Living ethically

To face the storm you must learn to respond to it rather than react to it.

How do you write from the place in your gut where love dwells? The Sufi poet Rumi said, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

All oppressive societies give birth to a false conception of the relationship between man and nature, from the mere fact that it is only the downtrodden who are in direct contact with nature,

The humanities are our most treasured—and useless—“special skills.” And it is their very uselessness—their determination to remain uncorrupted by models of efficiency and optimization—that is their saving grace.

We’ve been given no shortage of digital tools that should, in theory, help us work better, with more focus and efficiency, and connect us more easily with our colleagues. Instead, email, instant messaging, remote-meeting apps, work-flow and project-management software and so on can feel like so many buckets with holes in the bottom, maddeningly

Culture, he announced defiantly, had become the new counterculture.

When you’re first getting to know someone, you don’t want to try to peer into their souls right away. It’s best to look at something together.