thakate:

apoplecticskeptic:

It’s Sunday, so this is kinda like church, right? Here’s my sermon for the morning.

[previously]

My husband rocks. 

Weekend Reading

This week's Weekend Reading contains some absolute gems- so without further ado, here are the articles worthy of your attention this weekend:

• In Defence of Obscure Words is an argument by Will Self for using words that often need to be accompanied by a dictionary, warning against the dangers of intellectual laziness. I couldn't agree more.


• Sherry Turkle begs us to put the social media revolution in perspective. Giving her own mother as an example, Turkle worries that "like a lot of older people today, she fritters away her social time with whoever she runs into, instead of sustaining continued conversations with the people she cares about the most."


• David Eagleman is a new breed of man: a rock star neuroscientist. In The Brain: a User's Guide, Eagleman puts the accomplishments of nearly everyone on the planet to shame with such feats as attaching an electrical grid to a blind man's tongue in order to allow him to "see" as he climbs Mount Everest. Neuroscience rocks.


• Speaking of neuroscience: I've long said that if I could travel to any place in time, I would choose Renaissance-era Florence for its unparalleled concentration of genius. Eric Kandel has changed my mind, explaining that 1900 Vienna contributed as much to human knowledge, but did so through a lens of reason. He also makes an eloquent case for an intersection of neuroscience and the arts in The Age of Insight.


• Over on Brain Pickings, a summary of Clay Johnson's fantastic book The Information Diet: a Case for Conscious Consumption, in which Johnson explains why "arguing that blaming the abundance of information itself is as absurd as blaming the abundance of food for obesity."


• I've saved my favorite for last: if you're half the fan of Russian literature that I am, this comparison of Dolstoyevsky and Tolstoy by eight preeminent modern scholars will thrill and delight you.

On Suspense

Every morning with breakfast, I sit down to watch The Daily Show, reveling in its ability to update me on the world’s happenings while at the same time eliciting the laughter so critical to beginning a new day. Yesterday, I sat down with my unassuming bowl of raisin bran and turned on the DVR. The recording had caught the end of It’s Always Sunny, so I quickly hit the fast-forward button.

On a DirecTV DVR, if you fast-forward, when you finally hit the “play” button, the recording skips back a few seconds, assuming that your fingers did not respond to your brain’s command as quickly as is necessary. So, when I finally hit the play button, Jon Stewart was saddled up to his familiar desk, beginning his opening statements. Since the recording had gone back a few seconds, though, what I saw actually began with the title sequence- that familiar booming voice announcing ceremoniously that “This is the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

I noticed a strange relief come over me when I saw that the recording had skipped back to the title sequence. I wondered why. I’d seen this sequence, literally, hundreds of times. Why did I attach any importance to it?

Instantly, the words of Alfred Hitchcock came to mind:

There is no thrill in the bang... only in the anticipation of it.

It was the anticipation- or, more accurately, the suspense that the title sequence built that subtly and silently thrilled me.

This appreciation for suspense is one of life’s great joys, and one that largely goes unnoticed.

There are epic moments in all of our lives. Indeed, we seem to hopelessly attempt to model our lives after Hollywood scripts, simply attempting to fill the space between those epic moments.

Maybe you’re writing a novel, the completion of which is your next epic moment. Maybe you’re a mother, and wait impatiently for those all-too-rare moments in which your child takes her first steps, or makes you so proud that you feel that you might burst. Maybe you’re working eighty hours a week in hopes of finally making partner at your firm. Maybe, if you judge your life to be woefully lacking in epic moments, you turn on the TV or go to the movies to witness others' epic moments.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

~ Samuel Johnson

Looking at life through the lens of the epic inevitably yields many blind spots, but it is those who master the art of peripheral vision who are truly life’s conquerors. In that peripheral vision lies suspense, anticipation, and life itself.

If you've prepared a cup of tea, take a moment to savor the aroma, the warmth, before you take that first sip. If you're about to delve into War and Peace, take a breath and simply acknowledge the weight of it in your hands. If you’re writing a novel, develop the awareness to appreciate the time spent in front of the blank page, of honing your craft. If you’re a mother, learn to see the mind of your child churning, radiating in every direction as she begins to grasp the concepts that will eventually lead to the stellar report card. If you’re a lawyer, or an advertiser, or a barista, or a civil worker, take off the glasses and let the blind spots reveal themselves to you. It is there that life resides, and it is only when the fog lifts that you can begin to savor the anticipation of it.

An intense anticipation itself transforms possibility into reality; our desires being often but precursors of the things which we are capable of performing.

~Samuel Smiles

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely.

