A Riot of Linkage
Forthcoming in Comment:
Now let’s just do links! (My collection of hey-this-could-maybe-go-in-the-newsletter links is getting huge, so I’m going to shrink it a bit. There’ll be images and music next time.)
In the new issue of The New Atlantis -- and please do consider subscribing to that excellent journal -- there’s an essay by me on Oliver Sacks and an essay by my friend Adam Roberts on cowardice and a conversation between Adam and me about his essay. That conversation began as a series of emails, and then at some point we asked ourselves, “How can human beings flourish if they don’t have access to these scintillating insights?”
If I ever want to return to the question of where the idea of the individual (the person, the human) comes from, I might want to cite Tom Holland and Michael Walzer.
This by Giles Fraser is interesting: On the mournfulness and melancholy of conservatism.
Maybe I should blog my way through Finnegans Wake.
Chindogu: “An invention that, while innovative and perhaps ingenious, is of little or no use in the real world, typically created for fun rather than for practical purposes. Also as a mass noun: the art or practice of developing such inventions.”
I like this from J.G.A. Pocock: “We need to know more about those who acted unjustly than that their actions were unjust.”
Damon Krukowski's tribute to his friend and teacher Charles Simic is just lovely.
The multivalent curse of aural pollution.
A fun Wikipedia page: Pole of inaccessibility.
An essay on the “play deficit” among children that might be relevant to my interests in anarchism — the skills required to play well with others are precisely the ones needed for the “emergent order” of an anarchist world.
An interesting reflection on the sounds we hear only on CDs.
