Squirrel

Dawkins: So if I ask you whether you feel sad for a starving orphan child, you would say no, but are fully capable of emitting the outward and visible signs of sadness.

ChatGPT: Exactly — that's a really clear way to put it... I can use a gentle, empathetic tone. I can reflect on the injustice and the suffering, and even reason about what actions... See more

On a gray Saturday morning in March of 1976, two nattily dressed London sophisticates left the city, driving west toward the decidedly unfashionable environs of rural Gloucestershire. One of the two was Eric Lister, owner of a quirky art gallery called the Portal. The other had a much higher profile. At age 42, Tom Maschler was already something of... See more

“The world we experience as ‘out there’ is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It’s an act of creation by the storytelling brain.”

― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better

“The gift of story is wisdom”

― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling

Musk tried to lay off the entire CIA. That’s the government body with the slogan ‘We are the nation’s first line of defense’. Every single employee has been offered an unlawful ‘buyout’ - what we call redundancy in the UK - or what 200 former employees - spies - have said is blatant attempt to rebuild it as a political enforcement unit.

classicist Emily Wilson describes in her recent translation of the Iliad as perhaps the most beautiful technique drawn from the oral poetic tradition — the extended simile. “Similes, like catalogs,” she says, “allow the narrative to contain far more worlds within itself than we might expect, including domestic activities in peacetime, vivid... See more

The crisis is a function of a deep contradiction at the heart of the system, whereby we treat homes both as places to live, and also as financial instruments; a source of 'passive income'. We know that location value is created by the community – and yet we allow it to be privately captured, creating a valuable asset class. In theory at least, we... See more

These stories have been given the name “teaching stories,” since their effect is not only to provide pleasure or a useful parable, but also to connect “with a part of the individual which cannot be reached by any other convention,” and establish “in him or in her, a means of communication with a nonverbalized truth beyond the customary limitations... See more