tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-218266562024-03-12T20:20:16.475-07:00the contrary flâneuseVirtual, visual, verbal flânerie through scenic, human, and cultural byways ~ small town space, open space, wild space, cityspace, cyberspace, unspace. Baudelaire's Paris it's not, 'la chambre à deux" perhaps - but still its own kind of microcosm.Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.comBlogger123125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-15248612439757322342014-11-24T18:58:00.001-08:002014-11-24T19:07:04.321-08:00paradigm shift in contemporary critical theory<i> …a with this much Walter Benjamin, a dead cert the contrary (digital) flâneuse (irony noted) would pick it. What else can I say? Shift happens. Omnivore is always a treat.</i><br />
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<a href="http://www.bookforum.com/uploads/upload.000/id13897/article00.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://www.bookforum.com/uploads/upload.000/id13897/article00.jpg" height="220" width="148" /></a>....From critical theory to psychological warfare — how Franwithkfurt School intellectuals fought the Nazi enemy: Ulrich Plass <a href="https://www.academia.edu/9048372/From_Critical_Theory_to_Psychological_Warfare_How_Frankfurt_School_Intellectuals_Fought_the_Nazi_Enemy_Review_of_Franz_Neumann_Herbert_Marcuse_and_Otto_Kirchheimer_Secret_Reports_on_Nazi_Germany_The_Frankfurt_School_Contribution_to_the_War_Effort._Edited_by_Raffaele_Laudani_" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">reviews</a> <i>Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort</i> by Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer (ed. Raffaele Laudani).<br />
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Craig Shrimpton (Goldsmiths): <a href="https://www.academia.edu/7457657/Fascism_in_Benjamins_Historical_Materialism_Crisis_and_the_Aestheticisation_of_Politics" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Fascism in Benjamin's Historical Materialism</a>: Crisis and the Aestheticisation of Politics. Joel White <a href="http://review31.co.uk/article/view/242/being-another-philosopher" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">reviews</a> <i>Working with Walter Benjamin: Recovering a Political Philosophy</i> by Andrew Benjamin. Fallen angel: Ian Penman on the <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_3_urb-walter-benjamin.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">tragic life and enduring influence</a> of critic Walter Benjamin. From TNR’s series “Book that changed my mind”, Stephanie LaCava: “<a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119748/tribute-walter-benjamins-work-art-age" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Walter Benjamin</a> was my first crush”.<br />
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Barbarism: Anna-Verena Nosthoff on notes on the thought of <a href="http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/10/15/barbarism-notes-thought-theodor-w-adorno/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Theodor W. Adorno</a>. <br />
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<i>read the rest at <a href="http://www.bookforum.com/blog/13897" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">paradigm shift in contemporary critical theory - bookforum.com / omnivore</a></i>Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-50359676727665180142014-05-23T19:52:00.001-07:002014-05-23T19:52:01.138-07:00Make the most of limited city living space: House in a Box <i>Two hundred square feet. Appallingly small, even by NYC standards. But a new project from MIT Media Lab’s <a href="http://www.media.mit.edu/research/groups/changing-places" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Changing Places</a> group, promises to transform that into one that is like an apartment three times the size to live in</i><br /><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8giE7i7CAE&feature=youtu.be" style="background-color: white; border-bottom-color: rgb(145, 185, 62); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #91b93e; font-family: inherit; line-height: 23.999998092651367px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">CityHome</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; line-height: 23.999998092651367px;"> is essentially a hideaway bed taken to the umpteenth level. It’s a mechanical box about the size of a closet that sits inside an apartment, where it stows a b</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; line-height: 23.999998092651367px;">ed, dining room table, kitchen surface, a cooking range, a closet, and multipurpose storage, too.</span></blockquote><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/f8giE7i7CAE?rel=0" width="560"></iframe><br />
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<i><a href="http://www.fastcodesign.com/3030991/slicker-city/mits-cityhome-is-a-house-in-a-box-you-control-by-waving-your-hand">MIT's CityHome Is A House In A Box You Control By Waving Your Hand | Co.Design | business design</a>: </i>Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-75771185507786932252013-08-08T09:39:00.001-07:002013-08-08T09:39:53.981-07:00Everlasting Realities of the Bohemian Lifestyle<a href="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/politics/AP7810181441.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="AP7810181441.jpg" border="0" height="187" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/politics/AP7810181441.jpg" width="320" /></a><i>…or the creative #precariat & the #city, by extension #citymooc. Academic knowledge workers, particularly in the arts and humanities, are explicitly noted as those who, "</i><i style="line-height: 23.196022033691406px;">began adult life as artists and intellectuals only to find themselves 25 years on somehow being mainly a teacher at a D-list college in a place they never wanted to live."</i><i> </i><i style="line-height: 23.196022033691406px;">Sounds like a Balzac novel, doesn't it?<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></i><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 14.666666984558105px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><a href="http://www.v1.paris.fr/commun/v2asp/musees/balzac/furne/notices/illusions_perdues.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Illusions perdues</a>, in particular, comes to mind. </i></span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;">NEW YORK -- Is it still possible to be a bohemian in today's New York City, where <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/09/new-york-city-rent_n_3568278.html" style="color: #00598c; text-decoration: none;">average rents now surpass $3,000 a month</a>? Or are the rents just <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_Is_Too_Damn_High_Party" style="color: #00598c; text-decoration: none;">too damn high</a>? And -- if they are -- what does this mean for the future of artists and intellectuals of the sort who have long been as much a part of the natural order of the city as pigeons and locust trees?<br />
