sociopathy
Susan Orlean has written a beautiful, melancholy post about the challenges of dealing with her mother’s physical and mental decline — and having to deal with it from hundreds of miles away. She…
adventurousness and its enemies, part 3
adventurousness and its enemies, part 3
Nick Carr’s post on Craig Mod’s brief for interactive storytelling is more incisive and cogent than mine. Not that that’s any great achievement in itself … but just read Nick’s post.
Professor Roy’s research specializations include Robert Burns, reader response theory, and defense against the dark arts.
Gradually the humanities are being invaded and disciplined by explanations of that kind, which purport to sweep away the mess of hermeneutics and replace it with clean, meaningful science. And the explanations really are as absurd as the two examples I have given — absurd precisely because they are looking to explain something that they have not defined. Until you define what music is, and how it differs from pitched sound, for example, you will not know what question you are asking, when you inquire into its origins. Until you recognize that the human sense of beauty is a completely different thing from the peahen’s sexual attraction, you won’t know what, if anything, is proved by the sparse similarities.Worse, the whole ‘adaptation’ approach to human phenomena is topsy-turvy. It involves a mechanical application, case by case, of the theory of natural selection, as supplemented by modern genetics. It tells us that, if a trait is widespread across our species, then it has been ‘selected for.’ But this means only that the trait is not maladaptive, that it is not something that would disappear under evolutionary pressure. And that is a trivial observation. Everything that exists could be said to be not dysfunctional. That tells us nothing about how the thing in question came to exist. Nor does it tell us anything about its meaning or significance for us.
The landscape has changed in enormous ways, most good, some not so good. Anybody who tells you that PEPFAR and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria are just fraught with problems and not worth their salt is clearly not involved in humble service. You go from 2002, when there was not a single international financing agency working to treat AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, which were taking six million lives a year, no work even to prevent these diseases or develop new diagnostics—you go from that bleak picture to having these fantastic bilateral or multilateral mechanisms focused on integrating prevention and care…. That has changed the landscape irrevocably. Ever since, it has been impossible for anyone to say, ‘Well, we’ve never had the experience of treating a chronic, lifelong medical condition among the poor, so it can’t be done.’ Now that these countries and agencies have had that experience, they can’t go back. It’s irrevocable.
The brief history of the internet is dominated by wishful thinking about turning internet traffic into revenue; companies that have managed to do it are vastly outnumbered by those who have learned the cruel new information era twist on ‘if you build it, they will come.’ The modern form of that now runs: ‘if you build it, they may well come, but only as long as it’s free.’ That is why, as Warren Buffett observed, the internet is probably a ‘net negative for capitalists.
I admire the magnificent plotting of Annie’s adventures. They are just as adventure strips should be–fast moving, slightly macabre (witness Mr. Am), occasionally humorous, and above all, they show a great deal of the viciousness of human nature. I am very fond of the gossip-in-the-street scenes you frequently use. Contrary to comic-strip tradition, the people are not pleasantly benign, but gossiping, sadistic, and stupid, which is just as it really is.
Kawah Ijen by night - The Big Picture - Boston.comA sulfur miner stands inside the crater of the Kawah Ijen volcano at night, holding a torch, looking towards a flow of liquid sulfur which has caught fire and burns with an eerie blue flame. (© Olivier Grunewald)
How do you help your children balance when the whole education system is pushing, pushing, pushing, and you want your kids to be successful?
Answer: You don’t accept a rigid, simplistic, social-climbing model of what counts as “success.”
