Mountain Ash trees, Alfred Nichols Gardens, Victoria, Australia
I just finished reading Logicomix, and while I enjoyed it very much, I’m not sure I learned anything. It’s the kind of book that makes you feel smarter without necessarily making you any smarter.
Article XXXI: Whether I stole Laurie’s apple juice during nap time?Objection I: It would seem that I stole Laurie’s apple juice during nap time. For it was said: “Thomas, go sit in the corner. And say you’re sorry to Laurie for drinking her juice” (Miss Ellen).
Objection II: Further, once in the corner, I wedgied Billy and made him eat glue.
On the contrary, it is written: “Share everything” (that poster on the wall, right above the carpet where Billy puked up the glue).
I answer that we all have to share like it says on the poster. Firstly, because Holy Writ says so: “God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7). Also, everyone has to share because sometimes they have lots of something (juice, for example) that they never even drink and that someone else (me, for example) wants. When I play with my blocks, Miss Ellen makes me share with that Greek Orthodox kid, even though they’re my blocks and he picks his nose and smells and is dumb. Hence, I should get to have juice when I’m thirsty. For the best part about school is the juice (except on Fridays when we get chocolate milk).
Reply to Objection I: If I have to share my blocks with a smelly nose-picker, then Laurie has to share her juice. I was only sharing her juice, just like the poster says. For the poster says to share everything, and “everything” includes juice. Hence, Miss Ellen shouldn’t have made me sit in the corner.
Reply to Objection II: He started it.
endings and renewals
So I promised the other day that I would explain my resumption of this commonplace book. I am ending my Text Patterns blog and will be posting here instead. I’ve always been better at the collecting of cool quotes and images than at blogging; so in coming back here I’m coming back to my online comfort zone. And I suspect that the handful of people who read what I write will get more out of this than they ever got from my incoherent musings at Text Patterns.
However: by quitting Text Patterns I am giving up some income. Not a lot, but enough to make me a little uncomfortable. So if you’d like to click, a few thousand times, on those ads at the right of the screen, I would be much obliged to you.
More cool stuff to come! (At least, I think it’s going to be cool.)
The land of the dawn-lit mountains, Arunachal Pradesh, is a disputed territory lying between two super-powers with nuclear weapons, India and China. If you live in India, Google Maps shows you Arunachal Pradesh in India; if you live in China, Google Maps shows you Arunachal Pradesh definitely in China. The world’s leading search engine isn’t just a search engine but a camouflaged political persuader.
A lot of what Gabler describes as Big Ideas turn out to have been actively wrong or at least misleading in the wrong hands, and one of the reasons is not the insights and findings of their initial creators but the seductive refashionings of later popularizers. The process that made Big Ideas into two or three-sentence applause lines that can be rattled off in succession in an op-ed in the New York Times is often what allowed them to turn into ideology and dogma.If the informationally overloaded present is resistant to Big Ideas, maybe that’s not because we’re too busy watching YouTube videos of Jennifer Aniston playing with a cat. Maybe it’s because we’re acquiring an immune system resistance to the salesmanship of middlebrow middlemen trying to extract saleable Big Ideas from the raw material of knowledge production.
In short, this book is among the worst entries in what I sometimes call “the leadershit” (say “leadership literature” five times fast). Take a remarkable and holy person like Mother. Boil down her thought into eight simple principles. Remove any mention of Jesus (I found one reference in this book), even though her care for the poor was incoherent without Jesus. Tell a few personal anecdotes. Avoid any tangible or nuanced account of how she or her organization actually think about money or hiring or organizational scale or anything other than pithy, inspirational, “Whatever I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten” sorts of vignettes. Give the book a catchy marketing title, a glossy cover, blurbs from other leadershit authors, and large enough print and short enough chapters that a superficial reader can consume it on a short commuter flight, and you’re done.The tragedy, of course, is that no reader will learn more about Mother than she knew before. For her prejudice will be confirmed that religion is only there for a sort of inspirational pick-me-up. The specific differences that Jesus or Buddha or Hinduism or capitalism or Yoga makes don’t matter here any more than they do for your second cup of coffee in the morning… .
For Christian theology, a saint is a mystery. Saints reflect the living God, the most profound mystery of all, whom no human can fathom. They reflect the depths of God’s descent among us in Jesus and the glory of his ascension back to his Father. They can’t be simply explained, replicated, encapsulated, or cloned. We can only give thanks for them and ask God to give us more of them. To devote 114 pages to instilling their essence is little short of insulting.
Philip Rieff, first in (maybe) a series of unpopular TED talks.
Also, this one will last seven hours, with no breaks and no opportunity for questions.
But the emerging prevalence—anecdotally, at least—of the gadget death wish suggests an intriguing possibility: where electronic gizmos are concerned, product obsolescence is becoming a demand-side phenomenon.Consider that most ubiquitous gadget, the mobile phone. According to J.D. Power and Associates, the typical American gets a new one every 18 months. This is not because of some time bomb in the design that renders a phone useless over that span. ReCellular, a big recycler and reseller of mobiles, collects millions of unwanted phones every year. Joe McKeown, the company’s vice president of marketing and communications, told me that many are several years old—not because they’ve been in use all that time, but because, after being replaced, they were dumped in desk drawers and forgotten. But despite this, only 18 percent of the phones the company collects are “beyond economic repair,” and thus broken down to recyclable parts. The rest either work fine or can easily be refurbished and put right back into the marketplace. The problem, if that’s the right word for it, is that new devices perform more functions, faster—and people, as a result, want them.
This demand-side obsolescence does not extend to all products, of course. I have no death wish, for example, for the three-year-old dishwasher now in terminal condition in my kitchen. But the light-speed innovations in consumer electronics have turned many of us into serial replacers. A dealer in vintage home-entertainment equipment recently convinced me that it used to be possible to buy a top-notch stereo system that really would function admirably for decades. Imagine, by contrast, that tomorrow some company unveiled a cell phone guaranteed to last for 20 years. Who would genuinely want it? It’s not our devices that wear thin, it’s our patience with them.
It’s true that the boundaries of the collective create problems for the individual – problems that should be confronted and wrestled with. But this a human problem, and the implication that black people are in exclusive or chronic possession of that problem strikes me as wrong-headed. On the contrary, there is a strong argument that African-Americans are one of the most inclusive ethnic groups in the country. Our leadership has been historically cosmopolitan, featuring deep roots in the Caribbean (Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey) and in the white community (Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Walter White.) I can’t think of another ethnic group with a longer history of practicing both Christianity and Islam. You may not see more diverse gathering of phenotypes grouped under one race, then you will see at a black family reunion. This is not because black people are virtuous, it’s because white racism in this country was pervasive and strict. And faced with that stricture black people did what humans tend to do – they invented themselves. Again.