These are some of the questions provoked by an article in the Spring issue of N+1 magazine on "<a href="http://nplusonemag.com/cultural-revolution" style="color: #00598c; text-decoration: none;">Cultural Revolution</a>" signed by "The Editors." </span></blockquote>...<i>fast forward to the closing paragraphs...</i><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 23.200000762939453px;">[Bohmeian] complaints [<i>in n+1 article</i></span></span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 23.196022033691406px;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 23.200000762939453px;">]are far larger than one about the New York housing market, or the academy, as well -- they are about the relation of the intellectual and the artist to society, about the lack of recognition except by "</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stendhal" style="background-color: white; color: #00598c; line-height: 23.200000762939453px; text-decoration: none;">the Happy Few</a><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 23.200000762939453px;">." But the art and literary worlds have always been a total crap shoot, and far too many artists and writers reach old age as impoverished and unknown as when they began. There is nothing new in the failure of that dare. Even those who have one wonderful glorious moment of fame and fortune are rarely set, because a moment is not a life, and life is longer than most forms of renown these days.</span></span> </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 23.200000762939453px;">T.S. Eliot worked </span><a href="http://www.full-stop.net/2013/01/15/blog/robert-fay/t-s-eliot-employee-of-the-month/" style="background-color: white; color: #00598c; line-height: 23.200000762939453px; text-decoration: none;">as a banker</a><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 23.200000762939453px;">. Wallace Stevens was </span><a href="http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Stevens/obit.html" style="background-color: white; color: #00598c; line-height: 23.200000762939453px; text-decoration: none;">an insurance company vice president</a><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 23.200000762939453px;">. There are others who have carved memorable careers out of evenings and weekends. </span><span style="background-color: #fce5cd; line-height: 23.200000762939453px;"><i>But there have always been more who began adult life as artists and intellectuals only to find themselves 25 years on somehow being mainly a teacher at a D-list college in a place they never wanted to live. </i></span></span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 23.200000762939453px;">I'm not saying any of this is good, only that it is hardly new.</span></span></blockquote><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Read the complete article at <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/preview/blog/change_and_the_city/01/01/278283/?u=atlantic&p=media&c=?151428" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Everlasting Realities of the Bohemian Lifestyle - Garance Franke-Ruta - The Atlantic</a></span></i>Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-29913452034482553482013-05-25T13:30:00.000-07:002013-05-25T13:30:22.456-07:00virtual flânerie chez MOOC<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FX77yE5vqfE/TyJ4RYJqE8I/AAAAAAAAAT8/Tty9DY6G2RA/s1600/flanerie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FX77yE5vqfE/TyJ4RYJqE8I/AAAAAAAAAT8/Tty9DY6G2RA/s1600/flanerie.jpg" /></a>…late in the day or game of my life ~ figuratively speaking, but this flâneuse persona is off on another city jaunt...virtual flânerie in the form of MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses about cities.<br />
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The first, nearly over, is <a href="https://class.coursera.org/techcity-001" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Technicity</a>, and the other, in development and yet to start, is <a href="http://citymooc.weebly.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">City MOOC</a>.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><b>Technicity</b> is a Coursera xMOOC that I may or may not "complete" for a certificate I neither need nor care about. Why break my dilettante student record? The course, tech oriented (surveillance, tracking, data, etc) oriented and designed for city planned has been interesting, informative and not a little disconcerting. The course is well structured with forum discussions avoiding the usual maddening chaos (virtual traffic jams?). More about mapping and managing than any sense of place. As cityspace, would it be the Office of Circumlocution?<br />
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<i>Networked Cities: World City Network</i><br />
<img src="http://www.atributosurbanos.es/images/fotos/networked-city1_large.jpg" /><br />
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<b><a href="http://citymooc.weebly.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">City MOOC</a></b> is Fred Bartel's, announced as connectivist, #cityMOOC project that is still in its (chaotic) formative stages. Where Technicity asked participant to look at and select a project for their individual cities, City MOOC considers multiple cities, cities as like MOOCs ~ distributed networks, and presumably networked cities, nodes in a world city network as described by Castell and others.<br />
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There is a single <a href="http://citymooc.weebly.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">webpage</a> ~ an attractive facade with no real content yet, a #citymooc hashtag, a <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/109675815220709436631" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Google+ community</a> (more interactive but not as open as a page). He is talking about guests, syllabus, weekly topics. We need networks, rounding up the ones we have, and curation.<br />
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My contribution to the distributed networks:<br />
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<li>this blog, <a href="http://flaneusecontrariante.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">the contrary flâneuse</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.scoop.it/t/flanerie" target="_blank">flânerie (</a>Scoop.it)</li>
<li><a href="http://placesalongtheway.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">places along the way</a> (Blogger)</li>
<li><a href="http://pinterest.com/vanessavaile/citylit-and-cityspaces/" target="_blank">citylit & cityspaces</a> (Pinterest)</li>
<li><a href="http://cityscapesandspaces.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">cityscapes & places</a> (Tumblr)</li>
<li>bookmarked <a href="http://delicious.com/vrcrary/city" target="_blank">city links</a> (Delicious)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.google.com/reader/view/user%2F-%2Flabel%2Fcity" target="_blank">city folder</a> on feed reader</li>
