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My advice to young humanities students: 1. Don’t be afraid to skip around the chapters in an academic history book non-linearly. As long as it’s not narrative, it’s fine as long as you read everything 2. Don’t be afraid to use Wikipedia. Its footnotes and sources are a goldmine

There’s an Ursula K. Le Guin essay that’s actually really cracked the whole thing of the shadow and the collective self open for me in a way I’ve found really interesting/genuinely useful, I’ll link it

Borges at eighty: “I think that one should never use words like ‘the best’ or ‘the first,’ since those words carry no conviction and only lead to arguments. Beauty is not something rare. […] For example, I know nothing whatever about Hungarian poetry, and yet I am sure that [+]

“While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning a tune on the flute. ‘What good will it do you,’ they asked, ‘to know this tune before you die?’” — from “Why Read the Classics?,” in The Uses of Literature (trans. Patrick Creagh)

the brain rot didn’t start with ChatGPT. short form content and doomscrolling rewired our attention spans long before, it slowly stripped away focus, curiosity, and sense of presence. the world is big and vast! and so, the only real antidote is: books, essays, documentaries