David Pennington

“You should never ask an artist about their art,” Maurizio Cattelan said, immediately on arrival. “The best art raises lots and lots of questions,” he added. “Not answers.”

The question isn’t whether we can build cool things under authoritarianism. It’s whether those things will still matter in a system that punishes critical, independent thinking.

So far, 2024 isn’t giving me any joy.

brief moment in time where the world worshipped this type of guy (few extra IQ points and the will to use them) wonder what happens to them now, will they all start crashing out together? https://t.co/tnX5KYDgRS

Narrative medicine is the discipline of applying the skills used in analyzing literature to interviewing patients.[1] The premise of narrative medicine is that how a patient speaks about his or her illness or complaint is analogous to how literature offers a plot (an interconnected series of events) with characters (the patient and others) and is... See more

“librarians are what the internet is aching for—people on task to care about the past, with respect to the past and also to what it shall bequeath to the future.” Can we reimagine libraries for the digital age?

We have become used to the ease and convenience of our digital lives, and we expect the same offline. A slick, transactional, no-strings-attached kind of life, predictable and controllable.

But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. “It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told me. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” The real problem here, the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans... See more