The Reading Paradox
The Hemispheres Create Paradoxes. One is Brewing Right Now: We're Reading More Than Ever But Reading Reading Less Than Ever
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BYCU: Bands that Sell-Out to Beer
Later addendum: John Densmore's excellent The Doors Unhinged: Jim Morrison's Legacy Goes on Trial is only $2.99 on Kindle.
5 Band Beers
1. Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale (5.3% ABV)
2. Juice Runners Paloma Remix (5.9% ABV)
3. Hanson Brothers Beer
Escaping the Cocooned Mind
We’re all wrapped up in rationalist cocoons, spun not by our own hands but by the sticky threads of a world gone mad with reason.
Our spit’s in the walls, sure, but we didn’t design the daggone things. We were born into them, raised in them, schooled
The Thrill of Competition Might be Vitamins for the Left Hemisphere of Your Brains
And in this modern age, you never need to nourish your left hemisphere
The Third Way Fever
This modern world’s got a fever, and it ain’t for more cowbell.
It’s for third alternatives.
Everybody’s itching for that elusive other option, like it’s the last ticket out of a burning city. Ray Oldenburg lit a fuse back in ’89 with The Great Good
Documentary Review. Join or Die
America’s crumbling civic soul gets a hard look in Join or Die, a documentary riffing on Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000). It’s a 100-minute dirge for the death of social capital, that invisible glue of community that once held this nation together.
But for all its otherwise-excellent
And Now We See that Trump is a Gaslighter
Paul Kingsnorth nailed it in 2023 when he said the pandemic response rewired his brain. He saw the unholy trinity of power (Big Government, Big Business, Big Media) weave a narrative so tight it could choke a nation, the kind of thing you’d expect from a dictatorship, not the
Five Reasons to Drink at the Bar
In the twilight of Western civilization, where the sterile grip of the left hemisphere has throttled the soul out of our culture, the pub stands as a defiant outpost of human connection against the gnostic tide.
The churches once held the line too, but many—mainline Protestants, Jesuits, and their
GKC and McGilchrist
I ain’t got a shred of hard proof, but I’d wager that G.K. Chesterton’s noggin was rigged with a hulking, boisterous right hemisphere that steamrolled the left like a runaway freight train.
That jovial giant’s right hemisphere didn’t just outmuscle its analytical counterpart. It
Hand Me that Loaf of Nothing
America’s gone and lost its knack for wasting time, and we’re paying a butcher’s bill for it.
Young folks, especially, ain’t lingering with each other, not in the aimless, sprawling way that used to stitch souls together.
The fallout’s grim: depression’s up, suicide’s