Have you ever noticed how often robots themselves are white? Or how often AI researchers and venture capitalists are White males? Their power is slipping away. They need a new planet, fresh genius, a way to be invulnerable.And we are all their guinea pigs.
Sports writing can be brilliant; it is one of the most exciting forms, full of suspense and rich with lore. Yet most sports reporting winds up formulaic and pedestrian.
It is in marveling at transcendent wonders, experiences that lift us out of time and space, that our bodies relax into both physical and spiritual health.
Aristotle called touch the most universal of the senses, wrapping around both mind and body. All the other senses work by some form of touch, he pointed out, striking our receptor cells with light, sound, flavor, or fragrance.
Symmetry is “the quality of being made up of exactly similar parts”—and when is that realistic?
All too often, a woman in white is a ghost. Or she is Ophelia, gone mad and trailing her dreams behind her. White is fragile in so many ways.
It is enough, Montaigne insisted, to simply live. If someone is upset about wasting time, muttering, “I have done nothing today!” he scoffs, “What, have you not lived? That is not only your fundamental occupation, but your most illustrious one.”
Once, in the middle of the night, six Parisian teenagers managed to get into the Panthéon in Paris. They went on to explore the catacombs, set up an underground movie theater and art exhibits, and repair Paris's neglected treasures.
The Cloud has transformed our relationship to physical information. We no longer have occasion to be brave, to at least pretend nonchalance. We have no reason to make a fresh start.
This show is so White, so retro-male, so ripe for scathing dismissal by the snooty elite. There is even a class overlay.
Notes jotted in a margin carry on a conversation with future readers. Not with the authors themselves, mind, and often it is lucky for them that they remain oblivious.
Many of us are vulnerable to suggestion, our memories blurry and uncertain. But intense emotion can also etch an experience in memory with every detail intact. Overly involved therapists can push a certain narrative until their client believes it verbatim. But the mind can also shelter us from pain and release it back to us little by little, as we can handle it.