Category: ideas

“Most creative geniuses don’t start with a specific goal and follow it through with deliberate practice. Instead, they maintain an openness to discovering whatever arises. Although this openness to new ideas might sound like just waiting around for serendipity to strike, it’s a more deliberate process.”

“The class, ‘Sappho and Sweat,’ was the second offering from ‘Heavy Breathing,’ which its co-founders describe as ‘a summer series of free critical theory seminars in the form of absurd, artist-led conceptual fitness experiences.’ The idea came to Lisa Rybovich Crallé, a multimedia artist, last year. She and Sophia Wang, a dancer who recently completed her Ph.D. in literature, were collaborating on a sculptural installation when they took a long walk up a hill and discovered that discussing Aristotle’s conception of topos while huffing could be uniquely stimulating.”

“‘Nature has done everything for it and man very little,’ wrote one correspondent of Los Angeles in 1867. ‘Beneath the wide verandas the people sit, and about two-thirds of the population seem to spend the day smoking in front of the hotel and going in for drinks.’ That same author then went on to catalog the region’s agricultural bounty in great detail: ‘the richest gardens, vineyards, orange groves, and lemon, fig and olive plantations which can be seen in America.'”

But “the extended hours will involve self-service for book lending from a limited stock, and the core library service will continue to open for just 40 hours a week. The building will remain closed on Sundays.”

“After placing an order, you’d get to select a pickup time window. Then, all you’d have to do is stop by on the way home and pick up your items. It’s said that there will also be a small store location on site, perhaps allowing customers to walk in and buy without placing an order online first. The image above is a render pulled from the planning documents.”

“I do not think people should be driving cars for much longer, unless they want to. We will be killing and injuring many, many fewer people if we turn over driving. It’s one of the most important things we can do. If we value human life, let’s not end it as often.”

“In part two of The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir details a series of common responses people have to the loss of childhood. … The truth is, most people you meet are struggling with that horrifying mix of freedom and lack of freedom that comes with adulthood. But they’re all grieving in different ways. Beauvoir is taking subtle shots at some of the greatest thinkers of the era – she’s no fan of Friedrich Nietzsche – and her categories are uncannily applicable to recent Tinder dates.”

“I am thinking fast; new fears flood in at the speed of perception. I’m noticing some things you – the interviewing doctors – do not. Yes hallucinations, some of them; fight or flight is also heightening my senses. Paranoid hypotheses are disproved and discarded, others take their place. Some will stay with me for months to come. But I don’t know that there is any future. … The thought, ‘I’m experiencing psychosis’ – terrifying when it comes – is unavailable; it’s all too new for that.”

“Lonely people do understand social skills, and often outperform the non-lonely when asked to demonstrate that understanding. It’s just that when they’re in situations when they need those skills the most, they choke.”