Enjoying the view from Limbo
What is the point of making observations about the cultural significance of today’s mainstream pop music divas, mainstream Hollywood movies, mainstream social science and humanities professors, or mainstream politicians? These people and their effusions may appear deleterious to good taste and corruptive of morals or freedom, but this is not because of anything they do, in any active sense — they are not...
Do you believe that there are certain fundamental tensions in human nature, that these tensions are intractable, that the challenge of surviving these tensions reasonably well is essentially what living a good life means, and that finding one’s way through these incongruities of our nature is possible only or primarily at the individual level, which is not to say in isolation, but rather...
Recently, a serious student mired in stressful study for a professional certification exam expressed anxiety about her current situation and concern about her work ethic, wondering how her study progress, judged by Time, would look any better than the movement of a sloth. This description got me thinking about our common use of the sloth as a standard metaphor for inefficient or unproductive...
In 2019, a young comedian named Shane Gillis won the career-making prize most North American comics dream of, earning a job as a cast member on Saturday Night Live. In response to this hiring, someone named Seth Simons took to social media to draw attention to a past performance in which Gillis (“who is white,” as the media would announce today, as though...
Russell Brand, a moderately clever British comedian who has of late taken to playing the celebrity-pundit-for-profit game on the internet, and who has thus effectively self-identified as an opponent of the radical Marxist zeitgeist, has, not surprisingly, become the latest popular target of a progressive pogrom, aka he is being “cancelled.” In this case, the modus operandi appears to be the same one...
A student asks me what I make of the fact that she often talks to herself while walking, either repeating words she has recently said to someone or imagining what she would say in situations yet to come. My reply: I talk to myself while walking all the time. Sometimes I suddenly catch myself talking a bit too audibly, or with too much...
I ended a recent post with a Pythagorean ethical maxim. Since I happen to have been wandering in that territory of late, let us return to the Pythagorean school for another lesson. Today’s advice, like my previous example, is offered to us by the very late (5th Century AD) Macedonian writer Joannes Stobaeus, who collected various valuable quotations from ancient Greek writers, a...
For the thinking individual, the paradox of writing or speaking for public consumption is that the moment you realize you have been “discovered,” which is to say that you have found some kind of audience, you will be tempted every hour by the devil who has devoured the soul of almost everyone who has ever been in this position. Why are people of...
About a year ago, John Cleese was interviewed by Reason Magazine editor-at-large Nick Gillespie, in front of an enthusiastic audience of libertarians. One of the topics of discussion was creativity, a subject on which Cleese has spoken extensively over the years. At one point in the interview, full of giddy expectancy, Gillespie, citing Cleese’s Monty Python writing partner (and alcoholic) Graham Chapman as...
Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen. (Ralph Waldo Emerson) Of course, that means you really have to make the decision, not just think of or wish for something. For it is only the mind that has decided sincerely and seriously that can inspire a cosmic conspiracy. And of course, that power encompasses poor decisions as well as...
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