Sublime

The economist, philosopher, and writer Henry Hazlitt sums up the dilemma: In the modern world knowledge has been growing so fast and so enormously, in almost every field, that the probabilities are immensely against anybody, no matter how innately clever, being able to make a contribution in any one field unless he devotes all his time to it for... See more

Marshall McLuhan wrote that every new technology was an extension of the human body but also an amputation of the same function from the body itself, and computers’ ability to furnish us with a second brain implies that our first brains have correspondingly atrophied.

The human brain is incredible at synthesizing and uncovering meaning from information but is largely deficient (compared to computers) at long-term memory storage and raw processing power. At various work experiences we've had over the years (both Google and Yelp), a common problem came up: critical information didn't arrive at the right place at... See more

Thinking of this piece the neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote before he died, on how he perceived smartphone use as essentially a neurological catastrophe. He’s advocating for something like the opposite of mindfulness — instead, the problem is that we’re too stuck in the moment. https://t.co/Xm89Bt2jOW

People who read widely and attentively—and then publish the results of their reading—are also arguably performing research as a leisure activity. Maria Popova, who started writing a blog in 2006—now called The Marginalian —which collects her reading across literature, philosophy, psychology, the sciences. Her blog feels like leisurely research, to... See more