Andrei Stoica

There’s a fascinating On Being interview with Nick Cave from a couple years ago, where he discussed his belief that “ Religion is spirituality with rigor .” Whereas religion actively asks something of us, he explained, spirituality can feel squishier, less demanding and therefore, he implied, less rewarding.

What happens when you give a load of engineers a brief? I always ask the question: What would’ve happened if you hadn’t given the brief for High Speed 2 to a load of engineering firms who immediately focused on speed, time, distance, capacity? What if you’d given the brief to Disney instead?

They would’ve said, “First of all, we’re going to rewrite... See more

Selfhood in humans is not the expression of any central unity. We are programmed to perceive identity in ourselves, when in truth there is only change, We are hardwired for the illusion of self.

- John Gray, as quoted by Tim Carpenter in To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die

Under conditions of widespread institutional dysfunction, formal trappings can be disconnected from the core competence with which they are supposedly associated. Sometimes they can even begin to anti-correlate. But assuming the institution in question is not in such a dysfunctional context, the formal trappings of an organization actually do... See more