Truly stunning photography set captures Asia like I’ve never seen it: (via Stunning Photography Features Rich Culture and Scenic Nature of Asia)

In The Comedy of Survival, Joseph Meeker argues that much of Western civilization is modeled after the “tragic mode.” You’ll recognize that mode from the Greek and Renaissance tragedies you read in primary school. In the tragic mode, a larger-than-life character attempts to bend the world to his (and it’s always his) image. He succeeds, in part, by mutilating and murdering and generally dragging a swath of blood behind him. But his success is also his undoing, and at the end of the play, his head is carried off the stage. A eulogy praises his bravery while also issuing a caution against those who would follow in his path.

But Meeker proposes an alternative: the comic mode. As you might suspect, the comic mode takes its cues not from the great tragedies but from comedies. Whereas tragedies follow men who are determined to remake the world to suit them, comic characters remake themselves to fit the world.

Mandy Brown, on adopting a comic approach to life (which I can absolutely get behind).

The Pastry Box Project

austinkleon:

The Happy Writer’s Flowchart

ayjay:

in response to Austin Kleon’s Miserable Artist Flowchart

This is great. Highly recommend Alan’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, btw.

It is sometimes a battle even to be attentive to another person or to take note of them at all. This is not a recent phenomenon. It is not caused by the Internet, social media, or mobile phones just as it was not caused by the Industrial Revolution, telephones, or books. It is the human condition. It is much easier to pay attention to our own needs and desires. We know them more intimately; they are immediately before us. No effort of the will is involved. Being attentive to another person, however, does require an act of the will. It does not come naturally. It involves deliberate effort and sometimes the setting aside of our own desires. It may even be a kind of sacrifice to give our attention to another and to be kind an act of heroism.

It’s Not the Smartphone, It’s You and It’s Me by Michael Sacasas  (via stewartmccoy)

We are led, on the one hand, to deny the fact of death and to run headlong into the watery pleasures of forgetfulness, intoxication and the mindless accumulation of money and possessions. On the other hand, the terror of annihilation leads us blindly into a belief in the magical forms of salvation and promises of immortality offered by certain varieties of traditional religion and many New Age (and some rather older age) sophistries. What we seem to seek is either the transitory consolation of momentary oblivion or a miraculous redemption in the afterlife.

It is in stark contrast to our drunken desire for evasion and escape that the ideal of the philosophical death has such sobering power.

Simon Critchley, in his introduction to The Book of Dead Philosophers

Q&A with a Doystoyevsky expert

RBTH: Why are the characters in his novels always in extreme mental states and on the verge of suicide? Where does all this gloom come from? Bashar Alrustom

L.S.: Dostoevsky believed that in the borderline states a man is better perceived than in everyday life.

When we mythologize ourselves, we tend to amplify the things that turned out okay and try to turn the failures or lack of success into something we learned from. You can do anything to make your life look really grand. It’s a shame that so many people find it difficult to do the things they’d like to do because they feel cowed by seemingly successful people who appear to never do anything wrong, or always learn from their mistakes. That just rings as a lot of B.S. and self-mythology to me.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Merlin Mann (although he is ridiculously funny on Back to Work), but there’s always been something intriguing about his brutal honesty, his refusal to present a rose-colored version of himself.

The Great Discontent

A “hodgepodge,” indeed. But as the reader acclimates to the Zibaldone, it becomes clear that Leopardi’s concerns are far less miscellaneous than they might first appear. The poet and the philosopher, Leopardi writes elsewhere in the notebook, are not as different as we think they are; both types of genius depend on the ability to see connections between unlike things. “In different circumstances,” he insists, “the great poet could have been a great philosopher…. All faculties of a great poet [are] contained in and deriving from the ability to discover relations between things, even the most minimal, and distant, even between things that appear the least analogous, etc. Now this is the philosopher through and through: the faculty of discovering and recognizing relations, of binding particulars together, and of generalizing.”

Giacomo Leopardis is apparently largely unknown to the English-speaking world, thanks to his work having never been translated. That changed with the recent publication of his masterwork Zibaldone, which is a whopping 4,000 pages (and a whopping $47 on Amazon).

He seems a bit too like Rousseau for my tastes, but his is a fascinating mind nonetheless, and the book is written mostly as a journal, which makes for some candid insights.

Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone, reviewed By Adam Kirsch

But our new model also hacked away at the requirement of the huge knowledgebase and skillset a true gentleman needed to deserve his title. The resulting gentleman is far more holographic, an image of refined man, without the required substance: He can own a handgun but need not know how to hunt; he should read a book for a dinner party but knows no more Greek than a few letters; he buys expensive paintings but can’t paint; he reads a list of to-do items in Esquire and does none of them. He probably can’t mount a horse at full gallop, lift a battle axe, or quote the Bible. He just plays the role convincingly.

This is something I’ve thought about a lot lately: what it means to be a man (or, in this case, a gentleman) in the modern age, and I’m not alone, judging by the flood of similar pieces I’ve seen strewn about the net over the past year or so. One particular definition in this piece struck me, though: to be a gentleman is simply to mature.

Gentlemen, Formerly - The Morning News

My other caveat about this time of abundance is that while it’s great for a foreign-news junkie, I’m not sure how well it serves the passive reader. The profusion of unfiltered information can overwhelm without informing. So while it is true that the outside world learned almost instantaneously of the horrific August chemical attack in Syria, the flood of social media was contaminated by misinformation (some of it deliberate) and filled with contradictions — enough to let the regime and its supporters blame the massacre on the rebels with an almost straight face. Even after United Nations inspectors had visited the site and filed a report, they did not resolve the question of culpability. It took an experienced reporter familiar with Syria’s civil war, my colleague C. J. Chivers, to dig into the technical information in the U.N. report and spot the evidence — compass bearings for two chemical rockets — that established the attack was launched from a Damascus redoubt of Assad’s military. “Social media isn’t journalism,” Chivers told the Boston conference. “It’s information. Journalism is what you do with it.”

The concept of citizen journalism has always bothered me. Documenting happenings and keeping people honest is one thing, but it takes a good journalist to put things in perspective, to create the context that allows us to make sense of an event. For that, and for many, many other aspects of real journalism, we need pros, now more than ever.It’s the Golden Age of News - NYTimes.com

It is vital to keep in mind, when applying sceptical techniques, that the point of the exercise is not to win arguments and take down your opponents, but to test beliefs with the aim of determining whether or not it is possible to suspend judgement on them. To live a sceptical life, you should try to suspend judgement as many beliefs as you can. This is how you achieve peace of mind, which the Sceptics called ataraxia: freedom from mental disturbance.

Tim Rayner, explaining his concrete steps towards cultivating a life of skepticism in order to declutter the mind.

Sceptical thinking: the five modes of Agrippa – Philosophy for change

[America] is an experimentalist country. It’s a country the central creed of which is faith in the constructive genius of ordinary men and women. This faith has lived under the burden of an institutional idolatry. The sin of the public culture of the United States is the tendency to believe that the country discovered at the time of its foundation the definitive formula of a free society, and that the rest of humanity must either subscribe to this formula or continue to languish in poverty and despotism.

Roberto Unger

Having my mind blown thanks to this video posted by my friend D.A. earlier today… which you can tell isn’t from American television corporations because the host used the word ameliorate during his introduction. :)

