The ESB Project at 100,000
I don't count the number of essays in the Project, much less the number of words, but I realized this morning that the Project probably stands at 100,000ish words. It's nearing the finish.
Topic
Briefly
A collection of 249 issues
About the One-Thing Files
“The One-Thing File” is a practice I learned from Econtalk. It's the practice of writing just one thing (okay, maybe more than one) that I learn from a book, essay, documentary, podcast, whatever.
For younger TDE readers, think of it as Reddit's “Today I Learned” feature.
On Small Talk
Small talk. I dislike it. It can be argued that it is part of the lubrication that keeps social wheels moving smoothly, but I'm not talking about cordialities ("Hi," "How are the kids doing?" etc.). I'm talking about extended conversations that are
Edward Frenkel on Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy
"Nietzsche wrote this book called The Birth of Tragedy and he presented this theory . . . of two sides of a human. One that comes from Apollo, and that's the left brain so to speak: everything that has to do with logic, and reason, and analyzing, dissecting, conceptualizing. And
McLuhan Sighting
"Philosophize This" dedicates an episode to Marshall McLuhan. It's very good.
The podcast is here.
The transcript to the podcast is here.
You ask people that question what would you rather be? Blind or deaf? And 99% of people say they'd rather be deaf.
Was Descartes Nuts?
The Cartesian view of the world adopts a stance normally found only in patients suffering from schizophrenia.
Referring to a famous passage from the Meditations on First Philosophy in which Descartes describes looking out of his window and seeing what he knows to be people passing by as seeming to
The Fable Behind The Master and His Emissary
The Master and His Emissary takes its title from a story by Nietzsche (McGilchrist, humorously, drops a footnote and says he can't remember where he saw it . . . and apparently the editors at Yale couldn't, either). It goes like this:
A wise spiritual master ruled a small
Shift in Drinking Habits
It seems alcohol is reeling. Every week, I see stories about another industry that's hurting, but few stories point to the culprit: legal marijuana.
In my generation, I see many adults who drink far less but smoke far more (or eat edibles). I've known at least
All Gnostics are Left-Hemispheric, but Not All Left-Hemispherics are Gnostics
The difference between political gnosticism and cultural gnosticism
Chesterton and the Millennial Nun
In an essay that appeared some years back in the Huffington Post, Eve Fairbanks asked why after fifty years of decline, millennial women were discovering religious vocations. Fairbanks is not alone in her confusion. Many Catholics are also puzzled: not long ago, traditional women’s religious life, with all the