Black Magic and Scientism
Magic has fascinated me since I learned that the high watermark of magic was the Renaissance. The cutting-edge Renaissance thinkers were magicians. Magic and science were intertwined, its practitioners flitting between the two practices (arts) in their attempt to understand and, ultimately, control/manipulate the world, unaware that they are
Why Gardening Matters
Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813): Left-Hemispheric
McGilchrist writes about the left hemisphere's love for abstraction. Because it is the hemisphere of action ("it's tasked with tasks," is my (oh-so-clever) way of putting it), it prefers abstract ideas that give it guideposts for action. It keeps things simple, which makes things
Hemispheres in the Garden
The left hemisphere plans, incidentally. The right hemisphere flows.
Carol Deppe draws an autobiographical distinction in The Tao of Vegetable Gardening between "Planning Carol" and "Doing Carol." PC lays out elaborate plans that DC later disregards as she gardens. I can relate . . . big-time. Deppe's
Google and the Hemispheres
The Industrial Revolution had been churning for a hundred years. Results were impressive. Standards of living were climbing. Sure, urban slums were miserable, but many historians believe they beat the squalor in rural villages.
But industrialization was messy and not just from a pollution standpoint. Labor itself was messy. There
The Cell Phone is a Monkey Trap for the Left Hemisphere
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 Defecated Rationality of the Left Hemisphere in Action. Right Before Our Eyes.
The question: How can people who make the smallest carbon footprint be responsible for making the largest carbon footprint?
The answer: They can't.
Except in the mental world of our brain's left hemisphere.
This is a real-life (real-time) example from Tanzania and the plight of the
Against Human Flourishing?
A few notes about a difficult essay