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Meaningful Essays

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The joy of stress. Yes, it’s the modern plague – but anxiety also makes you feel creative, alert and alive. Is it perverse to thrive on it? ©Andrew Rae Do you know someone with insomnia who wakes up at 4am and ends up working and reading novels and cleaning closets and cycling through anxieties until the sky turns pink? I know her and sometimes I am her. I often hear friends and acquaintances talking about being up in the middle of the night, worrying, whirring, working. Stress is pretty universally understood to be a bad thing, as in the most recent contribution to the conversation, Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time, by Brigid Schulte. I am talking here about the speedy, high-strung form of anxiety, the mind racing through a million thoughts and worries and ambitions and fears. There is a particular vitality in anxiety, a sort of nervy power that one can’t say is fun, exactly, but is nonetheless slightly addictive.

One day, someone took me to a big house on the ocean. The Marriage Paradox - The Chronicle Review. By Clancy Martin Last Thanksgiving, at the turn-of-the-century house Amie and I just bought in old Kansas City: Amie, my third wife; Rebecca, my second; Alicia, my first; Amie’s mom, Pat; and my three daughters sat around the harvest table. My first wife, Alicia, who has a large, ambitious heart, had proposed this act of holiday lunacy. My second wife, Rebecca, had suggested we just have fun without her, but then came anyway. Amie had felt powerless to say no, and now it was taking place. Once the guests arrived, Amie hid in the kitchen until dinner.

Coming out of the kitchen with a roasted chicken on a platter, I listened nervously to the conversation: "I know the wood needs oil," Amie said, gesturing to the mahogany paneling in the dining room. My eldest daughter was musing aloud about what she would do if she accidentally killed someone. "No," her mother, my first wife, said. "I’d call my attorney! " Dinner and dessert went well.

Good luck always makes me anxious. In Praise of Failure. The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. Janus FilmsWinning isn’t everything. Antonius Block, right, played by Max von Sydow, challenges Death to a game of chess in the 1957 film “The Seventh Seal,” directed by Ingmar Bergman. If there was ever a time to think seriously about failure, it is now. We are firmly in an era of accelerated progress. We are witness to advancements in science, the arts, technology, medicine and nearly all forms of human achievement at a rate never seen before. We know more about the workings of the human brain and of distant galaxies than our ancestors could imagine.

Certainly the promise of continual human progress and improvement is alluring. Why should we care? So, allow me to make a case for the importance of failure. Failure is significant for several reasons. Failure allows us to see our existence in its naked condition. In this role, failure also possesses a distinct therapeutic function. We need to talk about TED | Benjamin Bratton. In our culture, talking about the future is sometimes a polite way of saying things about the present that would otherwise be rude or risky. But have you ever wondered why so little of the future promised in TED talks actually happens? So much potential and enthusiasm, and so little actual change. Are the ideas wrong? Or is the idea about what ideas can do all by themselves wrong? I write about entanglements of technology and culture, how technologies enable the making of certain worlds, and at the same time how culture structures how those technologies will evolve, this way or that.

It's where philosophy and design intersect. So the conceptualization of possibilities is something that I take very seriously. So my TED talk is not about my work or my new book – the usual spiel – but about TED itself, what it is and why it doesn't work. The first reason is over-simplification. At this point I kind of lost it. What is TED? So what is TED exactly? T and Technology T – E – D. E and economics. A.I. Has Grown Up and Left Home - Issue 8: Home. The history of Artificial Intelligence,” said my computer science professor on the first day of class, “is a history of failure.” This harsh judgment summed up 50 years of trying to get computers to think. Sure, they could crunch numbers a billion times faster in 2000 than they could in 1950, but computer science pioneer and genius Alan Turing had predicted in 1950 that machines would be thinking by 2000: Capable of human levels of creativity, problem solving, personality, and adaptive behavior.

Maybe they wouldn’t be conscious (that question is for the philosophers), but they would have personalities and motivations, like Robbie the Robot or HAL 9000. Not only did we miss the deadline, but we don’t even seem to be close. And this is a double failure, because it also means that we don’t understand what thinking really is. Literally translated, this reads as “there exists variable x and variable y such that x is a cat, y is a mat, and x is sitting on y.” (implies (equals ? (isa ? ALCOHOL, WITHNAIL AND GARY KING. BUT BEFORE WE GO ANY FURTHER LET HULK FIRST MAKE AN ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: IT'S REALLY HARD TO SIT HERE AND SPOUT OFF SOME BANAL PLATITUDES LIKE ABOVE.