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Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-16732314049058781822013-05-22T11:53:00.003-07:002013-05-22T11:53:31.963-07:00Borges, Paradox & Perception<a href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/04/28/opinion/28stone-img/28stone-img-blog427.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/04/28/opinion/28stone-img/28stone-img-blog427.jpg" width="196" /></a><i>…+ Heisenberg = irresistible. This was sitting in drafts, earmarked for </i><i>#introphil, </i><i>the philosophy course, now over, and the others left abandoned by the wayside. It's time for flâneuse to leave philosophy classes behind and move on. T</i><i>opically speaking, </i><i>we're city bound, heading home to the streets. MOOCs have discovered their cousin, the city, no stranger to paradox or uncertainty. More later. For now, let's transition with <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/cities-moocs-global-networks" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Cities, MOOCs, Global Networks</a> by Kris Olds, Inside HigherEd.</i><br />
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In 1927 a young German physicist published a paper that would turn the scientific world on its head. Until that time, classical physics had assumed that when a particle’s position and velocity were known, its future trajectory could be calculated. Werner Heisenberg demonstrated that this condition was actually impossible: <br />
<a name='more'></a>…we cannot know with precision both a particle’s location and its velocity, and the more precisely we know the one, the less we can know the other. Five years later he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for having laid the foundations of quantum physics.<div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 14px;">This discovery has all the hallmarks of a modern scientific breakthrough; so it may be surprising to learn that the uncertainty principle was intuited by Heisenberg’s contemporary, the Argentine poet and fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges, and predicted by philosophers centuries and even millenniums before him.</span><br />
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<i>Read the rest of <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/borges-and-the-paradox-of-the-seenk/">Borges, Paradox and Perception - NYTimes.com</a></i><br />
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<a href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/25/opinion/25stone-img/25stone-img-thumbStandard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="William Egginton" border="0" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/25/opinion/25stone-img/25stone-img-thumbStandard.jpg" /></a><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">William Egginton is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is the forthcoming “The Man Who Invented Fiction: Cervantes in the Modern World.”</em></div>
Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-4408647348574762222013-05-02T14:35:00.001-07:002013-05-22T11:17:26.003-07:00Open Letter from SJSU Philosophy Dept to Michael Sandel<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: xx-small;"><i>painting by <span style="background-color: white; line-height: 17px; text-align: start;">Gandolfi Gaetano</span></i></span></td></tr>
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<i>…for more (if not optimum) context, read comments and related article. Optimum context would involve taking the edX course in question, reading up on MOOCs, Sandel, edX. the MOOCing of HigherEd in general and, </i><i>in particular,</i><i> the Gates Foundation driven agreement between San Jose and edX. All that still might not be enough but brings us closer to an informed opinion. Even then there will be more variants and questions than consensus. </i><br />
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Professors in the philosophy department at San Jose State University wrote the following letter to make a direct appeal to Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor whose MOOC on "Justice" they were being encouraged to use as part of the San Jose State curriculum. (<i>See <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Professors-at-San-Jose-State/138941/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">related article</a> and comments</i>)</blockquote>
<i>Is this philosophy or just more mooc madness? If philosophy is truly about knowledge, how we know and ways of knowing of the world. Consider this comment in the letter, </i><br />
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<span style="background-color: yellow; color: #3a3a3a;">.. the thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary - something out of a dystopian novel.</span></blockquote>
<a name='more'></a><i>Counter that with this comment on the letter,</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Access is a pressing issue for the public because they already don't have access. I understand all the reasons, plausible and poor, why faculty dislike the idea of MOOCs. I have yet to see most of the faculty interested in taking a stand against MOOCs taking a stand for access. <span style="background-color: yellow;">If MOOCs aren't the answer, what is?</span> Plausible alternatives, given drops in state and federal funding, must be put forward, without expecting that the families can continue to make up the shortfall in state and federal funding.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>When <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Professors-at-San-Jose-State/138941/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">asked by the Chronicle</a>, Sandel responded that </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"...h</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">e <span style="background-color: yellow;">knows little about the arrangement</span> between edX and San Jose State, but he hopes the university does not force professors there to use any more material from his MOOC than they wish to use."</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"The worry that the widespread use of online courses will damage departments in public universities facing budgetary pressures is a legitimate concern that deserves serious debate, at edX and throughout higher education," wrote Mr. Sandel. "The last thing I want is for my online lectures to be used to undermine faculty colleagues at other institutions."</span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: yellow; font-family: inherit;">He declined to comment further.</span> </blockquote>
<i>I would have expected a distinguished professor of the philosophy of law to both know and be willing to comment more. It's up us then to do the philosopher's job of figuring out how and what to know, and then questioning it ~ relentlessly if necessary.</i><br />
