I assign a type of extended schooling called âhomework,â so that the effect of surveillance, if not the surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhoodâŚ. children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control. Children will follow a private drummer if you canât get them into a uniformed marching band.
I don’t work. I only know how to have fun every day.
He who seeks beauty will find it.
You canât be interested in someone who wonât tell you anything. Being good at sharing is not the same as talking and talking and talking. It means you share your ideas, you let people play with them and youâre good at talking about them without having to talk about yourself.
While humans are excellent at empathizing with individuals, we are pretty terrible at empathizing with large groups of people who aren’t us; in part this is because we are collectively interacting with systems, which we aren’t very good at understanding and interacting with either. One personâs lack of access to medical care is cause for a fundraiser, but thirty million people without health insurance is a âchoiceâ that needs to be protected. One teenager from a disadvantaged background who gets to go to Harvard is a triumph; the systematic increase of student debt and exclusion of large chunks of the population from public higher education is necessary belt-tightening.
You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth. You have to view the world in different ways to do it justice, and the different ways can each be very rich, can each be internally consistent, can each have its own language and rules, but they may be mutually incompatible, and to do full justice to reality, you have to take both of them into account.
A decent swimmer in his own estimate, Vedantam went out into the sea one day and discovered that he had become superb and powerful; he was instantly proud of his new abilities. Far from shore, he realized he had been riding a current and was going to have to fight it all the way back to shore. âUnconscious bias influences our lives in exactly the same manner as that undercurrent,â Vedantam writes. âThose who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers; those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine.â
Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.
The best thing I know is to do exactly what you wish for a while.
Holding myself tenderly in this marred body.
Wondering if the quiet I feel is that happiness
wise people speak of, or the modulation
that is the acquiescence to death beginning.
A man said no person is educated who knows
only one language, for he cannot distinguish
between his thought and the English version.
The heart
never fits
the journey.
Always
one ends
first.
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world.
This is what youth must figure out:
Girls, love, and living.
The having, the not having,
The spending and giving,
And the meloncholy time of not knowing.
This is what age must learn about:
The ABC of dying.
The going, yet not going,
The loving and leaving,
And the unbearable knowing and knowing.
For some reason, online communities seem particularly resistant to the type of elitist promotion structure common in real world institutions. In Academia, high school students have to fight to become undergraduates. Undergraduates have to fight to become PhD candidates. PhD candidates have to fight to become adjuncts. Adjuncts have to fight to become tenured and tenured professors have to fight to become Dean. I canât even think of a single online community that bears even the slightest resemblance to this sort of power structure.
Young people often signal through their pretensions what they hope to become⌠They see people whom they admire, or are in some way attracted to, and they try to copy the preferences of those paragons. Such copying can lead to more and more pretension; but in many cases the pretense becomes real: the tastes we aspire to often become our own tastes.
Good art is pointable. Something complex occurs, and you canât quite explain how you feel about it. Instead, you find the appropriate book, song, poem, whatever, then point to it, and say âThat. That is how I feel.â Itâs a shorthand that stands in place of your own words. It speaks for you.
It would’ve been a better essay if I’d explained how disillusioned and lost I felt at that moment in my life. But that’s not how we did it back then. We changed every first-person confession into a royal “we” (or a less royal “you”).
The essential thing about writing is not understanding, but the pleasure of reading.
I use a very poor alphabet to express ideas which are very complicated.
Write about the lessons now so familiar they can be recited in your sleep. Write about the insights not yet sighted, their silhouettes blurry like the edges of a distant shore. Write about the job, the joy and chaos of designing and building. Write at least once a week. Write to learn how to write, and write to understand, the process itself like a looking glass through which you may yet discover a strange new world. Write so something meaningful can be said to others. Write to be accountable, write with honesty. Above all, write to preserve the scrap of an age, a voice; write so you wonât forget.
I have no plan to stop making dick jokes or to swear off ragging people who clearly have it coming to them. Itâs just that itâs important to me to make world-class dick jokes and to rag the worthy in a way that no one is expecting. I want to become an evangelist for hard work and editing, and I want to get to a place where it shows in everything that I do, make, and share. Yes, even if it makes me sound like a fancy guy who just doesnât get it.
It reminds me that story is the atomic unit of magic. [âŚ] It proves to me that life is about noticing and deeming the mundane as special, and that if you do that, just maybe you can wring the last bits of beauty out of this life while youâre here.
But just because you canât have opinions about all things doesnât mean you canât have opinions about any things. There are some things we know for sure. These might be minorâhow to treat your parents, how to grow tomatoes, how to build a house. We each have a few such things. Start there with your feet firmly planted and see how it feels. Then take a few small steps until you reach a place that still feels firm, but where nobody else is standing. Then try to make something beautiful with what you see.
Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.