Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to

Something strange and wondrous begins to happen when one spends stretches of time in solitude, in the company of trees, far from the bustle of the human world with its echo chamber of judgments and opinions — a kind of rerooting in one’s deepest self-knowledge, a relearning of how to simply be oneself, one’s most authentic self. Wendell Berry knew... See more

See this Instagram post by @iamsitting

But this isn’t really about the software. It’s about what software promises us—that it will help us become who we want to be, living the lives we find most meaningful and fulfilling. The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and

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History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order... A political order is premised not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what can be imagined. And our political imagination is rooted in our history, our culture, and our myths.

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Politics is the art of the

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“I wonder how much harder it would be to get straight women to accept the reality of marriage if they were not first presented with the fantasy of a wedding. I wonder if women today would so readily accept the unequal diminishment of their independence without their sense of self-importance being overinflated first. It feels like a trick, a trick... See more