Sara

At two a.m., I started cleaning up my room, even though it wasn’t that messy. From Oleg Cassini’s memoirs, which were under the bed, I learned that Cassini had also suffered from insomnia. One night, he woke from uneasy dreams with the opening of Dante’s Inferno setting off “a clangorous tumult in [his] subconscious: ‘Midway the journey of our life

The powers of photography have in effect de-Platonized our understanding of reality, making it less and less plausible to reflect upon our experience according to the distinction between images and things, between copies and originals. It suited Plato’s derogatory attitude toward images to liken them to shadows—transitory, minimally informative, im

Jonathan Schell published The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People. The book eloquently argues for a new idea of change and of power. One of its key recognitions is that the change that counts in revolution takes place first in the imagination. Histories usually pick up when the action begins, but Schell quotes John A

PKM systems promise coherence, but they often deliver a kind of abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.

Worse, the

Rachel kept looking up at Jones, who stood a few rows from us, at the front of the car. She put her hand on the back of an empty seat, which kept her balance as we rode. I wondered what kind of thoughts she had. During the day, did she carry her mind like a net above her head and then in evening write poetry at a desk?

The less I’m trying to get something out of an experience, the more I find I can get into it, and the more I can be present for other people involved in it. This is not to say that life becomes a matter of unbroken good cheer; after all, it’s sad that a beautiful moment arises then vanishes. But it’s the flavor of sadness conveyed by the Japanese p

“The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force,” Marx mused. “If the product of labor does not belong to the worker, but confronts him as an alien power, this can only be because it belongs to a man other than the worker.” The domination of labor by capital took the form of a modern animism, a capit

All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water. If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring’s center is a single at

The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose. This touches upon questions of copyright for reproduction, the ownership of art presses and publishers, the total policy of public art galleries and museums. As usually