a eulogy and I realise I’m listening to it.
By George Carlin
More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning — and that its meaning is terrifying.
— René Girard, born in 1923“We’re in hot water”; “the straw that breaks the camel’s back”; “a leopard cannot change its spots”: What exactly makes a cliché a cliché?... The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea
The story of how a cripplingly shy, often sickly Slavic boy became Andy Warhol is also the story of our own antihumanist swerve Warhola
Record Year For Movies At The Box Office
It got more expensive to go to the movies, and ticket prices hit a new high, averaging $9.38 over the summer. But it’s not just the rising cost of admission accounting for the surge. Attendance is also up over 4% from last year. – Variety
Last sentences in novels often invoke the book’s title — or moths (Nabokov); or nautical imagery (Conrad). But the best last lines aren’t endings at all.
So you've been shamed. What to do if you've been wrongfully shamed, or rightfully so but want your life back? Helen Andrews knows from experience
It is a banal philosophical idea, espoused by the Buddha, Sufi masters, Schopenhauer, Bergson, and Weil: Civilization depends on humility
The Greeks had a word for it (epichairekakia), as did the Romans (malevolentia) and the French (joie maligne). In English we’ve adopted “schadenfreude"
Arnold Kling’s 93 pp. macro memoirWhy Are There So Many Books Now With F*ck In The Title?
Despite the occasional marketing hurdle, clearly these books are selling just fine. That’s the surprising thing about all of these supposedly irreverent titles. The premise of their humor is that they’re shocking, but they’re now so prevalent that it’s hard to imagine being shocked by them. They are “the product of a culture in which transgressing social norms has become an agreed-on social norm.” – Slate
Why (And How) Do Our Brains Trick Us Into Massive Procrastination?
Most chores could be accomplished in minutes, but hordes of people wait days, weeks, even years. What the heck, brains? Is it “decision fatigue,” or is it “chronic procrastination,” or is it just that doing dishes is mind-numbingly boring? – The Atlantic
