Michael Cunningham: You could say that writing is a continuation of that effort to render and recognize everything and everyone by naming their qualities, ideally from an illuminating angle — by naming them in ways that are both recognizabl…
Deborah Levy: All writing is about walking ghosts. Or perhaps the ghosts walk the writer. Towards our parents or something like them. Towards our siblings and lovers and friends or something like them. Towards the unknown. Towards the edge
Hey, there, blog. It’s been a while. I’ve been busy, but that’s not the main reason for my silence. The bigger problem I’m finding it hard to finds words that capture my sense of what’s going on in the world. But I’m still here, and still s…
I have never understood asceticism. I have always thought it proceeded from lack of sensuousness, lack of vitality. I’ve never realized that there is a form of asceticism — consisting in simplifying one’s needs and seeking to take a more ac…
Many a scientist has patiently designed experiments for the purpose of substantiating his belief that animal operations are motivated by no purposes. He has perhaps spent his spare time in writing articles to prove that human beings are as
Our son was three years old, and he was in the kitchen with me and my wife as we were preparing to eat breakfast one morning. Standing in front of the open refrigerator door, he announced that he would like to have a pickle on his cereal. “…
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms;
Climate change is caused by many human actions, and the solutions are likewise manifold: change how we design our residences, towns and cities, transit systems, agriculture, land management, and overall consumption habits, including food. B…
We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire’s, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, “It is later than you think.” But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late f…
This past week I added another word to my vocabulary: tribology. According to the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers, tribology is “the study of surfaces moving relative to one another.” They go on to explain that such study
(Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.) I came across this book only a week before the day that I’m writing this note, and I finished reading it several days ago. Yes, it’s a short book (only 139 pages), but I finished
I’m wrapping up this four-week project with today’s report. It’s a little — but only a little — frustrating to see that my phone use crept up a bit in this final week. I have what I think is a good excuse: my wife and I were both traveling