Today our eccentrics—by which I mean those who push at the boundaries of the acceptable—are more likely to provoke for the sake of provoking, not to expand possibilities but usually out of petty resentment; they are most often trolls. In shorter supply are public figures who act earnestly and gleefully, who use their idiosyncrasies and status as od... See more

Research as leisure activity is directed by passions and instincts . It’s fundamentally very personal: What are you interested in now ? It’s fine, and maybe even better, if the topic isn’t explicitly intellectual or academic in nature. And if one topic leads you to another topic that seems totally unrelated, that’s something to get excited about—no... See more

"The stronger [the] identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction."

“Strategy can be considered a simple machine that consists of just four working parts: Ends, Ways, Means, and Assumptions”

For Gray, Ends were the goals, Ways the actions taken, Means were the resources deployed, and Assumptions were the necessary leaps, imagination, and guesses.

A textile (even one as dense as felt) invites the eye to see its strands and, at the same time, see it as a field. This dynamic becomes further complicated when it is draped, folded, or otherwise attached to some thing or some body. Then thread, fabric, and scaffolding become a trinity of interdependence.

The untethered – people without a strong connection to an ecology and community – lack a shared past and see little value in working towards a shared future.

“Becoming a person of place makes long-term investments desirable, because the future becomes more valuable to you. Those who have committed to a place, an ecosystem, a community, feel those as... See more

“Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middleclass men and women who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will last forever or else are so frightened it won’t that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.”

“Late style arrives when you realise that you are: competent enough to write those things you wanted to write when you were twenty-five; impatient enough to have one more go at going all the way; angry enough not to allow anyone else to persuade you to do something else. At the same time, late style is cold, amused, contemptuous and savage about ev... See more

When research is your leisure activity, you’ll end up making connections between your existing interests and new ideas or topics. Everything gets pulled into the orbit of your intellectual curiosity. You can go deeper and deeper into a narrow topic, one that seems fascinatingly trivial and end up learning about the big topics: gender, culture, econ... See more