image from pxfuel, cc0 When I grow up, I want to learn to write like this: the first chapter of Ali Smith’s novel Spring I‘ve been exchanging notes with my friend Siyavash Abdolrahimi about what makes writing good writing, after lamenting the execrable quality of most contemporary English-language writing (and notably of most journalism). I’ve written…
This is the first of a series of articles — opinionated, fanciful writings, speculations — about The World After Collapse. It draws on what I’ve learned about pre-civilization humans and other large-brained creatures, and speculates on how, after civilization’s fall is complete — probably centuries from now — the remnants of the human species might…
Marshall McLuhan famously said “Knowledge creates ignorance.” He wasn’t being flip. He was asserting that the more we know, the more we realize we don’t know. Or, looked at another way, the more we believe we know, the less we are aware of, and open to, knowledge that refutes that belief. In a recent article, Indrajit Samarajiva…
At Stade de France, 85,000 fans sing Mylène Farmer’s famous (outside the anglophone world) protest song about youth alienation, Désenchantée (disenchanted: “nothing makes sense anymore, nothing works properly, it’s total chaos”) tous ensemble — all together. At 06:30 of the video, she just turns her mic around and lets the crowd take it. The video…
I have a love-hate relationship with AI. Please see my explanation of that at the end of this article. I‘ve been writing music for years, most of it pretty awful. Although I fancy myself a poet, I find the writing of rhyming poetry to be tedious, and since I’m basically lazy, I haven’t written much…
This is #48 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk and hike in my local community. screencaps of videos of uncontrolled intersections in Vietnam and Ethiopia (you have to watch the videos to get an idea of how this self-choreographed dance actually…
We make sense of this world by inventing stories about what our senses tell us is happening. If enough people ‘agree’ on the veracity of these stories, they then become myths (= “popular” stories), and hence very hard not to believe. These stories, however, have no value in affecting what we actually do, as I’ve…
I have in past argued that our beliefs and worldviews are merely after-the-fact rationalizations of what we want to believe happened, and of what we want to believe were the reasons for these events happening. I keep insisting that our behaviours — what we actually say and do — are conditioned solely by the behaviours…
About five years ago I switched from NYT crosswords to The New Yorker’s. They seem to have attracted the best of the NYT’s puzzlers, notably Liz Gorski, and they have a much better gender and ethnic minority balance than the NYT ever managed. They also have much more fanciful and imaginative clues than the rigid…
photo from DeviantArt by starwink The introduction to Rhyd Wildermuth’s latest article pretty much sums up where we seem to be, now, so I’ll just let his words lead off this month’s Links of the Month: This is Normal (now) We’ll just get used to this, like we get used to higher prices in grocery…
