“What is so interesting about death? Is it the science? Is it like a ‘forbidden fruit’ that you want to know about, but are too afraid to touch? Is it because it is such a taboo subject in our society? Why is it such a taboo subject? Are we afraid of it or are we…
Slashdot Poll Yes. No. ! Worst Poll Ever. No, there’s been a worse one. No, there hasn’t. Yes, there has. No! Yes! No! —? [Slashdot Poll] (Slashdot) Nearly 70,000 people took the time to vote in this poll. This is beyond stupid — so far beyond stupid that it approaches significance. It’s impossible to deconstruct this…
“I had always rejected the suburban ideal of the carefully clipped and methodically poisoned greensward, with its connotations of Babbittry, mundane middle-class aesthetics, and casual ecological depredation. But somehow, in the verdured acreage behind my home–where lately I have taken to carving crop circles and leaving elaborate paisleys of wildflowers intact–I find myself. | I…
“Over the years I’ve met a diverse collection of writers who have never been published or earned any academic credentials, yet whose claim to the title of artist is genuine. These invisible writers are soldiers and bakers, convicts and salesmen, winos, hairdressers, firefighters, farmers and waitresses. Their only qualifications to literary authenticity are their writings…
“I am having trouble remembering the last time I was bored. You must realize that I’m alone with myself which is endlessly fascinating!” William Shatner —Quotable Quotes (WilliamShatner.com) Thanks for the link, Rosemary. And, while I have the attention of the Trek Classic fans, here’s James Lileks’s Best 404 Message Ever (It’s a reference to the…
“Build great, innovative software, sell it to the users at a reasonable price, make millions of dollars, benefit humanity, retire young. And if you mistreat your users, you’ll loose them, because you have a hundred competitors. The old Silicon Valley was built on this dream, and it worked for two decades.|But this dream is nearly…
“Emerson was himself a sort of group blogger in The Dial, a magazine he founded with Margaret Fuller in 1840. He designed it as a compendium of the ‘good fanatics,’ like Thoreau, Alcott and Channing in his Concord circle. ‘I would not have it too purely literary,’ he wrote to Fuller, venting a blogger’s ambition.…
“The hunter-gatherers whose genetic make-up we inherit devoted all their energies to getting food. Labour, danger, stress and companionship attended their provisioning. Having secured their meal through their shared hardship, it is hardly surprising if our ancestors consumed it in a common ceremony, with rejoicing, affection, and gifts to the gods. | That experience of…
“The anti-science movement in health promotion has arisen as part of the humanistic perspective within the discipline that positions itself in direct opposition to a science-based approach that it terms ‘positivism.’ According to this view, the application of the scientific method — that is, an approach to the world founded upon experimentation and hypothesis testing…
“You do not have to be very conservative to find him startling… How could anyone, for instance, seriously hold, as Rorty has, that “truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with,” or that “no area of culture, and no period of history, gets Reality more right than any other”? Is it really possible…
“It was Milton’s Satan and Dante’s Inferno that made them two of the most powerful Christian artists of all time. Because they understood evil and did not shrink from it, their depictions of goodness had power. In order to be redemptive, art has to convince us there is something real from which we need redeeming.…
“[A]cademics are throwing themselves into the study of emotion with the rapturous intensity of a love affair. In a sense, emotion has always been at the core of the humanities: Without the passions, there would not be much history, and even less literature. Indeed the very word ‘philosophy’ begins with philos (love).” Scott McLemee —Getting…
“The social structure of the Network Age is already evident, and we can potentially anticipate a great deal about the next few decades of our lives by examining the essence of the network, both in its literal and figurative manifestations. But understanding the order of the coming age of distributed culture requires us first to…
“But however it may be in the art gallery, in moral issues we often cannot agree to differ. Agreeing to differ with Genghis is in effect agreeing to tolerate fox-hunting, and my whole stance was against that. Moral issues are frequently ones where we want to coordinate, and where we are finding what to forbid…
“The Geezer loves film noir. These dark, taut, black and white films give the lie to the illusion that the forties and fifties were upbeat, positive decades. I like that.” The Geezer —The Geezer Speaks WeblogGeezerSpeaks.com) An amusing personal website… and by a Geezer, too.
Cranky avant-garde novelist Kurt Vonnegut on George W. Bush: “He’s in the same business I’m in. He’s telling stories. It turns out this is the simplest of all stories to tell. I mean, I want to hold attention when I write something. What he wants to be is interesting. And revenge is interesting. I’ve said…
“[T]he promise of a pill for every ill remains, as it always will, unfulfilled. Anyone who had read his Shakespeare would not have been surprised by this disappointment. When Macbeth asks a physician: Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the…
“The evidence that mother-only families contribute to crime is powerful. When two scholars studied data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, they found that, after holding income constant, young people in father-absent families were twice as likely to be in jail as were those in two-parent families. And their lives did not improve if…
“Throughout the 1990s, my basic philosophy was this: Work=Boring, but Work+Speed+Risk=Cool. Speed and risk transformed the experience into something so stimulating, so exciting, so intense, that we began to believe that those qualities defined ‘good work.’ Now, betrayed by the reality of economic uncertainty and global instability, we’re casting about for what really matters when…
JENNY JONES: Boy, we have a show for you today! Recently, the University of Virginia philosopher Richard Rorty made the stunning declaration that nobody has “the foggiest idea” what postmodernism means.[…]JENNY JONES: Tell us how you think postmodernism affected your career as a novelist. ALEX: I disavowed writing that contained real ideas or any real…