IT MAKES IT SEEM LIKE HULK IS JUST PICKING THEM OFF FROM SLOGAN-IZED SELF-HELP SECTIONS OR SOMETHING. SO PLEASE UNDERSTAND THAT THESE PLATITUDES COME MORE FROM A PLACE OF... WELL... PAIN. ALCOHOLISM IS SOMETHING THAT'S A BIT TOO FAMILIAR. WE COULD TALK ABOUT IT ON A LOT OF LEVELS REALLY. THE FIRST IS CULTURAL, FOR IT IS NOT UNCOMMON WHEN GROWING UP IN THE EPICENTER OF BOSTON IRISH CATHOLICISM TO HAVE ALCOHOLISM JUST BE A REGULAR PART OF YOUR LIFE. COMING OUT OF THE INITIAL SCREENING HULK ACTUALLY HEARD A CRITIC SAY "Ugh, why did he want to go finish the pub crawl so bad?

"You know I used to be sober. Are We Puppets in a Wired World? by Sue Halpern. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov PublicAffairs, 413 pp., $28.99 Hacking the Future: Privacy, Identity and Anonymity on the Web by Cole Stryker Overlook, 255 pp., $25.95 From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet by John Naughton Quercus, 302 pp., $24.95 Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel Wiley, 302 pp., $28.00 Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 242 pp., $27.00 Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age by Alice E.

Yale University Press, 368 pp., $27.50 Privacy and Big Data: The Players, Regulators and Stakeholders by Terence Craig and Mary E. The Art of Looking: What 11 Experts Teach Us about Seeing Our Familiar City Block with New Eyes. By Maria Popova “Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.” “How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard wrote in her timelessly beautiful meditation on presence over productivity, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And nowhere do we fail at the art of presence most miserably and most tragically than in urban life — in the city, high on the cult of productivity, where we float past each other, past the buildings and trees and the little boy in the purple pants, past life itself, cut off from the breathing of the world by iPhone earbuds and solipsism.

Horowitz begins by pointing our attention to the incompleteness of our experience of what we conveniently call “reality”: Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. The book was her answer to the disconnect, an effort to “attend to that inattention.” The perceptions of infants are remarkable. David Foster Wallace on Writing, Death, and Redemption. By Maria Popova “You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness … has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.”

On May 21, 2005 David Foster Wallace took the podium at Kenyon College and delivered the now-legendary This Is Water, one of history’s greatest commencement addresses — his timeless meditation on the meaning of life and the grueling work required in order to stay awake to the world rather than enslaved by one’s own self-consuming intellect. It included this admonition: Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. Donating = Loving. Happy Birthday, Brain Pickings: 7 Things I Learned in 7 Years of Reading, Writing, and Living. By Maria Popova Reflections on how to keep the center solid as you continue to evolve. UPDATE: The fine folks of Holstee have turned these seven learnings into a gorgeous letterpress poster inspired by mid-century children’s book illustration.

On October 23, 2006, I sent a short email to a few friends at work — one of the four jobs I held while paying my way through college — with the subject line “brain pickings,” announcing my intention to start a weekly digest featuring five stimulating things to learn about each week, from a breakthrough in neuroscience to a timeless piece of poetry. “It should take no more than 4 minutes (hopefully much less) to read,” I promised. This was the inception of Brain Pickings. Illustration by Maurice Sendak from 'I'll Be You and You Be Me' by Ruth Krauss, 1954. Illustration from 'Inside the Rainbow: Russian Children's Literature 1920-35.' Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr.

How to Do What You Love. January 2006 To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love. " But it's not enough just to tell people that. The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. And it did not seem to be an accident. The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want.

Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. Jobs By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to. Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? What a recipe for alienation. The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. Bounds Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. Susan Sontag on Aphorisms and the Commodification of Wisdom.