The Flight From Conversation

Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete?

delirium-of-disorder:

It is hard to know how our future descendants will regard the little sliver of history that we live in. It is hard to know what events will seem important to them, what the narrative of now will look like to the twenty-fifth century mind. We tend to think of our time as one uniquely shaped by the advance of technology, but more and more I suspect that this will be remembered as an age of cosmology—-as the moment when the human mind first internalized the cosmos that gave rise to it.

Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete?

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment.

Thich Nhat Hanh

You, Me, and Character

I’ve been thinking lately about character. Iskra Fileva, of whose writing I am becoming quite fond, recently dissected the essence of character in a New York Times piece entitled Character and Its Discontents. In it, Fileva takes issue with a recent claim made by two preeminent philosophers: namely, that character does not exist, and that what we perceive as character is only a very fluid result of specific sets of circumstances.

If this were true, the results would be devastating. Imagine a world in which character does not exist- in which any act is merely the result of external pressure. Fortunately, this position seems to hold no water.

When people act ‘out of character,’ they may just be revealing their deeper tendencies.

Fileva deftly tears down the argument with two retorts, both circling around the concept of unity (in this sense, a unity of character). The first uses as an example a lover whose partner is incarcerated for an unspecified crime. The concept of perspective bias explains that this lover maintains a view of her lover’s kind and gentle nature only because her lover is kind and gentle towards her. She refuses to acknowledge the aspect of his character that may have been capable of the crime he is accused of, simply because she has never witnessed that side of him. By and large, we are all egregiously guilty of perspective bias. Indeed, it seems to be a core principle of human nature.

The second argument against the lack of character uses as an example Tolstoy’s shameful treatment of his illegitimate son, explaining it away with the master motive argument. This concept simply states that we all have an underlying essence of character that trumps all others. In Tolstoy’s case, that essence, that motive, is perfectionism. The same perfectionism that drives him to so masterfully lead his reader to a place of gripping empathy for his characters is the same perfectionism that enables him to cast off his son, simply because his presence, his mere being, creates for Tolstoy an imperfect life. This master motive concept, too, we all exhibit in some manner.

These, of course, are extreme examples, but examples which, in my mind, cast aside the notion that character is non-existent, and allow character to firmly take hold of its place among our psyches.

I don’t think these arguments go quite far enough, however.

Character itself is perhaps an infinite concept, in that its edges, its nooks and crannies, its intricacies are not only largely unknown, but perhaps even unknowable. The problem, it seems to me, of the fact that we are all so capable of so many terrible acts based upon our circumstances, as exemplified in so many movies in which a “good” character is driven to some malicious act by sheer despair, lies not in the absence of character, but in the existence of all character within each of us. (Much in the same way that followers of Zen- and many other wise men and women- maintain that the entire universe lies within each of us, a claim becoming more widely adopted among physicists as they realize that we are, indeed, made of star stuff).

It’s not so strange a claim, when you think of it. Our physical bodies are incredibly similar. Two arms, two legs, one heart, one brain, etc., all serving the same functions. The degree to which these body parts are effective, however, varies wildly. You do not have the same lung capacity as a marathoner. I do not have the same level of brain function as, say, someone with a photographic memory.

Is it such a stretch, then, to think that the very essence of us- our character- operates on the same principle? That we are endowed with all the possibilities of character, parts of which operate at different levels? Would that not explain the capacity in us all for every action, every behavior, under the right circumstances?

Consider Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s perfect example of this type of division within one’s self. Crime and Punishment is a brilliant lesson in this sort of dichotomy. Raskolnikov is at once a highly compassionate and maliciously cold character- so much so that Dostoyevsky actually uses two completely different characters to convey this division- in the novel, Sonya represents his loving, generous, and self-sacrificial side, while Svidrigailov represents the malicious and self-serving aspect of his nature. It is precisely because we as readers can identify with both sides that this character is so intriguing. All character exists within all of us: the differences in the degree to which we cultivate their nuances is the essence of who we are.

It could be, however, that the seemingly contradictory bits of evidence reveal not the lack of character but people’s deeper tendencies.

Which brings me to my final point: if we have such extraordinary power as to shape our own character, to feed or tame the beasts that lie within us to achieve our desired selves, on what, then, do these beasts feed?

The answer lies in the people that surround you- your friends, your family, your teachers, your confidants.

There is a select group of people I interact with regularly who feed my intellectual hunger. While working on a play, the wonderful theater folk I work with feed an insatiably carnivorous creative creature inside of me. I also have friends who make me feel as if I’m a fifteen-year-old boy again, forgetting at once the pressures of the world and leading me to a place of child-like laughter and joy.

