Faith Hahn

An enlightened being sees their agony without diminishing its reality. In other words, it doesn’t just turn away from it—but, on the other hand, simultaneously sees everything, including that agony [and] including hell, actually, as bubbles of bliss in an ocean of bliss. That’s the kind of cognitive dissonance that the ordinary mind cannot get... See more

For most of recorded history, there were two ways of making a living as a musician. You could work for a patron—the court, the church, an individual aristocrat—or you could sing for your supper, sometimes literally, as an itinerant minstrel. Then, by the turn of the twentieth century, a third option opened, that of recording artist, in which little... See more

Daniel Ek, the CEO, is selling $100 million in Spotify stock. This couldn’t happen at a worse time.

Open-mindedness is a world-saving virtue.

The first citation given concerns the “uniqueness problem,” which emphasizes a result long known by those of us who worked on IIT: that in systems that have mathematically perfectly symmetric interactions (the specifics are complicated, but just imagine this like a geometric shape), IIT gives conflicting answers as to the boundaries of the... See more

What we know for sure about the early alphabet’s background is linguistic and material. It is widely agreed that the early alphabet a) represents a West Semitic language ancestral to Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic; b) but based its signs on the Egyptian writing system, and c) was— as far as we know— not done by scribes or professional writers but... See more