Jay Matthews

"I always insist on my agency as a thinker. I have the right to read what I like to read. I think that is actually more radical: to insist that because I have my own mind, I will be influenced by whom I choose, and I will write what I choose." — Ocean Vuong

And so I think this is one of the reasons we, as a species, need the mediation of these stories — to create spaces where we can feel what it’s appropriate to feel and also acknowledge the complexity. We didn’t come to tie a bow on this and say that there’s a message. We came here to ask more questions and problematize it and interrogate it.

Thus “The Simultaneous City,” with texts spanning from about 1909 to 1915, explores the technological myths of the modern city that are archetypal to the Futurist imagination: new machines that abolish distance and modify our senses, new simultaneous perceptions of the street, the crowd, and nightlife, the dynamic clash of competing forces, and the... See more

This is why art matters: because it dredges our psychic depths in ways that even the artist may not understand. “The arts,” writes the Zen poet Gary Snyder, following Levi-Strauss, “are the wilderness areas of the imagination, surviving like national parks in the midst of civilized minds.” Strange things grow in the wilderness; unusual plants... See more

Proposition 1. As rationalized institutional rules arise in given domains of work activity, formal organizations form and expand by incorporating these rules as structural elements.

In this paper, Walls tells how the popular ideas of psychoanalysis and even the self have been selectively informed by Darwin's ideas of competition and individualism. The societal exclusion of Darwin and other scientist's work on the superiority of group cooperation has made for a model of psychology that looks for causes of distress within the... See more

"A lot of people no longer do work that has any meaning to them, since humans are productive creatures... we are meant to create. When we do work that is not creative, that doesn't reflect who we are, that imposes depression, anxiety, a sense of meaninglessness. When we have a sense of meaninglessness, we will want to substitute the meaninglessness... See more

"If stories are linked with regularly repeated spatial practices, they become mutually supportive, and when a story becomes sedimented into the landscape, the story and the place dialectically help to construct and reproduce each other. Places help to recall stories that are associated with them, and places only exist (as named locales) by virtue... See more

[on Wilczek's current project]: weaving together threads from across the frontiers of knowledge, optimistically pushing ever deeper, never satisfied with an incomplete understanding of the universe and all the potential it holds for us. And having a great time doing it.