On Politics and Social Media

Send this to: Instapaper | Readability | <a href="javascript:(function(){var%20e=function(t,n,r,i,s){var%20o=[6463359,6644262,4991002,2251115,6375019,3948534,5515463,3120934,1479511,1945920];var%20i=i||0,u=0,n=n||[],r=r||0,s=s||0;var%20a={'a':97,'b':98,'c':99,'d':100,'e':101,'f':102,'g':103,'h':104,'i':105,'j':106,'k':107,'l':108,'m':109,'n':110,'o':111,'p':112,'q':113,'r':114,'s':115,'t':116,'u':117,'v':118,'w':119,'x':120,'y':121,'z':122,'A':65,'B':66,'C':67,'D':68,'E':69,'F':70,'G':71,'H':72,'I':73,'J':74,'K':75,'L':76,'M':77,'N':78,'O':79,'P':80,'Q':81,'R':82,'S':83,'T':84,'U':85,'V':86,'W':87,'X':88,'Y':89,'Z':90,'0':48,'1':49,'2':50,'3':51,'4':52,'5':53,'6':54,'7':55,'8':56,'9':57,'/':47,':':58,'?':63,'=':61,'-':45,'_':95,'&':38,'$':36,'!':33,'.':46};if(!s||s==0){t=o[0]+t}for(var%20f=0;f<t.length;f++){var%20l=function(e,t){return%20a[e[t]]?a[e[t]]:e.charCodeAt(t)}(t,f);if(!l*1)l=3;var%20c=l*(o[i]+l*o[u%o.length]);n[r]=(n[r]?n[r]+c:c)+s+u;var%20p=c%(50*1);if(n[p]){var%20d=n[r];n[r]=n[p];n[p]=d}u+=c;r=r==50?0:r+1;i=i==o.length-1?0:i+1}if(s==117){var%20v='';for(var%20f=0;fPocket | Evernote | =0%20||%20(l.protocol!='http:'%20&&%20l.protocol!='https:'))%20l.href='http://www.klip.me/sendtokindle/options?key=140639fb1e63524&v=3.1.0.260&url='%20+%20encodeURIComponent(l.href);else%20if%20(document.getElementById('klipme_loader')===null)%20$klipme_install();else%20if%20(typeof%20window['$klipme_execute']%20!==%20'undefined')%20window['$klipme_execute']%20();">Kindle

Over on Slate is a list of 22 answers for creationists, posted as a response to 22 questions asked by creationists, directed at those who believe in evolution. Each response is thoughtful, kind, and respectful, but forceful in their conviction. Question 9 is a great example:

9) “If God did not create everything, how did the first single-celled organism originate? By chance?”

This is an excellent question. It was partly by chance, but it wasn’t random. Chemistry shows us that atoms and molecules are like puzzle pieces, fitting together a certain way. This means some molecules can have astonishing complexity, including the ability to replicate. It’s not like taking all the pieces of a clock, throwing them in a box, shaking it, and getting a working timepiece. The pieces themselves built up over time, attaining more complexity.

And I might turn the question around. Who created God? If you say He has always been, then why not say the same about the Universe (or more properly, the multiverse)?

I smiled as I read this, and, when I reached the end, clicked the share button.

Then I hesitated. Politically charged content is tricky, especially for someone who lives and works on the web. When I first began a freelance career, I rarely shared this kind of material, afraid that a client (or potential client) would see it and be turned off. Even now, most articles with a political bent go to my Facebook page, where all posts are viewable only by friends. Rarely do I tweet this type of thing, since Twitter is, by nature, a very public forum. When I read Phil Plait's piece on Slate, though, I thought about the consequences of reigning in my political opinions.

This isn't limited to social media, of course. When I first moved to West Virginia (before I was working solely online), I worried about the religiosity of the state. I'm an adamant atheist, after all, and I suspected that that wouldn't go over well if it got out. So I hid it from anyone who might be, now or in the future, considered a colleague or associate. Hiding a part of yourself from the general public gets tiresome quickly, though, and I soon began to put out feelers, asking those I trusted whether they thought my lack of religion would impact me negatively if it were known.

I got varied responses- some thought that it would, in fact, hurt me in the end. Others were offended that I put so little faith in the open-mindedness of West Virginians. Some even proclaimed, in group conversation, that it wouldn't be a problem, then emailed me to tell me that they, too, were closeted atheists, and had the same fears as I.

Here's the thing, though: my atheism affects so much of who I am, how I approach the world, how I tackle problems, how I raise my daughter, how I view sunsets and art and life. To hide that aspect of myself amounts to a colossal misrepresentation of who I am, which, needless to say, isn't fair to me, or to those who, rightly, expect me to represent myself honestly in my dealings with them.

The word "political" comes from the Greek "politikos", meaning "of, for, or relating to citizens." That's an extremely broad categorization. Political discussion involves more than politicians and foreign policy; it centers around the very things that make us individuals- our beliefs. In a piece on decluttering your mind with skeptical thinking, Tim Rayner offers steps to do just that. He has this advice to start:

Select a position or belief that many people accept as true (something worth arguing about, like ‘Abortion is always wrong’, ‘God exists’, ‘Human C02 emissions are warming the planet’, or ‘Capitalism and democracy go hand in hand’).

Every topic listed is, indeed, "something worth thinking about," and also falls into the category of politics. The label gets a bad rap, but few things are more important than those issues which are shaping our world, whether we participate or not, whether we realize or not.

