separate from ours is one of the most polarising concepts to have emerged from physics in decades. Is it the next phase in our understanding of reality, or nonsense? And why should we care?
In which the author manages a brothel in the nation's capital for a few weeks until fired for alcoholism. The money isn't much good. But the work is varied, the people interesting and the fund of filthy stories incomparable
Long, gripping story of William Alexander Morgan, US citizen and one of only two foreign nationals (the other was Che Guevara) to hold rank of comandante in Cuban revolutionary army. But who was he really?
Superb short essay in defence of the humanities as a form of knowledge, and as a valuable partner for science. "Culture appears to be at some level autonomous and in some sense irreducible, and this is what scientism cannot grasp"
Story of Hans-Jürgen Kuhl. Made fortune in leather hot pants. Bankrupt, turned to "art". His quest? A perfect $100 bill. "Warhol copied currency, and his prints are now priceless. Kuhl copied currency, got busted, and is now broke"
Just a matter of time. Painful, but no politically workable alternative. "The country has already started on the self-reinforcing downward spiral that leads to a crisis, and there is no one big enough to reverse the spiral"
Main topic: Losing faith in Obama. He overpromised, underdelivered. “It’s like a novelist being obsessed with Tolstoy or Proust, and then he ends up writing short stories that can barely get into some middlebrow magazine." Ouch
Goebbels knew he had to engage the public, at home and abroad. "It was an effort that led directly to the creation of that oxymoron in four-bar form: A Nazi-approved, state-sponsored hot jazz band known as Charlie and His Orchestra"
Essay. On growing up in an unhappy family in a blighted American town. "Fresno is amorphous, a conical blob that looks like a piece of bubble gum squashed against a sidewalk". Downtown died in the 1970s. Gangs took over the streets
Addiction assessed via philosophy. "For Socrates, ‘yielding to temptation’ is not being unwillingly overpowered, but is the experience of being a willing participant choosing what is at that moment wrongly thought to be best"
Enjoyable blogpost on how people interact with museum exhibits. Suggests we often look at paintings for just three seconds, and very rarely for more than 45. Fine art encourages us to walk in orderly fashion, but not so modern art
Pick him. No, him (Old video, but I couldn't resist)
Tetraplegic, paralysed and unable to speak for past 15 years, drinks coffee unassisted. Using a robot and the power of thought
"In the United States, everyone may enjoy freedom of speech so long as it doesn’t matter"
"Major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed"
“Aphorisms are rogue ideas”
"One of the central religious yearnings is for platitudes to be true"
“Brevity, like clarity, has its limitations. It is not good to feed horses on nothing but oats”
"Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life"
"If futurism is visionary, history is revisionary"
"There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can't remember what the second one is"
Barney Frank, on JP Morgan's $2bn trading loss
"JP Morgan Chase, entirely without any help from the government has lost, in this one set of transactions, five times the amount they claim financial regulation is costing them"
"It's amazing what you can achieve if you don't care who gets the credit"
"Nostalgia and freedom are linked concepts. The idea of freedom is usually a vision of a paradise lost"
"If we do not understand what an escalator is, we might get on it intending to go a few meters, only to find that once we are on, it is difficult to avoid going all the way to the end. Similarly, once reasoning has got started it is hard to tell where it will stop"
"When one calls a poet 'Mister', it means Mister So-and-so who has found his way into poetry and has no right to be there"
"Once one declares that democracy, for all its faults, is the highest form of contemporary political civilisation, one is talking religion, not politics"
"How can anyone govern a nation that has 246 different kinds of cheese?"