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<i>Read all of <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Professors-at-San-Jose-State/138941/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Why Professors at San Jose State Won't Use a Harvard Professor's MOOC </a>and <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/The-Document-Open-Letter-From/138937/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Document: an Open Letter From San Jose State U.'s Philosophy Department</a>, both from </i><i><a href="http://chronicle.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Chronicle of Higher Education</a> ~ and comments. Each comment sets has it's own distinct tone and demographic, which makes for an interesting comparison,</i>Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-67707835401557665982013-03-22T17:31:00.001-07:002013-03-22T17:31:54.635-07:00Physicists Debate Nothingness<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/11/Being_and_Nothingess.jpg/200px-Being_and_Nothingess.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/11/Being_and_Nothingess.jpg/200px-Being_and_Nothingess.jpg" width="127" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>…damn, this sounds like it belongs with #Introphil, despite presenter <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;">Krauss' </span><a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-consolation-of-philos" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #19437c; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">distaste for both </a></i></span><i style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-consolation-of-philos" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #19437c; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">religion and philosophy</a>…it even gets into existence, time travel, the multiverse, quantum theory…<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Nothingness" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Being and Nothingness</a>…</i><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What is <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=much-ado-about-nothing" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #19437c; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">nothing</a>? Sounds like a simple question—<em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">nothing is simply the absence of something, of course</em>—until you begin to think about it. The other night the American Museum of Natural History hosted its 14<sup>th</sup> annual <a href="http://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/adults/hayden-planetarium-programs/2013-isaac-asimov-memorial-debate-the-existence-of-nothing" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #19437c; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Asimov Memorial Debate</a>, which featured five leading thinkers opining (and <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=thinkers-talk-about-nothing-13-03-21" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #19437c; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">sparring</a>, sometimes testily, but more on that later) about the <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=much-ado-about-nothing" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #19437c; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">nature of nothing</a>.</span> </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/files/2013/03/Helix-Nebula-300x187.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="125" src="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/files/2013/03/Helix-Nebula-300x187.jpg" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Nothing is the most important part of the universe,” said <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-consolation-of-philos" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #19437c; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Lawrence Krauss</a>, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">a physicist at Arizona State University and author of the recent “</span><a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2012/04/23/science-will-never-explain-why-theres-something-rather-than-nothing/" style="border: 0px; color: #19437c; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">.” </span></blockquote><br />
<i>Read the rest at <a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2013/03/22/physicists-debate-the-many-varieties-of-nothingness/">Physicists Debate the Many Varieties of Nothingness | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network</a></i>Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-39624976001770499112013-03-16T10:31:00.001-07:002013-03-16T13:14:28.302-07:00learning time, spinning heads<i>or learning & time travel? Can I shoehorn this into an #introphil post? Tangle a few roots? Time, mind, post/transhuman (or was that another course?), learning, and identity too, for good measure. <b>Who am I?</b> is the QUESTION standing behind the examined life's green curtain, flowing into What do I know and How do I know it? </i><br />
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</i> <i>At <a href="http://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Building Creative Bridges</a>, Paul Signorelli, blogging #etmooc writes,</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We may be identifying yet another <a href="http://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/redefining-digital-literacy-for-our-learners-and-ourselves/" style="color: #b85b5a; text-decoration: none;">digital literacy skill</a>: an ability to function simultaneously within a variety of timeframes we don’t normally consider while we’re learning.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Before we take the leap into a bit of <b>virtual time travel</b> to pursue this idea, let’s ground ourselves within a familiar idea: much of the formal learning with which we’re familiar takes place within clearly-defined segments of time, e.g., an hour-long workshop or webinar, or a course that extends over a day, week, month, or semester. We work synchronously during face-to-face or online interactions, and we work asynchronously through postings that extend a conversation as long as the formal learning opportunity is underway and participants are willingly engaged.</span></blockquote>
<i><b>Disclaimer</b>: I still haven't written that digital identity reflection for Bonnie Stewart's Change 11 unit last year. However, I do think about (wrestle with) it regularly. </i><i>This still isn't it but may be approaching calculus not algebra. So</i><i> back to courses and their timespace boundaries: in open, online course ~ more specifically, MOOCs like #introphil and #etmooc ~ </i><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 16.79464340209961px;">this </span><a href="http://www.connectivistmoocs.org/what-is-a-connectivist-mooc/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: white; color: #b85b5a; line-height: 16.79464340209961px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">connectivist</a> <span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 16.79464340209961px;">learning process is far from linear—</span><a href="http://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com/?s=rhizomatic" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: white; color: #b85b5a; line-height: 16.79464340209961px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">rhizomatic</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 16.79464340209961px;">is one of the terms we’ve been using extensively throughout the [#etmooc] course. We are also seeing that our learning process does not have to be limited to exchanges with learners and others who are participating within the formal linear timeframe suggested by a course</span> </span></blockquote>