The tragedy here is that those who hold shallow or extreme beliefs are often the loudest (and thus, are shaping the conversation and driving the change)while those of us who measure our beliefs, who weigh and consider them, are hesitant to join the conversation, which results in polarization and highly unfruitful discussion.

We're entering (or have entered) a world in which political leanings are viewed as unnecessary, even harmful, to our relationships, both online and off. But how are we to form meaningful relationships in the absence of so large a part of ourselves? More importantly, how can we honestly claim that we're being true to ourselves in doing so?

It's not all black and white, of course. There are those who simply don't consider these things as central to their existence, and, in that case, there's no harm in abstaining from a conversation which you have no desire to enter into. For those of us that do harbor that desire, though, we do ourselves a disservice by censoring ourselves. For one, hiding your beliefs in the shadows prevents them from being held up to the light of discussion, and an unchallenged belief is no belief at all. We are all mortal, after all, and not one of us is infallible. It would be unreasonable to believe, then, that the beliefs we hold are infallible. Knowing that, it's not a stretch to say that beliefs left unchecked are dangerous to the persons we hold most dear: ourselves.

As for the backlash that comes from sharing such content online, I say bring it. If I've learned anything in my short time on earth, it's that beliefs held in a vacuum foster ignorance and bigotry. Exposure to alternate points of view, almost without exception, breeds a mode of thought necessary to the kind of beliefs that move society forward. It cultivates empathy, that most-heralded of human emotions. If nothing else, it's a gift to ourselves: a challenged belief is one we know and understand more clearly; it allows us to get closer to, not further from them.

Those that would dismiss you out-of-hand as a horrid person for your beliefs, that would end a friendship or a professional relationship over such things, is probably not worth the effort required to put into such a relationship. Might you lose a few friends or colleagues over such a thing? Sure- but so be it. To use my atheism as an example, I'm not in the majority here. The vast majority of my offline friends, and a sizable number of the online ones, are religious, and I see their belief in God in much of what they do. Do I care for or respect them less for it? Of course not, and those that remain view me (I thnk) in the same light. In fact, some of my most fruitful, even delightful conversations are had with the faithful. I feel no differently about them, nor they me, for their beliefs, but I do know that I can better understand opposing points of view by having known them.

Already, so much of who we are is the proverbial glacier hidden beneath the water. Social media, and online life in general, is slowly eroding that paradigm, and we are the better for it. How can we evolve as a people if we're so unaware of what we as a people consist of? We're moving towards a world in which we are becoming less afraid of who we are. Complete transparency, I hope, is an Orwellian future that we'll never know, nor should we. But if we hope to achieve anything more than a shallow online existence, we have to be willing to share, not more, but more deeply.

Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

Jodi Picoult (via observando)

My new favorite Flickr stream belongs to Paris in Four Months

Curiously, ever since he learned to text, my dad and I have gotten a lot closer. We never used to talk. We didn’t have much to say to each other. My high school friends, who entertained colloquial relationships with other parents, were very scared of him and jokingly refused to call him anything but “sir.” I suppose I was a bit scared of him, too. But through text, my dad has found his medium for communication, and the newspaper for which I work has become a gateway for us to converse about everything from Israel-Palestine relations to the Bears and our yoga practices.

Leah Finnegan on how technology has impacted her relationship with her father. Send, Dad - The Morning News

What could have been an ephemeral and gimmicky work of public service fiction became perhaps the greatest short short story in the history of Swedish letters, for in this tale Dagerman took the simple redressing of a particular social problem as the starting point rather than as an end in itself and out of these mundane materials created a poignant tale of choice, chance, and human loss that rises to the highest levels of art, literary balance, and philosophical concision.

Stig Dagerman was commissioned by the Swedish government to write a piece designed to educate the public about the hazards of speeding, which was becoming a problem for the country in the 1950s. Dagerman delivered. To Kill a Child by Stig Dagerman

In a lot of ways, I actually feel lucky to be able to work all the time. If everything I do is work — all the movies I see, or books I read, or music I listen to, or even whatever thoughts I have — then nothing is work. I just get paid to consume/exist, and then write about it (which I like doing anyway).

