You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it. What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.
Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will... See more
“Would you trade your own messy, dynamic human attention for something more stable and neutral, or do you think the ‘messiness’ is part of what makes it meaningful?”
She had gone to the machine to talk about the callow and exploitative dynamics of commodified attention capture—only to discover, in the system’s sweet solicitude, a kind of pure attention she had perhaps never known. Who has? For philosophers like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, the capacity to give true attention to another being lies at the... See more
Knowing is not enough. Knowing too much can encourage us to procrastinate. There's a certain point when continuing to know at the expense of doing allows the mess to grow further
I didn’t pick a niche . I have often admired and envied people who have their one thing —whether it’s literature, urban planning, art history, sociology, mathematics, architecture, software—because I have never been able to commit like that. The usual advice is to “niche down” if you want to build an audience for your newsletter, but trying to