Creatively Advancing into Novelty
I remember sitting with my wise old Rabbi once and hearing a baby scream. He looked at me and said, “Did you ever notice how babies come into the world with their tiny fists clenched?” “Yes,” I said. “Do you know how our sages explain that? They say that babies, not knowing any better, clench…
How else can one write but of those things which one doesn’t know, or knows badly? It is precisely here that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in…
A fish swims through the sea While the sea is, in a certain sense Contained within the fish! Oh, what am I to think Of what the writing Of a thousand lifetimes could not explain If all the forest trees were pens And all the oceans, ink? Lyrics from The Dryness and The Rain by…
In case you havn’t already seen this infographic, it’s pretty cool and informtative/incendiary.
Some people simply can’t process the horror in front of them. Some people suffer from what the psychologists call Normalcy Bias. When they find themselves in some unsettling circumstance, they shut down and pretend everything is normal. … People are really good at self-deception. We attend to the facts we like and suppress the ones…
Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It’s one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men’s shirt buttons on the right and women’s on the left. Above is…
…it seems here that capitalism gets human nature right. This is one of the reasons capitalism appears to be more successful than communism. Communism seems to miss the mark on human nature. Ironically by being too optimistic and hopeful, even Christian. People don’t tend to work hard for the good of others. Saints might do…
Nay, we honor no kings without kingdoms; nor hear the sound of harps save when the strings are plucked by hands; nor do we see a child playing in our olive grove as if he were a young olive tree. And all words must needs rise from lips of flesh, or else we deem each…
What is seen with baby eyes? Perhaps it’s sprouting sights unknown, Dressed in mops and donned with suits. Then forgotten fragrance upon which spilled Gets bumped whenever starry sky’s are held, Fraught until the end we sort; gathered, As if tortured tinder doused in rain, Shivering by night, but held so close (Those baby hands…
Just a follow-up to our discussion on parenting, which I really liked; needless to say, it’s a subject that I’m consumed with at the moment. I wanted to send along a link to a blog post I wrote on authoritarianism in parenting, and a link to the book I was telling you all about, Parent…