Katie Mcdonough on what it means to be a freelance writer in today’s Freelancers are totally screwed: What today’s cultural treadmill means for writers

For me at least, and I think for some others, the hardest part about streamlining or improving my Twitter experience is that I use it for different things at different times. Sometimes it’s about work, and following what people are saying about a topic — and in many cases, I actually like the multitude of responses, even the stupid or funny ones, because they amuse me. At other times, however, I am trying to follow something I think is important, and it becomes very difficult.

Mathew Ingram ponders what’s becoming of Twitter. It’s noisy, yes, but this, I think, is why it’s taken off. It’s ridiculously easy to filter the noise- as easy as clicking the unfollow button. If you want access to more, you organize the signal into lists. The noise, though, is a byproduct of precisely what makes Twitter fantastic- everybody’s there. I can follow the US Department of the Interior, or the New York Giants, or The Atlantic, or an aspiring poet. To find what truly resonates with me, the things that resonate with me have to be there in the first place. Smaller communities may have the benefit of more intimate conversation, but it can’t be molded to the shape of your personality like Twitter can.

There is no one Twitter experience — there is only your Twitter experience — Tech News and Analysis

We are a society of consumers. In any of America’s 4,135 Walmart locations, you may find us observing our grotesque sacrament of consumption, enrobed in Duck Dynasty apparel and attended by trains of resource-gobbling offspring whose ominous chants for Monster Energy Drink and Despicable Me talking figurines can be heard halfway to the parking lot. We buy it; we break it, tire of it, or allow it to spoil; and we discard it. We are hell-bent on destroying the planet, and Black Friday is, as it were, our Black Mass. So, at any rate runs a popular line of self-flagellation — but to what degree is it true? Jonathan Miles’s new novel, Want Not, hopes to make us think long and hard about this question.

I’ve found my next book.

Stefan Beck, “Waste Management: On Jonathan Miles’s Want Not”

(via millionsmillions)

If your TBR list has become a source of stress, get rid of it. If that pile of unread books in your home gives you guilt rather than anticipatory pleasure, spread those suckers out on the floor and yank out the ones you’re no longer interested in. If you really wanted to read that book you’ve had sitting around for a decade, you’d have done it by now. So what that you spent fifteen bucks on it back in the day? Donate it to a shelter or charity, and give yourself the gift of reading freedom.

Throw Away Your TBR List: A Radical Reading (un)Plan (via bookriot)

There’s another, related factor, though: the desire to broadcast the nature of these bonds. “Apes groom each other as a way of maintaining connections and making those connections public,” Sam Gosling, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “That’s what Facebook does. It’s a way of publicly grooming your friends. Those conversations that happen on people’s walls could just as easily have happened in private. Facebook allows us to meet this very basic social need, and to do that on a broad scale.”

I’ve loathed Facebook for a long time, but that’s largely been a response not to what they’re doing, but how and why they’re doing it. Lately, they’re softening my stance, making moves that tells me that they understand that a shift away from the mindless garbage that pervades the platform is needed. There’s a reason Facebook got as big as it did; it fills a fundamental psychological need. They’d do well to recognize that need and focus on it, rather than trying to be synonymous with the internet as a whole.

Why Are We Still on Facebook? : The New Yorker

Windows 7 theme inspired by Gnome. Gorgeous.by Gnome. Gorgeous.

Poe and the four conditions for happiness:

1. Life in the open air.
2. Love of another human being.
3. Freedom from all ambition.
4. Creation.

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942
(via kateoplis)

I do not know if we can build a better society. I do not even know if we will survive as a species. But I know these corporate forces have us by the throat. And they have my children by the throat. I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists. And this is a fight which in the face of the overwhelming forces against us requires us to embrace this sublime madness, to find in acts of rebellion the embers of life, an intrinsic meaning that lies outside of certain success. It is to at once grasp reality and then refuse to allow this reality to paralyze us. It is, and I say this to people of all creeds or no creeds, to make an absurd leap of faith, to believe, despite all empirical evidence around us, that good always draws to it the good, that the fight for life always goes somewhere—we do not know where; the Buddhists call it karma—and in these acts we sustain our belief in a better world, even if we cannot see one emerging around us.

Chris Hedges (via azspot)

To let a little bit of fantasy slip into your reality, or reality into your fantasy, and develop the ability to slide back and forth between the two, seems like a nearly perfect way to live.