The memories I treasure tend to follow some sort of risk or effort; they feel earned. Like making a painting or a sweater or a wooden box, they rewarded and commemorated an investment of time, patience, sweat, courage, and attention.
Marketers are throwing themselves at us. Repeatedly. And because we drop newspaper subscriptions and fast-forward through commercials and prefer streaming to broadcast and block ads on our computers, marketing has become a flat-out wrestling match.
Very few people I knew growing up had braces, but most of us just gnawed the trees as we were designed by nature to do.
Decades ago, Hannah Arendt wrote of a “common world” that could only exist if “differences of position and the resulting variety of perspectives notwithstanding, everybody is always concerned with the same object.” Now the common world has exploded.
Wright has figured out how to build small, affordable homes he could be proud of. He calls them Usonian, because they capture the democratic spirit of the United States. They are simple—no paint, stucco, or wallpaper; no basement, attic, or garage.
The word “abstract” means to remove something; to condense; to lack a concrete, physical existence. Abstraction is supremely useful—but it should not wind up more highly valued than the world from which it abstracts.
They pressed the plunger and put the pink death fluid in the clearly defined black vein of Rascal’s back right leg. He died with his head in my palm. He was my kitty boy.
I never thought much about the pragmatic value of the humanities either, to be honest. I just knew it was my world. When, with alacrity, I dropped out of a business certificate and picked up a philosophy major, it felt like a guilty hobby. An indulgence.
Maybe this is better. The human element is being removed. We no longer need a partner or best friend to say, “You look stressed, why not take a break?” Exes have less room to demonize one another, because their communications have been muted and massaged. Nobody can accuse the AI of being on the other person’s side, which has got to be the worst part of doing couples counseling. But I sense a flattening, as we lose some of the messiest, most instructive interactions and automate wisdom, negotiation, health, self-expression.
“Shakespeare in Love” worked well enough for my mood this week. The film is twenty-five years old now and holds up. More importantly, the writing by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard (for which they won an Oscar) is crisp, flawlessly-paced, and does not take itself too seriously, even in its tendency to be self-referential.