- “What does story telling do to people? It is making them dream, it is making them suffer as well. But can we stop storytelling? I don’t think so.” — Julie Delpy, actress in and co-writer of the films “Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset,” and “Before Midnight”, is interviewed by philosophers at AfB
- “The fact that there are unhealthy forms of pity should not prevent us from recognising its humanising element” — Gordon Marino (St. Olaf) on pity
- Do people view pain as mind-centric or body-centric? — new results suggest people conceive of pain as a “hybrid combining both mental and bodily aspects”
- Underphilosophized: “the fraught relationship between the private insurance industry and the state, and the growing power of insurance companies in gathering and wielding data about individuals and groups” — Caley Horan (MIT) looks at the issues
- The allies of Viktor Orban, the right-wing prime minister of Hungary, “have poured £1.5 million into a chain of coffee shops in Scruton’s memory” — the first cafe to open features “memorabilia including books, records and a teapot donated by the widow of Sir Roger Scruton”
- “By contemplating what is possible in the universe, in addition to what happens, we have a much more complete picture of the physical world” — Chiara Marletto (Oxford) on the importance of counterfactuals in science
- “8-bit” style watercolor rendition of Raphael’s “School of Athens” — by artist Adam Lister
Is “Improving” Your Personality A Thing? We
Mayb we should all try to become more compassionate or honest or forgiving, but there’s no comparable moral demand for shy people to become extraverted, or for excitable people to be more placid. – Psyche
- Almanac: Joseph Conrad on loneliness
“Who knows what true loneliness is—not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.” Joseph... Read more
What are some examples of the are okay too.
Art that accidentally predicted the future
What are some examples of the arts (any genre--music, literature, etc) that now seem eerily prescient to? Like poems or lyrics that allude to major world events that nobody knew would happen? I'm more interested in examples using major events, but personal ones are okay too.
What Poetry Can Predict
Naja Marie Aidt’s When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back is an account of the first few years after her twenty-five-year-old son Carl died in a tragic accident. The excerpt below is addressed to him.
PHOTO: AMANDA HILL. CREDIT: THE NOAA WEATHER IN FOCUS PHOTO CONTEST 2015.
My first book, a poetry collection, was published in 1991. I wrote it when you were a baby. I wrote it as I nursed you, as I rocked you, as I got to know you, as you learned to crawl and walk. There’s a poem in the book in which I describe a dream I had when you were a year old. A dream about you. In this poem:
I woke
and the dream will not leave me
my son is about to drown
and I can’t save him
his brand-new self
soft as a bear’s snout
sinks in the clear water
What Is “Internet Literature”?
The way Internet Literature treats its relationship to the world—and the anxiety of that treatment—is what distinguishes it as a form, and that goes straight to the heart of what distinguishes the Internet itself as a technology: the link. – LitHub
Journalist Janet Malcolm, 86
“A longtime New Yorker staff writer and the author of several books, the Prague native practiced a kind of post-modern style in which she often called attention to her own role in the narrative, questioning whether even the most conscientious observer could be trusted.” – AP
