David Pennington

I personally think it makes people less attractive, authentic and worth connecting to. Anything that strips us of our imperfections is missing the point. The AI images, music and video are another. Of note, I actually think the meme uses are fine (it’s entertainment, not art, and that’s something else).

THE POORLY DEFINED PROBLEM OF BEING ALIVE

One of the take-home lessons of Buddhist philosophy is that feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we’d often be better off. Learning to do that is a big part of what mindfulness meditation is about.

But this raises an obvious question—if we lose libraries as the last public space for quiet reading and reflection, what can replace it?

Simone Weil, writing in Oppression and Liberty (published posthumously in 1955):

“Never has the individual been so completely delivered up to a blind collectivity, and never have men been less capable, not only of subordinating their actions to their thoughts, but even of thinking.

alchemy is about facilitating change, growth, evolution, or transformation in another. alchemy is what we do when we offer services or products of any kind.

A book where you can enter "sport" and end up with "a diversion of the field" -- this is in fact the opposite of what I'd known a dictionary to be. This is a book that transmutes plain words into language that's finer and more vivid and sometimes more rare.