“Once Suler, Sergei Lvovich, Tchekhov, and some one else, were sitting in the park and talking about women: he listened in silence for a long time and then suddenly said: ‘And I will tell the truth about women, when I have one foot in the grave. I shall tell it, jump into my coffin, pull the lid over me, and say, “Do what you like now.”’ The look he gave us was so wild, so terrifying that we all fell silent for a while.”~ Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (trans. S.S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf)
― The Shape
Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce – review | Books | The Guardian
Van Wyck Brooks, in his autobiography, provides an affecting portrait of John Butler Yeats
The idler's dilemma. It’s one thing to slack off in pursuit of self-interest. It’s another to be idle amid urgent human suffering
A new model for the art show?
We Are All Lawyers Now – The Rise of the Legalish Artificial Lawyer
Y Combinator plans to back carbon removal ventures MIT Technology Review
Can Catholic literature build on its rich heritage? | America Magazine
We’re All About Feelings Now – How Literature Evolved Beyond Narratives
Western literature’s gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. I’d often wondered, when reading older texts: Weren’t people back then interested in what characters thought and felt?
Robin Hanson on Signalling and Self-Deception
Conversations with Tyler | 1h 05m | Listen Later 
Wide-ranging discussion with Robin Hanson, co-author of “The Elephant in the Room”, which makes the case that as much as 90% of human behaviour is motivated by sub-conscious signalling, not the selfless motives typically professed
Wide-ranging discussion with Robin Hanson, co-author of “The Elephant in the Room”, which makes the case that as much as 90% of human behaviour is motivated by sub-conscious signalling, not the selfless motives typically professed
Jennifer Ackermann on the Genius of Birds
Being Human with Robert Sapolsky
Origin Stories | | 0h 38m | Listen Later 
Robert Sapolsky, author of “Behave”, with a fascinating and funny talk about human behaviour and the ways we are the same as, and different from, other animals.
Robert Sapolsky, author of “Behave”, with a fascinating and funny talk about human behaviour and the ways we are the same as, and different from, other animals.
On The Differences Between Being An Actor In The US And Europe
"Certainly American culture is different from European culture. So I had expected the life of a theatre artist in Paris or London to be more refined, somehow easier, and at the same time more gratifying on a creative level than mine here in the States. But it turns out that their struggles, passions, fiscal concerns, their training, their identity issues, and the sexism they face—in other words, much of their life experience, seems very similar to my own." … Read More