thinking out loud

I begin with three apparently random observations.

I recently finished reading Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac.

My reflections on the books I read this month (Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

Some random and vaguely formulated thoughts about books, ideas, and possessions.

James Atlas: We think of ourselves not as located in a continuum, part of an ever-evolving world, but as its endpoint.

Why write?

Bertrand Russell, as quoted by Ved Mehta: You know the best remark [G.

Earlier this month I introduced my comments about Megan Marshall’s After Lives: On biography and the mysteries of the human heart by saying that “I came out of the reading with the sense that I know Marshall as I might know someone with whom I have occasi…

Anaïs Nin: We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.

Like many others, I post notes about my reading on my blog.

Aldo Leopold, writing in 1948: We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.

A.J.

Jenny Odell: A 2012 Pew study found that 62 percent of U.S. respondents disagreed with the statement “Success in life is determined by forces outside our control.”

If I were forced to categorize this post, I’d be torn between two options: the category of “Trivia about philosophers that I find interesting” and the category of “How can I distract myself for at least a minute from the country that is falling apart arou…

Peter Godfrey-Smith: A small octopus was staring at one of our unmanned cameras on a tripod for a while from its den, and then went off camera and returned with a piece of dead sponge.

My reflections on the books I read this month (Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

I resisted posting anything about yesterday’s Oval Office fiasco because I wanted some time to reflect.

Erich Hatala Matthes: …we need to remember that an explanation of the relationship between our sense of self and the motivation to conserve is not necessarily a justification of it.

John Dewey: …the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments…

Some time ago I came across this in Lydia Davis’s Essays Two: I read recently that in English, a mere 43 words account for half of all words in common use, and that just nine (and, be, have, it, of, the, to, will, you ) account for a quarter in almost any…

Peter Godfrey-Smith: Fish will count objects in experimental tasks.

My reflections on the books I read this month (Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

I’m currently reading Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper.

W.E.B.

In 1943, the French philosopher and activist Simone Weil was living in London.

It’s a standard move in the last 10 days – has it really been only ten days?

Agnes Callard: All fiction offers up the possibility of escape from everyday life, but great fiction allows us to explore what we otherwise look away from.

Or perhaps I could call this post “How does one live in a world that seems to be falling apart?”

I’ve struggled to write this post.

Samantha Harvey: (I’m not sure how much of the power in this text will survive my ripping it out of context, but I can’t resist the urge to put it here.

Thomas Merton: “I am still trying to find out: and that is why I write.”

Last week I announced my decision to delete my Facebook account.

Like many other users of Mastodon, I’m impressed with Mastodon’s announcement that the people should own the town square that is Mastodon.

I’ve been writing in emacs org-mode for a couple of decades now.

I don’t play guitar all that much anymore, though I’m trying very hard (or, at least thinking very hard about trying very hard!)

Rebecca Solnit: Lies gradually erode the capacity to know and to connect.

Albert Einstein: I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination.

This photograph of a fallen statue of Hafex al-Assad, father of the recently deposed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, brought to mind Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias.

In his book Living on Earth, Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a thought experiment to aid one interested in thinking carefully about the morality of what’s somewhat euphemistically called “factory farming.”

Peter Godfrey-Smith: The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his wry, moody memoir Tristes Tropiques …, discussed this aspect of writing: ‘Writing is a strange invention.

I stopped posting on Facebook in November 2016.

I’m just not willing to go down this rabbit hole, but I can’t resist describing it, however briefly.

Ferris Jabr: We’ve known for more than a century that fossil fules are combustible crypts containing the power of countless deceased life forms that collectively absorbed hundreds of millions of years of sunlight.

To state the obvious, I’m not the only one who has spent more than a few minutes over the last couple of weeks attempting to state clearly the New Year’s Resolutions™ I’m thinking now that I’ll fail to live up to this year.

My reflections on the books I read this month (Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it.

As I write this entry in January 2025, I’m continuing to think about just what I’m trying to do and how best to do it.

I didn’t track reading all that carefully during this time – sometimes life just gets in the way.

Hannah Arendt: Impotence or complete powerlessness is, I think, a valid excuse.

Joan Westinberg argues that the death of critical thinking will kill us long before AI.