<i style="font-family: inherit;">Both MOOCs and philosophy partake of, occupy themselves with time, space and unspace (if we can designate virtual space as such). A science article that caught my attention, comparing <a href="http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/events-in-the-future-seem-closer-than-those-in-the-past.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">differences in perceiving past and future tim</a>e, seems relevant to temporal discussion in either (philosophy's time travel paradox vs digital ed's sync/async) camp.</i><br />
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</span> <i><a href="http://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/learning-time-and-heads-that-spin/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Learning Time and Heads That Spin | Building Creative Bridges</a></i>Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-49112959860385205302013-03-13T09:22:00.001-07:002013-03-13T09:22:10.481-07:00A Darwin-Sartre connection: absurd or what?<i>…<a href="https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=%23introphil&src=typd" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#introphil</a>…although I'm not sure quite where (or even whether) this fits in the <a href="https://www.coursera.org/course/introphil" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Introduction to </a></i><i><a href="https://www.coursera.org/course/introphil" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Philosophy</a>. My call: skepticism and the nature of reality. Being absurd does not make reality less real...or more. Truth? Don't even go there. Yet.</i><br />
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</i> <i>Resistance appeals to me. </i><i>Camus (mentioned), not Sartre, has always been a favorite. I won't claim to be exploring essay topics, but that could be what my unconscious is up to. That or making sense of philosophy-by-mooc. Could I write 750 words on why I keep taking philosophy courses when I really prefer history?</i><i> </i><i>Ethics and applications (pragmatism?) are considerations. </i><i>I'm trying to decide whether or not to take Michael Sandel's <a href="http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/michael_sandels_famous_harvard_course_on_justice_now_available_as_a_mooc_register_today.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Justice</a> </i><i>EdX mooc</i><i>. Haven't done (or whatever verb) an <a href="https://www.edx.org/courses/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">edX </a>yet and am uncomfortable with a "true believer" intensity prevalent among Coursera followers. Brand and superprof loyalty sometimes approaches that of swooning bobby-soxers, </i><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A few weeks ago we <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/rethinking-mill-and-paternalism/" rel="nofollow" style="color: #666699;" target="_blank"><b>linked</b></a> to an articl<span style="background-color: white;">e connecting <b>Sartre</b>’s insights about “authenticity” with recent work in cognitive science. This week, in<b> </b><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/EvolutionExistentialism/137715/" rel="nofollow" style="color: #666699; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">an essay</a> at the <i>Chronicle of Higher Education</i>, David P. Barash pursues a similar thread connecting existentialism and evolutionary biology, one he thinks shows that “science has not completely destr</span>oyed our understanding of free will" ....</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Barash points out that both evolutionists and “existentialists” from Pascal to Heidegger all see the universe in its sheer indifferent vastness as in some sense “absurd” from the human perspective....</span>then asserts the “uniquely human potential to resist our own genes,” and makes the further claim that it’s exactly this ability that constitutes our humanity, thus making “rebellion” practically a duty. To Barash, that sounds unmistakably like Albert Camus’ “reconfiguring” of Descartes: “I rebel, therefore we exist.”</blockquote><i>Plus more philosophy links, mostly from more or less main stream popular media<span style="font-family: inherit;">, surely a sign of something.</span></i><br />
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<ul><li><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;">At Slate, an</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/02/artificial_intelligence_can_we_teach_computers_what_truth_means.html" rel="nofollow" style="color: #666699; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;" target="_blank">article</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;">on the challenges of teaching computers what truth means.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;">See </span><a href="http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2013/03/four-symposia.html" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: white; color: #666699; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;" target="_blank">what David Chalmers has been up to lately</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;"> at his blog, Fragments of Consciousness.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;">At The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier </span><a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112481/darwinist-mob-goes-after-serious-philosopher#" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: white; color: #666699; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;" target="_blank">defends</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;"> Thomas Nagel.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;">At 3AM, Colin McGinn </span><a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/brief-encounter-with-the-mysterian/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: white; color: #666699; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;" target="_blank">interviewed</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;">.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;">Can’t get enough of experimental philosophy? This Friday at N.Y.U., experience </span><a href="http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jk762/xphipage/Video_Release.html" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: white; color: #666699; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;" target="_blank">X-Phi in 3-D</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;">.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;">At Huffington Post, what happens when a philosopher watches</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-morris/philosopher-king-of-reality-tv_b_2805823.html" rel="nofollow" style="color: #666699; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;" target="_blank">too much reality TV</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;">.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></li>
