The Cell Phone is a Monkey Trap for the Left Hemisphere
And Eight Other Short Observations about the Hemispheres
Topic
Briefly
A collection of 251 issues
The Left Hemisphere Thwarts Focus: On Art Appreciation
Attention, attention, attention.
Everyone is starved for it . . . their own, not others. People want to be able to focus again.
Madison Avenue purposefully kills it:
The legal scholar Tim Wu, in his book “The Attention Merchants,” notes, “Without express consent, most of us have passively opened ourselves up to the
The World of Wine Collecting
It's a combination of pretension, mystery, investment, viticulture, vinification, historical appreciation, and fraud.
The world of wine collecting. The world of the 1%. Scratch that. The 1/10th of one percent.
It sounds like oenophiles work with vintners to create a buzz about a new wine, one that
Pragmatism and the Saints
"Pragmatism" and "practicality" aren't the same things. When a person says, "I'm just being practical," he's probably being highly impractical.
It normally means he's just thinking rationally: with the certitude of his left hemisphere, which excludes
Sam Kriss: Drug Aficionado and Master Essayist
I don't know whether I'm impressed or appalled, and I can't tell if the writer is confessing or bragging.
But boy, Sam Kriss, a "British writer and dilettante," has written the most enjoyable essay of the year. The agnostic Kriss ("[m]
Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences by Diana Pasulka
When Virtue Becomes Vice
We can't pursue virtue without vice.
Every pursuit of virtue, after all, requires us to strive to advance our happiness. Every such pursuit, in other words, is selfish, which is the root of all vice.
It's a paradox.
Paradox, The Hemispheres, and the TaoA basic tension
Elitism v. Snobbery
I never could "get into" Bell's Crowd Culture. This micro review kinda makes me want to try again, but only "kinda." The book falls into "snobbish conservatism," which I've never much cared for.
We tend to think of liberalism as
Mint Julep: The Percy Battle?
Poet Will Percy provided this recipe for the Mint Julep in his autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee:
First you needed excellent bourbon whisky; rye or Scotch would not do at all. Then you put half an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampened it with
A Few Great Charles Bukowski Quotes
His headstone features a graphic of a boxer and the Zen-inspired epitaph “Don’t try.”