None of these people are better or worse than another, and none are more or less essential- they simply feed different beasts. They all, every one, make me a better person for having known them. The only true danger comes when I allow myself to be influenced by those who try to tear me down to their level (in other words, to feed the beasts of jealousy, anger, pettiness, etc, that I would rather let starve).

You are not simply a result of your genetic hand-me-downs. Neither are you solely a result of your environment. Instead, you are a rich cacophony of both, and of more. The only true path to knowing yourself is in taking a road that leads you to the people you love, the people who make you better. The next time you find yourself surrounded by these miraculous people, reflect a bit on the marvel that they are, because they are not just they, but are a lake shimmering with possibilities. If you gaze into the lake, you will see all the possibilities of who you may become shining back at you.

Weekend Reading

I've been detained by life these past few weeks, but fear not. Weekend reading is back. Some of these may be a couple of weeks old, mind you, but nevertheless, these are the pieces worthy of your attention this weekend. As always, poorly designed sites are presented in Readability view, while sites optimized for a good reading experience are presented in their original format. Happy reading.

• Andrew Sullivan writes in The Daily Beast a case for a transformation in modern Christianity. Being a non-believer, I find few religious pieces that speak to me. Sullivan, however, presents one of the most impassioned, reasonable, and poignant takes on modern Christianity in recent memory in Christianity in Crisis.
• On the incomparable You Are Not So Smart blog, a dissection of ego depletion: beginning with Freud's early interpretations of the human psyche, and ending with a direct correlation between willpower and the amount of glucose residing in the prefrontal cortex, this piece will change what you think you know about your self-control.
• Over on The Atlantic, Edward Jay Epstein takes a look at the roots of the diamond industry, and the massive marketing campaign that suckered us into associating diamonds with engagement in Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?
• In Character and Its Discontents, Iskra Fileva breaks down the myth that character is a consistent, immutable prospect. The dissection of its nuances is much more fascinating than our traditional view of who we are. Spoiler alert: I think I'll base a piece here on Wonderisms on this essay next week.
• Charles Simic wrote a bit of a scathing piece on the current state of our great nation. It's full of hard, painful truths, and it's exactly what we needed to hear in the aptly named Age of Ignorance.
• Finally, NYMag tells us what Facebook really bought with the billion-dollar Instagram deal: sincerity.

Thomas Jefferson, writing to his predecessor, John Adams, ‘The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.’

 “The God Delusion” - Richard Dawkins

I would rather read a mediocre book than waste time sitting around with people making small talk.

James D. Sass (via booksandnerds)

Emotional Intelligence: a Revelation

Yesterday, I wrote a bit about why I love the web, the gist being that it combines an unheard-of amount of accessible information with a serendipitous social filtering mechanism that, when used to its potential, creates a more engaged and alive person of those who take advantage of it.

What I write now is both  a result of that power and an example of it.

Maria Konnikova recently wrote a piece for Scientific-American in which she puts forth the idea that intelligence is not a fixed entity, as we’ve always thought it to be. Rather, it is: 

1. much more complex a concept than can be measured by standard IQ tests, and


2. a very malleable thing, capable of being cultivated.

In order to take control of your own intelligence, then, you must do two things. First, you must be willing to rethink the very notions of what you conceive intelligence to be at a very foundational level. This debate has, in some form, raged for quite some time: it’s the book smarts versus street smarts argument. I would argue that we need to include the idea of emotional intelligence- that is, the way that we understand and perceive the world around us. Since that world is largely dominated by human interactions, it would follow that navigating the waters of social interaction is a crucial element to our overall intelligence.

Second, you must accept the idea that intelligence is, indeed, fluid. Konnikova illustrates her point here by categorizing all of us into two groups: the first group, dubbed entity theorists, believe that intelligence is fixed, that the hand you are dealt at birth is unchangeable, amounting to a “luck of the draw.” The second group, incremental theorists, believe that intelligence is as putty in our hands: we can mold it and shape it to our liking through good, old-fashioned hard work.

The fascinating aspect of this take on intelligence is that both camps are right: incremental theorists become masters of their own fate, engaging in a “self-fulfilling prophecy.” By believing that they can shape their own intelligence, they can. The brain must first be open to the possibility to allow it. Entity theorists, by believing that they can do nothing to forward their intelligence, are indeed stuck with what they’re given naturally, because the brain will not allow something to contradict one’s beliefs.

If you believe intelligence is fixed, it is. If you believe you can do something about it, you can. The most uplifting take from this view is that incremental theory can be learned, simply because we humans have the ability to change our habitual approach to the world (as Konnikova puts it). (As a fun bonus, we now know that we can literally increase the size of our brains by exercising that particular muscle).

