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.” Three years later, on September 12, 2008, Wallace murdered his own terrible master — not by firearms, but by hanging himself. The reader walks away from real art heavier than she came to it. That was his whole thing. Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr
Escape Your Shape: How to Work Out Smarter, Not Harder - Edward J. Jackowski, Edward Jackowski The Individualized Fitness Prescription for Your Body Type Do you wonder why the latest fitness fad doesn't work for you? Have you lifted weights for months, dreaming of toned, defined muscles, with no results? Have you exercised regularly for months -- or even years -- without seeing any changes in your body? If you answered yes to any of these questions, chances are your exercise routine is incomplete and wrong for your body type. Everyone -- men and women alike -- has a natural shape: Hourglass® Spoon® Ruler® Cone® And there's a right and a wrong way to exercise for each. You don't need to buy expensive equipment or devote hours a day to this program.
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.
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.
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.
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... 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. 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. Our approach to thinking, from the early days of the computer era, focused on the question of how to represent the knowledge about which thoughts are thought, and the rules that operate on that knowledge. 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.” This lack of context was also the Achilles heel of the final attempted moonshot of symbolic artificial intelligence. (implies (writtenBy Ulysses-Book ? (isa ?
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? 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. 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. So I ask the question: does TED epitomize a situation where if a scientist's work (or an artist's or philosopher's or activist's or whoever) is told that their work is not worthy of support, because the public doesn't feel good listening to them? What is TED? T – E – D.
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. 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. Whenever it occurs, failure reveals just how close our existence is to its opposite. Failure is the sudden irruption of nothingness into the midst of existence. In this role, failure also possesses a distinct therapeutic function. Our capacity to fail is essential to what we are. We are designed to fail.
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) ShareThis The One That Got Away: Why James Wood is Wrong About Underworld (And Why Anyone Should Care) Essay by Garth Risk Hallberg Tags: don delillo, literary criticism, postmodern fiction I. I had always assumed that “the media” was a rhetorical hobbyhorse, like “the culture” or “postmodernism”: useful in a pub debate or an op-ed column, and otherwise too abstract to pin down. “Look! A matronly woman just descended from a double-decker bus was gesturing toward NBC’s souvenir store. Philip Roth long ago lamented the way American life outraces the novelist’s imagination, but lately one feels an entirely different order of mismatch is at hand. One reputable school of thought, with roots somewhere across the Atlantic, would have us disregard this unmapped area as quite beside the point. Another school of thought (notably American, notably male) anguishes at the difficulty of capturing The Great, Sprawling Wreck of It All. II. Or perhaps this last sentence is too like one of Wood’s. III.