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Will The Pandemic Be An Opportunity Or Will It Tear Us Apart?

Social media essentially gives a megaphone to the extremes, so it’s very hard to know what most people really think. “And when you look at the people who are loudest on Twitter and elsewhere, it’s quite clear that this pandemic is turning into just another culture-war issue, where people on the left see what they want to see and people on the right see what they want to see.” – The Atlantic

Leading Thinkers Envision The Post-Pandemic World

“They describe a society that is clear-eyed about the disparities that have made this pandemic so much worse for some communities than for others. They call on us to sustain each other through mutual aid, understanding that our lives are all woven together in ways that may not always have been visible until now. They outline the necessity of protecting democracy, resisting authoritarianism, and paying attention to one another, filling in the spaces left by loss.” – LitHub

Living Your Life Through Aphorisms

Much of the history of Western philosophy can be narrated as a series of attempts to construct systems. Conversely, much of the history of aphorisms can be narrated as an animadversion, a turning away from such grand systems through the construction of literary fragments. The philosopher creates and critiques continuous lines of argument; the aphorist, on the other hand, composes scattered lines of intuition. One moves in a chain of logic; the other by leaps and bounds. – Aeon

Playing Satie’s ‘Vexations’ To Evoke The Spirit Of Our Times

The pianist Igor Levit played a livestream of Erik Satie’s famous, mysterious work, consisting of four lines repeated 840 times, on Sunday. And, well: “The fascinating livestream occasionally slid into something more disturbingly voyeuristic, like witnessing a private crisis of faith and bracing for it to all go wrong.” (It didn’t.) – The New York Times