December 2011
16 posts
LITTLE.i.: David Foster Wallace on seeing Blue... →
littlei:
[…] seeing the movie when it first came out was a kind of revelation for me. It was such a big deal that ten years later I remember the date — 30 March 1986, a Wednesday night — and what the whole group of us MFA Program students did after we left the theater, which was to go to a coffeehouse and…
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself.
I am large,
I...”
– Whitman, Song of Myself
On Social Networking, The Internet
“It is not only our material environment that is transformed by our machinery. We take our technology into the deepest recesses of our souls. Our view of reality, our structures of meaning, our sense of identity—all are touched and transformed by the technologies which we have allowed to mediate between ourselves and our world. We create machines in our own image and they, in turn, recreate...
An Interview with Gideon Rosen →
“I can imagine that to the extent to which one is gripped by the problem of nihilism is pretty closely connected by the extent to which one dwells on one’s own death. There the recipe is: dwell less on death.”
CONVERSATION: Infinite Stupidity, Or the Retweet →
“A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And...
The School of Life →
A series of life-affirming talks by cultural mavericks.
“Except for order, moderation, and constancy, I believe that all things are...”
– Montaigne, The Essays
1
There is a gold light in certain old paintings That represents a diffusion of sunlight. It is like happiness, when we are happy. It comes from everywhere and nowhere at once, this light,
And the poor soldiers sprawled at the foot of the cross
Share in its charity equally with the cross.
2
Orpheus hesitated beside the black river. With so much to look forward to he looked back. We think he...
Touch of Evil: Cinematic Villainy from the Year's... →
“A video gallery of cinematic villainy, inspired by nefarious icons and featuring the best performers from the year in film.”
CONVERSATION : The Evolved Self-Management System →
“I’m now thinking about a larger issue still. If placebo medicine can induce people to release hidden healing resources, are there other ways in which the cultural environment can “give permission” to people to come out of their shells and to do things they wouldn’t have done in the past? Can cultural signals encourage people to reveal sides of their personality or faculties that they...
Art and the Limits of Neuroscience →
“Far from its being the case that we can apply neuroscience as an intellectual ready-made to understand art, it may be that art, by disclosing the ways in which human experience in general is something we enact together, in exchange, may provide new resources for shaping a more plausible, more empirically rigorous, account of our human nature.”
