Flexibility, the art of adapting, and the necessity of continuous creation: A Talk on Jazz
This music helps us to free ourselves from conformity, which is just a form of stagnation and snobbery, thus always guiding us toward the future.
Lore & Peace: What Tolstoy Can Teach Us About Bowe Bergdahl
Long before Bowe Bergdahl dreamed of military battle, Leo Tolstoy was writing about the seductive nature of war stories and their ability to lure young men to gruesome and early deaths.
The so-called great neighborhoods of America’s cities are food courts.
She explained how each of his tweets was actually a message to her. Where the man was talking about the movie he’d seen, he was talking about Hannah, and where his dog had done something funny, he also was talking about Hannah.
There’s a discipline to both religious faith and drug addiction: to maintain either of them you have to ritualize your own frustration. You have to continually hold out hope, see yourself disappointed, and offer your hope up again.
If stress makes us sick, all the more reason for us to avoid it; having medical evidence to back this up helps to bolster that argument. But surely we are not so neurotic as a society, so distrustful of our own subjective experience, that we need the supposedly objective ratification of an outside authority to make it seem valid?
Friedrich Nietzsche: Edu-hater
Why offer a set of reforms when your goal is to tear down the whole system of values upon which your current society is built?
On Roberto Arlt’s THE SEVEN MADMEN
Before you read it, you might see a quote from Roberto Bolaño on the back cover: Let’s say, modestly, that Arlt is Jesus Christ. You can ignore the blurb; you can have an original relationship with the book. Maybe this is what you should do.
Apple and the Aesthetics of Empty Aspiration
Apple has absorbed the imagery of political resistance and the consumerist promises of technological innovation into a single, aspirational aesthetic.
What Twitter Does to a Novel; What a Novel Does to Twitter
I started the account with hopes the daily dips into the book would help me figure out a way to teach such an odd text, but I really learned that the novel is great for Twitter for the same reason it’s not so great for college freshmen.