Now the problem becomes: how to increase your own intelligence? There are the traditional methods: learn a new skill, take a course, etc. If you subscribe to the idea, though, that intelligence is a much more complex thing than what is traditionally taught to us in a classroom, consider a recent piece by Annie Murphy Paul in the New York Times entitled Your Brain on Fiction.

In it, Paul tells us what many fiction readers have long known, but only recently knowledge of the human brain has confirmed: reading fiction- stories- increases your emotional intelligence:

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.

Fiction allows us to “enter fully into another’s thoughts and feelings.” I can think of no more useful quality to enhance than our ability to empathize. Empathy tends to lend context, and it is only by filling in the blanks with context that we can fully understand a situation, whether it’s a politician’s latest misstep, the intricacies of the Palestinian/ Israeli conflict, or the bully that keeps taking your daughter’s iPod on the bus.

Fiction specifically enhances our theory of mind, an area seldom surpassed in its transformative qualities once understood, and enhanced. An improved theory of mind enhances our real-life social skills, and as Paul cites in her piece, study after study (specifically two studies conducted in 2006) plainly show that regular readers of fiction have a keener theory of mind, and are therefore much more adept at empathizing. The same goes for our children: those who are read stories are sooner able to navigate their social world with skill than those who gorge on television.

What does all this have to do with the web? How does it relate to the so-called Information Age that we now find ourselves in the midst of? It’s really quite simple: since the dawn of the paradigm shift in reading- the rise in ebooks, the increase in the sheer availability of books- people read more. The Pew Foundation has reported a remarkable increase in reading among those who have access to digital literature. The societal implications of this could not be more profound. Think of the effect it could have on democracy itself. If the enemy of progress in a democratic society is the ignorance of the masses, how world-altering would it be if the masses can chip away at their own ignorance? On a more individual level, how much more comfortable would I be with my daughter’s social skills if she has better access to reading material that enhances her social prowess?

Clive Thompson recently gave an interview on The Findings’ How We Will Read, discussing the advantages of his newly-constructed reading habits, centering around the digital format. Currently, he’s reading War and Peace- perhaps the most intimidating novel in literature- on his iPhone. He notes that the book is actually much less intimidating in this format, since he can only see one page at a time, never having to consider the bulk of the undertaking by literally weighing the book in his hands. He also mentions that the human brain tends to read more efficiently when narrow margins are used. Books in their traditional format were designed for economic efficiency (as many words on as few pages as possible, thereby reducing the cost to print), whereas digital formats feel no such constraint.

Thompson goes on to praise the effects on memory of repeating what you read, a practice made more frictionless by books’ evolving format, and here he gives a couple of examples.

In reading War and Peace on his iPhone, he’s able to select snippets of text that resonate with him with very little effort (and very little interruption to his reading flow). When finished, he can easily collect all these clippings and print them, so that he has a physical copy of the most powerfully personal bits of the text. “In short,” he says, “I have a physical copy of all of my favorite parts of War and Peace that I can flip through, with my notes, but I don’t actually own a physical copy of War and Peace.” If repetition is the key to true understanding, practices such as this could become invaluable.

Thompson also remarks that we have no idea what the ebook will yet become, as it has yet to even scrape the surface of its true potential. The real revolution will come when true conversations can be had in an engaging and frictionless way. What’s happened to the rest of the web- the rise of social- will inevitably happen to the printed word. Indeed, it’s already begun, but we’ve a long way to go. On the current state of ebooks, Thompson says this:

...they’re clearly horrible compared to what they’re going to be. I find it amazing that I can get this much pleasure out of them already.

So, we know that intelligence is malleable, that it can be cultivated, that emotional intelligence is a very large piece of the overall pie, that fiction dramatically increases our emotional intelligence, and that the rise of the web is empowering readers as never before, and in ways we can only yet imagine. If you believe that the time that we live in is just another speck on the linear history of our world, frankly, you haven’t been paying attention. It’s a remarkable time to be alive. If you want to be a better person tomorrow than you are today, it’s quite simple:  go read something.

Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.

Tom Robbins - Still Life With Woodpecker (via brooklyn-forester)

Why I Love the Web

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I love the web. Every time I sit down with or in front of a web-enabled device, I marvel at the possibilities that have just opened up before me. I realize, though, that not everyone grasps the transformative power of a world lain at your fingertips. Most recognize that it is sparking a revolution in the world as a whole, but few understand the web’s power to transform on a very personal and individual level. I see an opportunity for me to spell it out.