</ul><div class="thumb" style="background-color: white; clear: left; color: #333333; float: left; height: 50px; line-height: 15px; margin: 0px 7px 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; width: 50px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img alt="The Stone" height="50" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs_v3/opinionator/pogs/thestone45.gif" width="50" /></span></div><div class="summary" style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.4166em; margin-bottom: 0.3em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/the-stone/" style="color: #666699; text-decoration: none;">The Stone</a> </b>is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless. </span><em style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">The Stone’s weekly briefing of notable philosophy-related issues and ideas from around the Web.</em></div><br />
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</span> <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/the-darwin-sartre-connection/"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Stone Philosophy Links, March 13, 2013 - NYTimes.com</span></i></a>Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-24020814106986297742013-02-10T13:15:00.001-08:002013-03-07T20:07:04.327-08:00information graphics, diagrams, flowcharts, mind maps etc<i>…which relate to <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23introphil" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#introphil</a> <b>how</b>? Surely logic cannot be irrelevant (especially not to thinking, knowledge and questions, all central to <a href="https://www.coursera.org/course/introphil" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Introduction to Philosophy</a>. OK I admit it: the real reason is that this graphic reminded me of a recent comment exchange/conversation with <a href="https://twitter.com/Gordon_L" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">@Gordon_L</a> about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">mind maps</a> and the Wordle image I created for my <a href="http://flaneusecontrariante.blogspot.com/2013/02/introphi-into-week-2-but-still-stuck-in.html" target="_blank">last #introphil post</a>. This is a flow chart because of a) that reminder and b) I couldn't find one about mind maps. There may not be a mind map humor category although some can be amusing, if not intentionally so. The same could be said of some philosophical arguments. Could the model below adapt to a <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/gettier/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Gettier Case</a>?</i><br />
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Flowcharts are supposed to help you in making step-by-step decisions to reach a particular goal. Now here's a flowchart from College Humor to help determine whether you know what you're doing when you read a flowchart. If you're not, it won't help you at all. <a href="http://www.collegehumor.com/article/6867887/flowchart-are-you-good-at-following-flowcharts">Link</a> -via <a href="http://presurfer.blogspot.com/">the Presurfer </a><br />
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<i><a href="http://www.neatorama.com/2013/02/10/Flowchart-Are-You-Good-at-Following-Flowcharts/">Flowchart: Are You Good at Following Flowcharts?</a>:</i>Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-14262876700269099862013-02-06T21:59:00.000-08:002013-02-07T10:20:55.395-08:00#introphil: Into Week 2 but still stuck in Week 1<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Behind on blogging, I resort to meatball textual analysis: a <a href="http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/6339249/What_is_philosophy%3F" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Wordle of the Week 1 transcript</a>. Note that thinking and questions rank much higher than answers or even meaning. Encouraging...</div>
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I'm also behind on groups, find-following-commenting on blogs and, of course, Forum surfing. The last takes a faster connection than I have and better search than Coursera is willing or able to offer. Granted, there may be a system load problem that prevents better search...so how is it that Amazon and other platforms manage? My mind now wanders to data mining: Coursera would rather not share its data... and would we want it shared with Amazon? Thinking about data mining in the context of philosophy ~ knowledge and understanding ~ sends me on a mind jumps over to thinking about a <a href="http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/narratology/modules/greimassquare.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Greimas Semiotic Squar</a>e and using contraries and contradictions as a way to look at and compare terms. </div>
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<span style="text-align: center;">More thinking (what this is all about, after all) and decisions and choices: what would I get crossing/mashing up a Greimas Semiotic Square and a </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin" rel="nofollow" style="text-align: center;" target="_blank">Cynefin framework</a><span style="text-align: center;">? In some frameworks, the center word is "disorder." Intriguing implications and assumptions to the side, the framework is an answer to the "why philosophy" question. To figure it out, or at least try. The copy on this graphic differs from others I've seen. I don't know about assigning "skill" hours. Chaos as a "wicked problem" could take a lot longer than 416 days...a lifetime or even longer.</span></div>
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I intended to write about bigger meaning of stuff but started wondering about details that seem minor and less relevant: navigating an LMS over its content and the ideas expressed there. Are the details really less relevant or another way of looking at the questions? Thinking about them did lead me back to big picture /concept thinking (whatever that is)<br />
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So how do I relate data, searching and time/setting priorities to bigger questions of a more philosophical persuasion? Data and searching relate to information, which, although not the equivalent of knowledge, can lead to it. Time and priorities = how to live one life, choices, decision making. Think universal, act/live local (personal). What does it have to do with what I am already doing?<br />
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How would the Wordle of the week one transcript compare to one of the what-is-philosophy Forum thread?Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-7043741674392518052013-01-29T13:17:00.002-08:002013-02-07T08:04:25.804-08:00thoughts on starting #introphil<a href="http://cms.montgomerycollege.edu/assets/0/2345/2860/4119/4146/fa84cf3e-4c1d-42a7-a2ae-7f29d2ec9ce1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="goog_1582795511"></span><span id="goog_1582795512"></span></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">…in no particular order, counting #introphil, I am now in…four MOOCs! (not counting CM11 or POTcert): #etmooc, EDC and #mmooc13, five counting soon to start Complexity from Santa Fe Institute. <b>Whatever was I thinking?