George Saunders's Advice to Graduates. It’s long past graduation season, but we recently learned that George Saunders delivered the convocation speech at Syracuse University for the class of 2013, and George was kind enough to send it our way and allow us to reprint it here. The speech touches on some of the moments in his life and larger themes (in his life and work) that George spoke about in the profile we ran back in January — the need for kindness and all the things working against our actually achieving it, the risk in focusing too much on “success,” the trouble with swimming in a river full of monkey feces.

The entire speech, graduation season or not, is well worth reading, and is included below. Shyness cannot be ‘cured’ – Joe Moran. If I had to describe being shy, I’d say it was like coming late to a party when everyone else is about three glasses in. All human interaction, if it is to develop from small talk into meaningful conversation, draws on shared knowledge and tacit understandings. But if you’re shy, it feels like you just nipped out of the room when they handed out this information. W Compton Leith, a reclusive curator at the British Museum whose book Apologia Diffidentis (1908) is a pioneering anthropology of shy people, wrote that ‘they go through life like persons afflicted with a partial deafness; between them and the happier world there is as it were a crystalline wall which the pleasant low voices of confidence can never traverse’.

Shyness has no logic: it impinges randomly on certain areas of my life and not others. For Charles Darwin, this ‘odd state of mind’ was one of the great puzzles in his theory of evolution, for it appeared to offer no benefit to our species. 17 July 2013 Comments. Faith and Works at Apple by Edward Mendelson. Great institutions thrive on internal contradictions and irresolvable divisions. This has always been the case with governments and universities, and especially with religions. The Christian church survived for two thousand years partly because it never resolved its often bloody conflict between faith and works—between the parts of itself that value private belief and inner light, and the parts that value collective worship and public ritual.

This is equally true of the modern commercial quasi-religions, which, like traditional ones, embody whatever it is that a person takes most seriously. As T. The closed world of the iPhone and iPad is, however, only one branch of Apple’s empire, the branch that values centralized doctrine, visible works, and universal rituals.

But OS X also contains a little-known region of individual freedom and personal vision named AppleScript. AppleScript is protestant with a lower-case “p,” as iOS and much of OS X is catholic with a lower-case “c.” The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss - Liza Mundy. It is more than a little ironic that gay marriage has emerged as the era’s defining civil-rights struggle even as marriage itself seems more endangered every day. Americans are waiting longer to marry: according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median age of first marriage is 28 for men and 26 for women, up from 23 and 20, respectively, in 1950.

Rates of cohabitation have risen swiftly and sharply, and more people than ever are living single. Most Americans still marry at some point, but many of those marriages end in divorce. Though people may be waiting to marry, they are not necessarily waiting to have children. Against this backdrop, gay-marriage opponents have argued that allowing same-sex couples to wed will pretty much finish matrimony off. Liza Mundy and Hanna Rosin discuss what same-sex couples can teach straight couples about marriage and parenting. But what if the critics are correct, just not in the way they suppose? Not all is broken within modern marriage, of course. The One That Got Away: Why James Wood is Wrong About Underworld (And Why Anyone Should Care)

Los Angeles Review of Books - John Gray’s Godless Mysticism: On "The Silence Of Animals". Small Talk. Los Angeles Review of Books - John Gray’s Godless Mysticism: On "The Silence Of Animals" Blog » The Best Work in Literature. How to Live Without Irony. The Essayification of Everything.

Today. The Science of Loneliness: How Isolation Can Kill You. Graham Hill essay in the New York Times: Is minimalism really sustainable?
King of the Ghosts. A Darwinist Mob Goes After a Serious Philosopher. Why are we so obsessed with the pursuit of authenticity? The Strange Power of Les Mis, the Book. The New Essayists, or the Decline of a Form? The Quest for Permanent Novelty - The Chronicle Review. Misguided Nostalgia for Our Paleo Pasts - The Chronicle Review. In theory: the unread and the unreadable. Wes Anderson’s Worlds by Michael Chabon. Lunch with the FT: Robert B Silvers. Writers and readers on Twitter and Tumblr: We need more criticism, less Liking. A Critic's Manifesto: The Intersection of Expertise and Taste. Daniel Mendelsohn: Beyond Borders, Beyond Identities. Edge.org.

On Friendship - Edward Hoagland.