I know a fellow who's as broke as the Ten Commandments.
The 10 Rules of Being Human
Kottke: “A few decades ago, Chérie Carter-Scott devised a list of 10 Rules for Being Human, which was published in her 1998 book If Life Is a Game, These Are the Rules. These rules are often presented on social media as being “handed down from ancient Sanskrit” but their more recent origin shouldn’t keep us from learning what we can from them. Here they are:
- You will receive a body. You may love it or hate it, but it will be yours for the duration of your life on Earth.
- You will be presented with lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called ‘life.’ Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or hate them, but you have designed them as part of your curriculum.
- There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of experimentation, a series of trials, errors, and occasional victories. The failed experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that work.
- A lesson is repeated until learned. Lessons will be repeated to you in various forms until you have learned them. When you have learned them, you can then go on to the next lesson.
- Learning does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
- “There” is no better than “here”. When your “there” has become a “here”, you will simply obtain a “there” that will look better to you than your present “here”.
- Others are only mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects something you love or hate about yourself.
- What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you.
- Your answers lie inside of you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
- You will forget all of this at birth. You can remember it if you want by unraveling the double helix of inner knowing.”
Dan Sinykin, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. An excellent history of U.S. trade publishing, and not the sort of anti-capitalist mentality snark you might be expecting from the title. Recommended, for those who care.
2. Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World. It’s not the same kind of deep explanation as Toulmin or Schorske, nonetheless an excellent survey and introduction to the miracles of Viennese science, philosophy, and culture, earlier in the 20th century. I enjoyed this very much.
3. Peter Kemp, Retroland: A Reader’s Guide to the Dazzling Diversity of Modern Fiction. Is this an actual book, or just some smart guy running off at the mouth and writing what he really thinks? Would I prefer the former? No!
4. Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. It is getting harder and harder to find good popular science books, due to exhaustion of the major topics, but this is one of them. I kept on seeing reviews of this book, and not buying it due to fears of pandering. But most of this book is genuinely illuminating and on a wide range of biological topics, most of all how the female body is different. Ovaries, menopause, differences in brains — you’ll find it all here. Furthermore, the book does not drown in political correctness. Recommended.
5. Larry Rohter,
Note also that Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence is coming out in April, likely to be very good. I haven’t seen it yet.
