Keely Adler

most humans don’t really realize how interdependent we are to other organisms. Bacteria, fungi, viruses, bugs—there is still this binary thinking of these organisms as good or bad, as clean or dirty, which really obscures the reality.

While the market mechanism is a good enough device for making social decisions about unimportant matters such as the mix of colors in the production of frocks, the length of skirts, or the flavors of ice cream, it cannot and should not be relied upon for important, big matters such as the distribution of income, the maintenance of economic... See more

what enables this derivative creativity and cross-pollination of ideas is a rich pool of mental resources to derive from. And I believe the two main mechanisms of how we fill that pool are curiosity…and choice.

a writer is a writer, no matter what sort of work she’s doing, as long as she is thinking, still, like a writer: observing and mentally composing and watching the world with curiosity. Writing is a lovely, life-affirming thing to do, even if the world never rewards us for it, or never rewards us enough to allow us to make it the main thing in our... See more

“to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certain kind of attention to the world. In so doing we may find, as Andrew Wyeth once commented about a work of Albrecht Dürer’s, that “the mundane, observed, became the romantic”— or, the enchanted.