Gus Guerrero

“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.”

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... 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,... See more

“Books are for reading. As straightforward as that may sound, books are still usually promoted with images of pristine books waiting to be read. Being a writer myself, the sight of my own unread books is somewhat unbearable. I prefer those copies that have been read and read to the point that they are almost falling apart. That have earmarks,

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From the broad temporality

that this era forces us to make sense of, our existence is surely dependent

only on what it leaves behind.

That is, it forces us to imagine our lives as

the marks, remains and impacts we have left upon the Earth, without “our”

in

fl

uence to de

fi

ne exactly what was

meant

by these marks.

In social science, hope is not simply the belief that one’s circumstances will get better; for that, we use the term optimism. Hope is the belief that an individual can make things better.

“The chief utility of a general theory... of strategy lies in its ability not to point out lessons, but to isolate things that need thinking about. Theory provides insights and questions, not answers.”

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 interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play . It seems to describe a life where it’s just fun to be reading, learning, writing, and collaborating on... See more