the joy of writing
self-awareness boils in your bloodstream you feel immersed in the wanton inflation of the infinite hole that homes you, and keeps you dissolving into that heightened state of mind, so you can push the buttons or beings loopiness. now two minds in such a state will smile at each other as two monads, on a …
What is a ball?
Dear Miru, We were playing with a ball today, but you said it wasn’t a ball. Or, as you put it, that the ball was “kapot”. You meant that the ball lacked significantly in “ballness”; that its “ballness” was broken. I understand your intuition: The ball we were playing with didn’t look like any other …
Pope vs. Trump
Pope Francis has stated that “avoiding pregnancy” (as opposed to abortion) is not an absolute evil, and spoke out in favor of the use of contraceptives to avoid the spread of the Zika virus. In the case of certain other viruses, he added, contraception is not only an understandable decision but one that could count on God’s …
Two poems of Tomas Tranströmer
I discovered, through Facebook, the 2011 Swedish Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer. Here are two of his poems in translation: The Couple They switch off the light and its white shade glimmers for a moment before dissolving like a tablet in a glass of darkness. Then up. The hotel walls rise into the black sky. The …
Democratization of News (sketch)
I have the following simple idea: a news aggregation tool that pulls news items from Internet sources and applies a fully democratic weighting process. The news items are presented as a time line or a world map. Problem 1. How can the aggregation tool decide which Internet sources to trust? I assume, for reasons of simplicity …
Mindfulness
“Mindfulness, the practice of sitting still and focusing on your breath and thoughts, has surged in popularity over the last few years, with a boom in apps, online courses, books and articles extolling its virtues.” This is as close to the final stage of commodification as it gets. The “practice of sitting still” is now …
Sanders – Trump
They had mounted a television set on the wall of the restaurant – there was no avoiding it. In the international news bulletin, there was Bernie Sanders calling for nothing less than a political revolution. He was more explicit about the “powers to be overthrown” than young Obama eight years ago: The one percent, corporate …