My usual process is this:

I usually begin my day with Twitter, catching up on the overnight nuggets sprinkled throughout the ether by the various wonderfully thought-provoking people I’ve chosen to follow. A friend recently remarked that she assumed that Twitter was just for sports and geek stuff, which, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, Twitter is a tool. It is what you make it. It can be as dangerous in your hands as is a hammer in the hands of a toddler, or it can be as helpful as the same hammer in the hands of a master craftsman. It takes a bit of time to prune and trim your timeline to those who you find most engaging, but once you do, it’s a remarkably powerful medium. For instance, I tend to follow leaders in the fields I’m interested in, so my feed is filled with designers, writers, neuroscientists, psychologists, comedians, literary figures, Linux aficionados, freethinkers, and yes, sportscasters.

I sift through these things in the morning, favoriting tweets that seem of interest. Each of those favorited tweets is fed to a bookmarking service (in my case, both pinboard.in and kippt.com), which I can then peruse later, opening the links to find those that are actually worthy of reading. Those that make the grade are added to my Readability queue, and I read them from the comfort of my Kindle.

Quite often, a piece so entrances me that I star it in Readability. These are usually pieces I either write about or add to the Weekend Reading section I post here on Saturday mornings. Either way, I can go back to them later and re-read them. Usually, a theme or two emerges among a couple of articles, and oddly, it’s usually a theme that crosses genre or industry. I may see a correlation between the latest neuroscientific piece by David Eagleman and the How We Will Read segment on the Findings blog, a regular look at the future of reading. Frequently, I’ll use these starred articles to put together my thoughts on the divergent subject that emerges from within these various texts.

Now, let me share something that recently came up in a conversation with a fellow wonderer (context: we were discussing the freedom to write about a topic of your choosing versus a school setting, in which you’re given a subject to write about, and usually given the materials from which to gather your own conclusions): her argument was that working on assignments you wouldn’t normally seek out allows you to diversify your perspective, to see things from the point of view of someone whose work you wouldn’t normally stumble upon. To which I say this: this is precisely the beauty of the web.

The entire underlying philosophy of the web- indeed, the principle it was built on- is hyperlinks (or, simply, links). The ability to cite the work or writing of another individual within a given body of work is the glue that holds the web together, and the principle that gives it its enormous power. The result is this: when I browse these articles from great minds, the articles are inevitably sprinkled with links to the works of others, often those espousing the contending view of the point the author is trying to make. And those articles link to more works, and those to more, and ... well, you get the idea.

All this combines to create a very sharp sense of serendipity. Before long, a mountain of information and engrossing texts lay before you, and it becomes your job to sift through the information to find what is valuable enough to be worthy of your time.

All this can happen in a span of hours, if not minutes. Now, contrast this with the amount of time and effort it would take to collect that amount of information twenty years ago, or even the mere accessibility of it- how many scientific texts were available to us mere laymen before the web came along?

This is to mention nothing of the newest web principle- the social aspect. Imagine being able to actually connect with the people who write the things you so admire.

Now, would you like to learn to play the guitar? Learn another language? That’s possible. Want to collaborate on a screenplay with someone in Prague? You can do that. Your kids are hundreds of miles away? Grab your phone and pull up a videochat. At the moment, I’m learning design, honing my meager writing skills, learning another language, and studying a bit of acting. Often, I feed my mind with the fantastically powerful talks on TED.

One can (and probably will, later) go on and on building a list of the mind-boggling qualities of an interconnected world, but I’ll leave it at that. There are any number of reasons to fall in love with right here, right now- the age we live in. These are but a few of mine. What are yours?

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What it’s all about.

Meditation does not involve discontinuing one’s relationship with oneself and looking for a better person or searching for possibilities of reforming oneself and becoming a better person. The practice of meditation is a way of continuing one’s confusion, chaos, aggression, and passion—but working with it, seeing it from the enlightened point of view. That is the basic purpose of meditation practice as far as this approach is concerned.

Chögyam Trungpa from Laura Dunn’s post Satsang: Learning to See. (via crashinglybeautiful)

Quite possibly the best writing setup ever.

…our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, more than our opinions in physics or geometry…

Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly: That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess—and by argument to maintain—their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

Thomas Jefferson on religious freedom, 1779. Fast-forward a few dozen decades, and research confirms what Jefferson intuited — narcissism mixed with religious righteousness breeds bad things. (via explore-blog)

The ultimate state of love is freedom, absolute freedom, and any relationship that destroys freedom is not worthwhile. Love is a sacred art. To be in love is to be in a holy relationship.

Osho (via fuckyeahexistentialism)