January 2010
24 posts
December 2009
15 posts
“The decision to live in a yurt has forced them to confront the same questions...”
– Broadband, Yes. Toilet, No. - NYTimes.com
“[The Hobbits] are not an allegory of the English, but they are perhaps a myth...”
– The Gods Return to Earth: C.S. Lewis’ Review of The Fellowship of the Ring - The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien - The One Ring - The Home of Tolkien Online
(thanks, SEH)
“O goodness infinite, goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce...”
– — Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 12
Did you know that Milton penned the first Romantic motif, the idea that looking and seeing are not necessarily the same actions that bring about the same ideas?
“At the very least, free will is a useful illusion, leading us to be more...”
– Free Will and Ethics : The Frontal Cortex
3 words: Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Doesn’t just apply to Quantum Mechanics.
(Also, reducing people down to their past events/circumstances/actions [chemical reactions of the past, if you will] and rendering them incapable of change is...
“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour...”
– — John Keats, “Bright Star”
Keats is glorious.
Showcase: Dubai’s Improbable Tale - Lens Blog -... →
Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest skyscraper, is still under construction, overlooking artificial islands shaped like palm trees. The tower is a useful symbol for considering Dubai. Is it the Tower of Babel? Is it Icarus, flying too close to the sun? It’s unclear whether this crisis will simply be a pause in Dubai’s ascent or whether Dubai’s story will itself become a cautionary tale of mythical...
crushes:
boy,
Lately, I’ve seen you looking kind of sad and I want to know what’s wrong. Please be happy again because I love your gorgeous smile. I think I have what it takes to make you smile.
:)
— girl
This blog makes me smile. So cute!
“Biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their...”
– Some Biologists Find an Urge in Human Nature to Help - NYTimes.com
What say you now, ye brethren who believe that man is innately bad or that mankind is doomed? Once again, cynicism is so 2008.
Winter Drinks Issue - In Current Cocktails, Rum Is... →
“Everybody still enjoyed rum,” said Audrey Saunders, who in 2005 founded the Pegu Club, an ambitious gin palace where roughly half the noteworthy young bartenders in Manhattan once worked. “But people kind of passed it over for things that were more challenging and difficult to work with.” Now that bartenders have tested their mettle by mixing drinks with the bitterest amaro, however, rum is...
Platon: Photographs of World Leaders : The New... →
Artists have been making portraits of the mighty for centuries—from Velázquez’s Philip IV to Lucian Freud’s Elizabeth II—and the act of portrait-making can leave the royal or the tyrant, the President or the diplomat with a sudden feeling of disequilibrium, of a transfer of power. Avedon knew that Kissinger was trying to manipulate him, but what, exactly, did he want? “Did Kissinger want to look...
Why Keats is amazing
from his letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817:
Oh, I wish I was as certain of the end of all your troubles as that of your momentary start about the authenticity of the imagination. I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination. What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, whether it existed before or not.
from his...