culture
“The contemporary man should not find it difficult to play a role in which modern life is casting him. Glued to his movie or television screen, fed his daily dose of scandals, always watching and never acting, he has become a Peeping Tom.”
Leo Nasskau • René Girard, mimetic desire, and society's biggest rat race
By mistaking language as merely a tool that’s a means to an end—little different from a spatula—too many people have lost sight of the fact that understanding language provides the basis of smart thinking.
The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition
Every doctrine of inevitability carries a weaponized virus of moral nihilism programmed to target human agency and delete resistance and creativity from the text of human possibility. Inevitability rhetoric is a cunning fraud designed to render us helpless and passive in the face of implacable forces that are and must always be indifferent to the... See more
the perfect playlist
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.
Drew Austin • #162: Minimum Viable Self
Bad Feminist: Roxane Gay on the Complexities and Blind Spots of the Equality Movement
Maria Popovathemarginalian.org
Sylvia Plath on Living with the Darkness and Making Art from the Barely Bearable Lightness of Being
Maria Popovathemarginalian.org
In the early 2010s, a new phenomenon emerged called an “Instagram wall”. In part, it was an outgrowth of the street-art movement of the 00s, a gentrification of graffiti that saw clean, officially sanctioned murals take over city walls, particularly in neighbourhoods where decrepit warehouses were plentiful. Street art became an attraction in and... See more