The joy of stress. Yes, it’s the modern plague – but anxiety also makes you feel creative, alert and alive.
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. 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 need to talk about TED. 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? 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. 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... 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.
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.” 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. 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. How to Do What You Love. January 2006 To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. 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.
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. 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. 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. The One That Got Away: Why James Wood is Wrong About Underworld (And Why Anyone Should Care)
ShareThis 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. I recently found myself sitting across a table from a stranger, chewing awkwardly in silence. 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. Wednesday evening, early May, Claremont, California. A Darwinist Mob Goes After a Serious Philosopher. Why are we so obsessed with the pursuit of authenticity? Picture the tragic scenes in Crouch End, north London, early this year.
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.