Living ethically

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.

My answer to her was simple: Begin. Rekindle your creative craft for a few moments every day. Don’t worry about the rest right now; simply sit down and make something.

If we’re not careful, we can get stuck in the Disinterest Zone for years, maybe decades, simply because it’s what pays the bills.

It was Descartes, too, who formed the project of a School of Arts and Crafts, where each artisan would learn fully to understand the theoretical bases of his own craft; he thus showed himself to be more socialist, in the matter of culture, than all Marx’s disciples

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

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.