Chad Aaron Hall

“ You want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you,”

Madeleine L’Engle counseled in her

advice to aspiring writers

.

Somehow we’ve become reluctant to publicly endorse any sort of value that lies outside of economics. Governments pay people to take vaccines. Cities are paying residents not to shoot people.

New research from Boston University suggests that tonight while you sleep, something amazing will happen within your brain. Your neurons will go quiet. A few seconds later, blood will flow out of your head. Then, a watery liquid called cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) will flow in, washing through your brain in rhythmic, pulsing waves.

Your mind should be flexible, but your process should be repeatable.

You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet. You don’t talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out and you try to locate the cat in the shimmer, the grammar in the picture.

While some stations still do sign off, they are increasingly rare in a hyperkinetic, always-open America that has shifted fully into 24-7 mode (indeed, one promise of much-hyped digital TV is that it will allow an individual channel to subdivide itself four or more times). If the test pattern symbolized a moment of silence in the cultural process,... See more