Email from one of my best students accompanying a final paper: “While I always want my final papers for classes to be the culmination of all my learning, in truth, they usually end up being the worst work of the semester. I always find out what I really wanted to say once the break starts as I learn what it feels like to be a thinker and not just a harried, hunted animal.”
Intentional fouls ruined the Spurs-Thunder game. The NBA should abolish them — I was going to write just this post, but it’s been done for me. For 95% of that game both teams played brilliantly; it was riveting to watch. And then the last “minute” of the game became 15 minutes of free throws, time outs, and substitutions. I actually turned it off before the end; I didn’t care any more who won. This is a really, really bad problem with an easy fix.
Supposedly serious news outlets still have a long way to go in subjecting publicity exercises like the World Happiness Report to appropriate journalistic scrutiny. It is easy to see why editors are tempted to assign some beat reporter without expertise in the social sciences to write up a fun little story about how much happier those enlightened Scandinavians are compared to benighted Americans. But if the media wants to live up to its self-appointed role as a gatekeeper of reliable information, it can’t continue to be complicit in the spread of such shoddy clickbait.
Over the last years, media outlets like the New York Times, universities like Oxford, and international institutions like the UN have devoted themselves to the fight against so-called “misinformation.” It is certainly true that our political discourse is awash with dangerous distortions and outright lies. But any institution which wishes to address that problem must start by looking into the mirror—and cease spreading “elite misinformation” like the World Happiness Report.
The dream of Pilate’s wife according to DLS. This is a pretty long one.
Paying for Apple Music or Adobe Acrobat is relatively harmless, but an economic model that is progressively turning more and more things into subscriptions — and renting is certainly a form of subscription — is creating conditions that are antithetical to human life freed for public life…. What was once the animal laborans is today homo subscribens, man the subscriber. The possibility of a 50-year mortgage would only confirm this reversion back to the life process, ensuring that people today are no freer than laborers bound by endless necessity.
I'm blessed to have many friends who write beautifully, and I especially love it when I hear their voices in the written words. This whole essay by Sara Hendren is like that:
You think Hyde’s telling you to give your gifts, like “giving back,” I say. But it’s weirder than that. Gifts precede you, mark your life. They invite you to imitate the pattern. This truth is hard for all of us to hear.
And this from Charles Marsh on “making anxiety great again”: “Receive anxiety as an opportunity…. Accept anxiety as an awakening…. Acknowledge anxiety’s capacity to instruct.”
Much wisdom in these two reflections.