</b> Nice to "see" Gordon and Jaap. A number of familiar names/avatars from Fantasy SF course (later morphing into an active post-course book club) are there too although few blog and have yet to see signs of any on my rare Forum visits. I wonder who else I know from online will be there? Most of the usual connectivist MOOC bunch sticks to "about pedagogy and elearning" courses. </span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="yui_3_7_2_15_1359489218396_79">The philosophy course not being yet another one about edtech, online learning, networks, social media and their ilk comes as a relief, although content overlap in the other three could count as economy of scale. It will be a mentally refreshing change of pace no matter how challenging. </span>Resolved: always be enrolled in one course with other content (not necessarily literature either). The next time an academic slams Coursera, I will contemplate the local IRL alternative, <a href="http://mountainair-announcements.blogspot.com/2013/01/socrates-come-to-mountainair.html" rel="nofollow" style="color: blue; cursor: text !important;" target="_blank">Socrates Cafe</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So how am I packing for this MOOC? prepare? I am: downloading the introduction video (which fwiw downloads better than <a href="http://etmooc.org/" rel="nofollow" style="color: blue; cursor: text !important;" target="_blank">etmooc</a> and <a href="http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/" rel="nofollow" style="color: blue; cursor: text !important;" target="_blank">mmooc13</a> audio files); checking <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23introphil" rel="nofollow" style="color: blue; cursor: text !important;" target="_blank">#introphil</a> tag on Twitter and <a href="http://topsy.com/" rel="nofollow" style="color: blue; cursor: text !important;" target="_blank">Topsy</a> ~ but mostly avoiding anything that might interrupt upload: closing superfluous windows, resisting temptation to share from reader. Once the introduction video finishes I'll return to the page to download syllabus and check early readings ~ not so different from any other course, except that I now give myself permission to be a bad student, relish it even. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">My intentions (that <b>Declare</b> part): to think and enjoy the conversations; to blog reflections (no guarantees and no guilt if I don't); not to over obsess with studying the mooc/iness of it all.</span></div>
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Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-47179268721619715712012-12-08T10:49:00.001-08:002012-12-08T11:15:49.202-08:00Best #CityReads of the Week<i>…<a href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Atlantic Cities</a>'</i><em> weekly roundup by </em><i>Sommer Mathis </i><em>of the most intriguing articles about cities and urbanism we've come across in the past seven days. Share your favorites on Twitter with <a href="https://twitter.com/#%21/search/%23cityreads" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#cityreads</a>.</em><br />
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<a href="http://americancity.org/daily/entry/in-the-traffic-of-cairos-diy-highway-exit-an-urbanist-movement-grows" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">"In the Traffic of Cairo's DIY Highway Exit, an Urbanist Movement Grows,"</a> Joseph Dana, <em>Next American City</em><br />
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Jamel Mubarak leans over the side of his balcony overlooking Tahrir Square and makes a simple observation: Cairo, the city of his birth, is not as pretty as it used to be.<br />
For 40 years, Mubarak has lived in a 10-story building on Cairo’s most prominent public square. In that time, he’s watched it transform from a downtown traffic roundabout and symbol of former President Hosni Mubarak’s regime to become, last year, a ground zero for the overthrow of that same regime. </blockquote>
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And now, nearly two years after the first protest of the Egyptian Revolution, the square has again sprung to life as a center of opposition, this time <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/world/middleeast/egyptian-newspapers-and-broadcasters-protest-draft-constitution.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">in protest over the drafting of the country’s constitution</a> and sweeping new self-granted powers of its Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, who took power democratically after Mubarak’s fall.<br />
Looking down at the tens of thousands of protesters filling the square below him, waving flags and chanting slogan’s against the country’s ruling party, Jamel Mubarak (no relation to the ousted leader) notes that the once-peaceful square is not likely to quiet down anytime soon.</blockquote>
<a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/6/3723712/myth-dream-paperless-city-chicago" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">"The dream and the myth of the paperless city,"</a> Matt Stroud, <em>The Verge</em><br />
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When Rahm Emanuel took office as Mayor of Chicago in 2011, he asked his constituents for advice. What should he change about Chicago’s notoriously opaque government? How should he balance the budget? Which technologies should he embrace? He would take suggestions on a free, public website so that savvy Chicagoans could track ideas, note which ideas made it into policy, and which ideas were ignored. Citizens made thousands of suggestions. Though most revealed political gripes rather than sound advice — “Fire 25 Aldermen/women [to] save $50 million!” “SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT SHOULD BE WORKING FOR HIS MONEY!!” “Declare Gangs as Terrorists!” — others showed keen-eyed political promise. </blockquote>
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Kyle Hillman’s suggestion showed enough promise, in fact, to get the 38-year-old political consultant, community organizer, and actor onto <a href="http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2011/08/04/mayor-calls-some-who-posted-budget-ideas-on-city-website/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the evening news</a>. It also got him a personal call from the mayor. As it turns out, <a href="https://twitter.com/kylehillman" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Hillman</a>’s suggestion wasn’t ground breaking. It actually seemed like a no-brainer — an idea that cities all over the country might like to try. </blockquote>
He suggested that the city should digitize.<br />
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<i>Read the rest of <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAtlanticCities/~3/dWpSnsVKHvk/story01.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">History Lessons: The Best #CityReads of the Week</a></i><br />
