The hardest battle
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. –E. E. Cummings
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. –E. E. Cummings
I was never that fond of seafood to begin with, but after finish Taras Grescoe’s terrific book Bottomfeeder, I am even less into it. The reasons are multiple.
If our eyes are always looking for weakness, we begin to lose the intuition to notice beauty. —Jay O’Callahan, speaker/storyteller, quoted in Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen
Via TED, this is like my mindfulness class in a nutshell (less the meditation practice): Srikumar Rao says we spend most of our lives learning to be unhappy, even as we strive for happiness. At Arbejdsglaede Live! 2009, he teaches us how to break free of the “I’d be happy if…” mental model, and embrace [...]
What we’re approaching here is what was once “content” being stripped of its nutritious value and being processed into “content product”. See where I’m going with this? I could see, over time, readers realizing how many empty calories, in the form of news “snippets” or meaningless photos, we’ve been consuming on the web and there [...]
Architecture, as a discipline, can itself be used to tell stories. In fact, some of the most interesting student work today comes complete with elaborate plots and story lines, supplied for no other reason than to explain why a particular building should exist or require designing. These stories very often exceed today’s mass-market fiction in [...]
Anthropologist Wade Davis of National Geographic in an absolutely mind-blowing TED talk from 2003. I’m floored. I caught a bit of this guy today on the radio while driving back from the garage and wanted to find out more. He’s giving this year’s Massey Lecture.
Back in my university says, as I’ve mentioned before, I bristled against the self-importance of artsy film students who made boring (and therefore ignored) works of self-indulgent art. I was happy to make things that entertained because although moving an audience is a difficult thing, an unmoved audience is an audience that you don’t own, [...]
The Alain de Botton book I’m reading, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, isn’t quite what I was hoping for, at least two-thirds of the way in. I was hoping for more insight into the lives and minds of people as they work and make their way through society. Mostly, though, we get an overview [...]