As will be seen in the above article, my friend Clive Bell is a fathead and a voluptuary. This a very comfortable sort of person to be, and very friendly and easy and pleasant to talk to. Bell is a brainy man out of training. So much the better for his friends; for men in training are irritable, dangerous, and apt to hit harder than they know. No fear of that from Clive. The layer of fat on his brain makes him incapable of following up his own meaning; but it makes him good company.A man out of condition muscularly not only dislikes rowing or boxing, but cannot conceive anyone liking them. A man out of condition mentally not only dislikes hard thinking, but cannot conceive anyone enjoying it. To Falstaff, Carpentier is an object of pity. To Clive, Einstein is the most miserable of mortals. So am I.
He is mistaken as to both of us. Intellect is a passion; and its activity and satisfaction, which can be maintained from seven years old to 107 if you can manage to live so long, are keenly pleasurable if the brain is strong enough for the exercise. Descartes must have got far more pleasure out of life than Casanova.
As for Spotify, since it is not considered radio, either of this world or any other, they have a different additional royalty to pay. Like any non-broadcast use of recordings, they require a license from the rightsholder. They negotiate this individually with each record label, at terms not made public. I’m happy to make ours public, however: It is the going “indie” rate of .005 cents per play. (Actually, when I do the math, that rate seems to truly pay out at .004611 cents– I hope someone got a bonus for saving the company four ten-thousandths of a cent on each stream!) We didn’t negotiate this, exactly; for a band-owned label like ours, it’s take it or leave it. We took it, which means for 5,960 plays of “Tugboat”, Spotify theoretically owes our record label $29.80.I say theoretically, because in practice Spotify’s .004611 cent rate turns out to have a lot of small, invisible print attached to it. It seems this rate is adjusted for each stream, according to an algorithm (not shared by Spotify, at least not with us) that factors in variables such as frequency of play, the outlet that channeled the play to Spotify, the type of subscription held by the user, and so on. What’s more, try as I might through the documents available to us, I cannot get the number of plays Spotify reports to our record label to equal the number of plays reported by the BMI. Bottom line: The payments actually received by our label from Spotify for streams of “Tugboat” in that same quarter, as best I can figure: $9.18.
I think the premise from which I start is this idea that … relentless positivity and optimism is exactly the same thing as happiness; that the only way to achieve anything worthy of the name of happiness is to try to make all our thoughts and feelings as positive as possible, to set incredibly ambitious goals, to visualize success, which you get in a million different self-help books. Whereas, actually, there’s a lot of research now to suggest that many of these techniques are counterproductive, that saying positive affirmations to yourself in the mirror can make you feel worse and that visualizing the future can make you less likely to achieve it. And so what I wanted to do in this book was to explore what I ended up calling ‘the negative path to happiness,’ which involves instead turning toward uncertainty and insecurity, even pessimism, to try to find a different way that might be more durable and successful.
One item from Retronaut’s collection of “Maps Before Maps” (via Robin)
Starbucks has probably improved your coffee-drinking life even if you never step foot inside a Starbucks shop. Because, again, what chains do is set a floor for standards beneath which it is not wise to fall. Starbucks may not be the best coffee in the world but if you’re competing with Seattle’s largest you better offer something better than they can provide.The reason Starbucks and other chains have made less impact in, say, Italy or the Netherlands is that these countries were amply-stocked with places you could purchase good coffee before Starbucks et al arrived. Britain? Well, not so much.
Those wealthy consumers who deplore Starbucks and want to stick to their single-tree sourced, Ethiopian high-roast or other comparably trendy, exotic and fussy brews are entitled to their prejudices. But they might at least recall that Starbucks created the market in which they can parade their snobberies. They owe something to Seattle too.
“The common good” also serves as a valuable reference point for personal choices. Most of my fellow American Christians’ choices about career, consumption, geography, and more are articulated in starkly individualist terms…. In my observation American churches are full of the functional individualists Christian Smith describes. Even if the actual motives for our choices may be more complex, we lack a vocabulary for evaluating our personal lives in light of something larger. I would love to see more of my fellow Christians making explicitly “common-good decisions.”So while it’s certainly not a panacea, I think that if people all along the political spectrum recovered the thicker meaning of “the common good,” and were held accountable to that thicker meaning, that would be a real contribution to our public life.
So shame, which rightly belongs to the rebellious human will, gets deflected to the genitals, and every fig leaf so strategically placed reinforces the deflection. Our sexual organs become pudenda, literally “the shameful parts.” It’s curious that this term is more often used to describe women’s anatomy. Consider, for instance, Masaccio’s great Expulsion from the Garden of Eden: Adam bends forward in grief, his hands covering his eyes—but the eyes of the two, once opened, can’t truly be closed—and his penis clearly visible. This is intentional: we see him from the right, with his left foot forward. Had Masaccio placed the right foot forward, our view would have been blocked. But we see Eve’s wailing face clearly, because her right hand covers her breasts, her left her vulva, which is partly obscured anyway by her right leg. She and Adam are out of step. Adam’s posture suggests that he does not want to see, Eve’s that she does not want to be seen, though no one could be looking, as the angel with the flaming sword hovers behind them. Everything in their portrayal suggests that they feel two different shames. Adam’s is closer to the Biblical account, Eve’s to the Augustinian shifting of responsibility to the genitals, the pudenda. If Adam’s shame comports with the Genesis narrative, Masaccio’s overall depiction seems not to, since we are told that God clothed them in “skin coats” before he dismissed them from their Garden. But Masaccio restores them to the moment they discovered their nakedness, thus telescoping the story, emphasizing the connection between exposure and expulsion.
Memrise is built to discourage cramming. It’s easy to spend five minutes learning vocabulary with the app, but hard to spend 50. That is by design. One of the best-demonstrated principles of memory – proven both in the controlled setting of the laboratory and in studies conducted in the wilds of the classroom – is the value of what’s known as “spaced repetition”. Cognitive scientists have known for more than a century that the best way to secure memories for the long term is to impart them in repeated sessions, distributed across time, with other material interleaved in between. If you want to make information stick, it’s best to learn it, go away from it for a while, come back to it later, leave it behind again, and once again return to it – to engage with it deeply across time. Our memories naturally degrade, but each time you return to a memory, you reactivate its neural network and help to lock it in. The effect on retention of learning in this manner is staggering. One study found that students studying foreign language vocabulary can get just as good long-term retention from having learning sessions spaced out every two months as from having twice as many learning sessions spaced every two weeks. To put that another way: you can learn the same material in half the total time if you don’t try to cram.