Proustian Setences 2: In Time
I recently picked up Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, about two years after I finished the first book....
Nows & Laters
This week I’m sharing a Farnam Street post from 2021. Too Busy to Pay Attention. In one of Einstein’s dreams, people live forever. In this world, the...
Nostalgic Fury for an Impossible Past
Last month, El País published an interview with Judith Butler. Despite only briefly touching on topics ranging from the role of identity in politics,...
Turn This TV(Netflix) Off
Related to the last issue about music streaming, I wanted to highlight Will Tavlin's piece on Netflix, Casual Viewing, published in N+1. The article...
Listening to music
After over a decade of relying on streaming services, I recently made the switch to buying one album a month, and using YouTube to stream everything else I...
Building castles
Just one quote this week. Once again picked from Maria Popova’s book Figuring. What struck me about this is how the concerns expressed by Higginson 175 years...
Figuring: Hats, a scientist, classification
For this week, I've selected three quotes from chapters 4 and 5 of Maria Popova's book, Figuring. True to her signature style visible in every article on her...
Meaning, Memories & Tibet
Hannah Arendt on the Human Condition: Productivity Will Replace Meaning You begin the task; you complete the task. You begin the task; you complete the task....
In Time
Within a Budding Grove is the second part of the In Search of Lost Time series by Marcel Proust. Early in the book, Proust has paragraph where he grapples...
Places
Almost one year ago, I shared a quote about Andre Aciman's perspective on the difficulty of finding a sense of belonging, when the past, both real and...
Electrify / Pacify
In the current media landscape where advertising is the primary source of revenue, these companies are incentivized to hook us with a stream of never ending...
China, Japan & the Nocebo Effect
Whither China 5: No, China is not competing with India for Wall Street's attention. On net, China continues not to import capital - the issue highlighted by...
Health & Culture in Capitalist Realism
One year after coming across Mark Fisher, I finally read Capitalist Realism. It's one of those books where I felt compelled to to stop, underline, re-read...
Origins, Motherland, Look Up
Human origins are much more diverse than previously thought Stringer has called this new perspective “African multiregionalism”. East Africa is still...
Wicked Freedom
One of the interesting ideas explored early on in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow is the high degree of...
Marginalia: Optimization, Free Money & Half of Something
The Optimization Sinkhole So what happened? Stuff got cheaper, and cheaper stuff breaks more, and planned obsolescence (of technology or couches or clothes)...
Marginalia: The Essay, Myanmar, Petrol Pump
The Age of the Essay An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a...
Marginalia: Bounded virtues, living fuller and the beauty of chalk
Bounded virtues Our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so...
Elsewhere On-Screen
I too decided to sit on one of those benches in that deserted spot in the park, trying to take stock of my life, which wasn't going well, for I too felt...
Also happening: Sudan
The first Sudanese civil war started in 1955, one year before Sudan became independent and continued till l972. The second Sudanese civil war lasted from...
Bird by Bird
There are many metaphors for breaking an overwhelming project into small steps that feel more achievable. I'm partial to one I discovered recently - bird by...
Transforming Desire
Wanting by Luke Burgis is an introduction to Rene Girard's theory of mimesis. He covers many interesting topics including an alternative, messier version of...
Un-quantifying my reading
Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life. Swann's Way I rarely thought about the number of books I'd read until I discovered and started using...
Travelling at the speed of light
Can we live for hundreds of years? Travel at the speed of light? Terraform Mars or other planets? If you read science fiction or science, you will have...
30 Yoga Nidra Sessions
I learned about Yoga Nidra from Shane Parrish's interview with Dr Andrew Huberman. Yoga Nidra is one method to get non-sleep deep rest (NSDR). It is similar...
The dangers of ChatGPT according to ChatGPT
I asked ChatGPT to explain what it was. I am ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI. I am designed to understand and generate natural language...
Resistance 02
This is a follow up to Resistance. This first part of the quote I'd shared was from The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. He is a spiritual teacher. The pain...
Less Wrong 02 - Principle of Mediocrity
The Principle of Mediocrity is another idea that David Deutsch questions in The Beginning of Infinity. Again, I considered this idea to be true without...
Resistance
I will see you on the other side of these quotes. The pain that you create now is always some form of non-acceptance, some form of resistance to what is. One...
Fire Escapes
I listened to Krista Tippett's conversation with Ocean Vuong for the the fourth time this week. Ocean is an award-winning poet and novelist who teaches at...
Less Wrong - Spaceship Earth
Reading The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch has made me realize that I treat a lot of debatable and even potentially incorrect ideas as facts. I'm...
Asphalt Meadows / Gold Rush
Stumbled across a new Death Cab for Cutie album, Asphalt Meadows. It's been out for a few months. They've largely stuck to the combination of indie rock...
Proustian Sentences
I've been reading for 25 years but I've never paid much attention to the structure and length of sentences until I started reading In Search of Lost Time by...
Your depression is political
The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly...
Amazon sub-prime
I just ordered the first book of the Masnavi series by Rumi, translated by Jawid Mojaddedi. The delivery estimate is 5-14 days. I'm almost as excited about...