Studying philosophy could ruin one’s ability to write poetry if the poet were an idiot savant, and poetry the result of some version of “inspiration” or “genius” susceptible to corruption by rationality. Or it could ruin poetry if poetry were essentially decorative, if it were just prettified language, and if philosophy by imposing dry reason shoved beauty out. But I doubt that either of those views, or any similar view, is true. I doubt that reason and beauty are mutually exclusive (and in support of my doubt would cite such conjunctions of reason and beauty as our counting “elegance” as one criterion for a mathematical proof). I myself believe that poetry arises from depth of knowledge or intensity of experience or acuity of attention, not from some isolated inner wellspring that would be poisoned by contact with the world. Consequently, I suspect that, all else being equal, the more a poet knows about anything (philosophy, nuclear physics, farming, geology, music, appliance repair, SpongeBob, medical imaging, differential calculus, whatever) the better for her or his poetry. I can’t think of any knowledge that would corrupt a person’s ability to write poetry; to put this in the opposite way, I doubt that the ability to write poetry is so fragile that it can be harmed by learning.
A restored liberal education would not be a liberation from “the ancestral” or from nature, but rather an education in the limits that culture and nature impose upon us — an education in living in ways that do not tempt us to Promethean forms of individual or generational self-aggrandizement. Particularly in an age in which we are becoming all too familiar with the consequences of living solely in and for the present, when too many among us are failing to live within our means — whether financially or environmentally — we would be well served to restore the proper understanding of liberty: not as liberation from constraint, but rather, as a capacity to govern ourselves. Such self-governance, as commended by ancient and religious traditions alike, makes possible a truer form of liberty — liberty from enslavement to our appetites, and from those appetites’ destructive power.
I’m now at a point where (as far as I know), all of my online activity is linked to my real name. I’ve taken a whole-person approach to my self-representation online. If you follow me on Twitter or read my posts here, you know a lot about me, my family, my sense of humor, what sports teams I like, what books and movies I like, what gadgets and services I use, who my friends are and who and what I don’t like very much. It’s not Tim @ Wired.com; it’s extremely close to Tim.At the same time, however, I’m keenly aware that whole-person approach is only possible because Twitter and blogs actively encourage, as a matter of culture, that kind and variety of self-expression. Both Twitter and blogs are and always have been a mélange of individuals and groups, real names and pseudonyms, institutions and inspired parodies, fans and authorities. It’s not a Robert Moses world of central planning and institutional voice; it’s the Jane Jacobs world of organic, prismatic communities, always reshaping and evolving itself.
Graphic designers, who favor an uncluttered aesthetic, dislike hyphens. They are also partly responsible for the disappearance of the apostrophe. This little squiggle first appeared in an English text in 1559. Its use has never been completely stable, and today confusion leads to the overcompensation that we see in those handwritten signs. The alternative is not to use apostrophes at all—an act of pragmatism easily mistaken for ignorance.Defenders of the apostrophe insist that it minimizes ambiguity, but there are few situations in which its omission can lead to real misunderstanding.
The apostrophe is mainly a device for the eye, not the ear. And while I plan to keep handling apostrophes in accordance with the principles I was shown as a child, I am confident that they will either disappear or be reduced to little baubles of orthographic bling.
The great mystery of memory is how it endures. The typical neural protein only lasts for a few weeks, the cortex in a constant state of reincarnation. How, then, do our memories persist? It’s as if our remembered past can outlast the brain itself.But wait: the mystery gets even more mysterious. A neuronal memory cannot simply be strong: it must also be specific. While each neuron has only a single nucleus, it has a teeming mass of dendritic branches. These twigs wander off in every direction, connecting to other neurons at dendritic synapses (imagine two trees whose branches touch in a dense forest). It is at these tiny crossings that our memories are made: not in the trunk of the neuronal tree, but in its sprawling canopy.
This means that every memory – represented as an altered connection between cells – cannot simply endure. It must endure in an incredibly precise way, so that the wiring diagram remains intact even as the mind gets remade, those proteins continually recycled.
Reader comments at the Washington Post website have shot up 142 percent since the paper switched to the Echo platform in March 2011, according to Jon DeNunzio, the Post’s interactivity editor. The community is growing so fast that Post staffers will start getting more personally involved, starting now.And not just the six people dedicated to comments full-time — the whole newsroom. “In recent weeks,” DeNunzio wrote in a blog post, “we have had more than 40 reporters post in comment streams, and that number will continue to grow.” Comments from post staffers are badged with “WP Staff” insignia, helping reinforce trust among readers.
A gentlemanly riposte to email is being launched by the literary world as Dave Eggers heads a group of authors who are turning instead to the old-fashioned letter.The critically acclaimed author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is joining in with a new initiative from American arts magazine the Rumpus, which is offering readers the opportunity to receive a letter a week from literary names including Eggers himself, Tao Lin, Stephen Elliott, Nick Flynn, Margaret Cho, Elissa Schappel, Emily Gould and Jonathan Ames. “Think of it as the letters you used to get from your creative friends, before this whole internet/email thing,” urged the Rumpus. “Most of the letters will include return addresses (at the author’s discretion) in case you want to write the author back.”
The Rumpus editor and author Elliott said the response to “Letters in the Mail” so far had been “overwhelming”, with almost 1,500 subscribers and growing. “I had the idea because I’m a letter writer and I miss writing and receiving letters,” he said. “I’ve always written lots of letters. Fifteen years ago when my then girlfriend was travelling Europe I would send her letters poste restante to whichever town she was supposed to arrive in next. The letters were often written by hand and as long as 20 pages. I had the idea on a Monday evening three weeks ago today and announced it the next morning. But I did not realise the response would be so overwhelming.”
A Clock for an Architect, by Daniel Weil
A doctor treating many of the students is confident that they are suffering not from poisoning, but from mass hysteria, also called mass psychogenic illness and other variants. Typically, symptoms—which can include Brownell’s Tourette’s-like movements, along with nausea, dizziness, cramping, and more—start with one or two victims and spread when others see or hear about them. Victims are often accused of faking it, but more often they are suffering real physical symptoms that are psychological in origin. The phenomenon has been observed for centuries, with the blame shifting to whatever specific anxieties are culturally pervasive at the time. But one theme has remained consistent: The victims are overwhelmingly female
Google’s new business tactics are creatively inelegant, and insupportable to geeks: many of the things friendly to the open internet that Google could have done, and was in the process of doing, have been abandoned for ever. Facebook, Amazon and to a lesser extent Twitter have changed in the same direction, appropriating whatever they can – apps, music, movies, books – to turn themselves into the only internet you’ll ever need. One day they’ll all be competing and incompatible ecosystems: you’ll have to choose which of the world wide webs to be in, pretty much exclusively, even though they will all be essentially indistinguishable.