Defending a liberal arts education is equivalent to celebrating līlā/ play. Enabling and encouraging līlā is more than just desirable, it is necessary. My thesis is thus līlā/ play is the intellectual disposition that enables epistemic humility, which in turn is the central goal of a liberal arts education.
Like comic books and animation, board games became more artful, more expensive, more interesting to adults. For millennia, games had been folk culture, passed down for generations, the play communal. Now they are a craft, sometimes even an art, designed and authored, often with a deliberately niche appeal.
In the process of traveling with my youngest daughter to five races, I learned that my crude assumptions about the nature of Formula 1 drivers were wrong and that my daughter was an F1 authority to be reckoned with.
The man asking if I am a Christian is a Puerto Rican chef living in Dallas, someone I met in the strange expanse of the internet, specifically within a Chinese gaming platform called Age of Origins.
At the slot machine that night, I also had no control. I even lost my money. I did not feel so anxious. But at the trade show, I kept worrying more, trying harder, all the effort to feel in control, but did the odds change a lot? Maybe not.
One foot on a tangle of tree root, I looked down at my beloved Merrell hiking boots and noticed big, frayed holes on both sides. Time to spring for a new pair. To be loyal, I went—in the flesh—to REI, but they had only waterproof hiking boots. “Tariffs,” muttered…
“Those poor brutish Epicureans that have nothing but the meer husks of fleshly pleasure to feed themselves with.” ~John Smith, 1660
How did we get Epicurus so wrong? Foodie websites, luxury magazines, gourmet shops…he would be aghast. His goal was to remove pain and fear, not pile up…
We have given ourselves two more years, ample time to continue spreading out in this friendly, comfy, century-old house. Two more years, my mother’s daughter whispers, to keep weeding, scrubbing, repainting the wrought-iron fence…. By the time we leave, we will be thoroughly ready for a smaller, more practical,…
Anger has never been my go-to. Now and then I fume, even simmer a while. But I recoil from rage; for me, it is far easier to find excuses or let slide.
Until now.
The Trump Administration has undone six decades of complacent serenity. No doubt its…
One day, our professor asked the class whether we still believed a pure, just, and equal society was possible. I said “no” loudly without thinking, and I meant it. It is a dangerous place to go for me.