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Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-32685223885861596882012-09-23T13:32:00.001-07:002012-09-23T13:32:06.369-07:00City, Empire, Church, Nation…<i><a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_3_modernity.html">by Pierre Manent, City Journal Summer 2012</a>. Is modernity a condition, a place along the way, a destination ever disappearing into the horizon as we approach? Unapproachable. Aleph or illusion. Ever the city at the center...</i><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><a href="http://www.city-journal.org/assets/images/22_3-pm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The Acropolis in ancient Athens" border="0" height="148" src="http://www.city-journal.org/assets/images/22_3-pm.jpg" width="200" /></a>We have been modern for several centuries now. We are modern, and we want to be modern; it is a desire that guides the entire life of Western societies. That the will to be modern has been in force for centuries, though, suggests that we have not succeeded in being truly modern—that the end of the process that we thought we saw coming at various moments has always proved illusory, and that 1789, 1917, 1968, and 1989 were only disappointing steps along a road leading who knows where.... </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Modernity is characterized by <i>movement</i>, a movement that never reaches its end or comes to rest....The movement of the West began with the movement of the Greek city....To be more precise, Western movement began with internal and external movements of the Greek city—that is, with class struggle and foreign war. Cities were the ordering of human life that brought to light the domain of the common, the government of what was common, and the implementation of the common. The Greek city was the first complete implementation of human action, the ordering of the human world that made action possible and meaningful, the place where men for the first time deliberated and formulated projects of action. It was there that men discovered that they could govern themselves and that they learned to do it. The Greek city was the first form of human life to produce political energy—a deployment of human energy of a new intensity and quality. It was finally consumed by its own energy in the catastrophe of the Peloponnesian War.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Subsequent Western history was, on the whole, an ever-renewed search for a political form that would recover the energies of the city while escaping the fate of the city—the city that is free but destined to internal and external enmity. </blockquote><i>So what would the Greek peripatetic be the original flâneur? Read the rest at <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_3_modernity.html">City, Empire, Church, Nation by Pierre Manent, City Journal Summer 2012</a></i>Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-27578650356362282812012-08-28T13:50:00.001-07:002012-08-28T13:50:56.251-07:00The NYPD Shut Down a Stoop Sale<i>…so how do you have a yard sale without a yard, a garage sale without a garage? </i><br />
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<a href="http://ny.racked.com/uploads/2012_08-Stoop-Sale.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="2012_08-Stoop-Sale.jpg" border="0" height="212" src="http://ny.racked.com/uploads/2012_08-Stoop-Sale.jpg" width="320" /></a>Over the weekend, a stoop sale in Park Slope that was composed of some clothes, dishes, a bike, and a floor lamp was shut down by the police. The seller, a commenter on the message board Brooklynian, said that two police officers parked their car and plainly said, "You can't do this here." They then proceeded to ask whether or not he or she had a license.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">The license, in that case, most likely meant a Secondhand Dealer General License, ... needed by "a person or business that buys or sells secondhand articles in New York City." Exempt from that, however, are garage sales, used boat dealers, not-for-profits, and curiously, used clothing stores. </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Here are a few points to consider, if we're going to have this debate: Most New Yorkers don't have a front lawn to host a garage sale, if we're going to have this debate: Most New Yorkers don't have a front lawn to host a garage sale, but that doesn't automatically mean the word "stoop" is a legitimate substitute. </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">A rent-paying resident doesn't own his stoop... but even though they're occasionally kind of annoying to the <em style="background-color: white; border: 0px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">rest</em><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21px;"> of a building's tenants, stoop sales (much like </span><a href="http://ny.racked.com/archives/2012/08/27/dear_sample_sale_planners_dont_let_the_rest_of_the_country_in_on_our_sales.php">sample sales</a> are naturally occurring phenomena that most city dwellers—particularly Brooklyn residents—have come to accept and enjoy.</blockquote> <i>Read the rest at <a href="http://ny.racked.com/archives/2012/08/27/the_nypd_wasnt_too_happy_with_this_park_slope_stoop_sale.php">The NYPD Shut Down a Park Slope Stoop Sale - Controversies - Racked NY</a> </i><br />
Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-74616426587578315522012-08-13T09:42:00.001-07:002012-08-13T10:34:25.855-07:00Kabbalah on Book Drum, 13 Aug 2012<div style="background-color: white; color: black;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>…reposting this puppy as received & beating the drum for <a href="http://bookdrum.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Book Drum</a> as a site for book flâneurs to bookmark. No mystery to it. If this is not to your tastes, there are plenty more on the site.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title="Kabbalah">Kabbalah</a> is a system of knowledge that originated in Jewish thought, and uses stories of the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament) as metaphors to explain its teachings. It seeks to unlock the mysteries of the universe, explain the relationship between the creator and creation, and to explain the nature of human beings and the purpose of existence. Its teachings are meant to help people attain spiritual realisation and well-being. Its teachings are not part of traditional Jewish scripture, and it is not a denomination of Judaism, though some denominations do use it heavily.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Kabbalah has enjoyed a huge rise in popularity in recent years. Here is what '<a href="http://www.kabbalah.com/about/what-is-kabbalah" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title="The Kabbalah Centre">The Kabbalah Centre</a>' website says about the ancient wisdom:</span><br />
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<a href="http://bookdrum.com/images/books/118917_m.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Kabbalah - Tree of Life" border="0" height="320" src="http://bookdrum.com/images/books/118917_m.png" title="Kabbalah - Tree of Life" width="225" /></a><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Approximately 4,000 years ago, a set of spiritual principles was communicated to humanity in a moment of divine revelation. These ancient revelations unlock all the mysteries of humanity; the secret code that governs the universe. It's the grand unified theory pursued by Einstein. It's an incredible system of logic and a phenomenal technology that can alter the way you view your life. It is the oldest sacred document in existence, filled with wisdom. This extraordinary, powerful set of tools is known as Kabbalah—the original instruction manual for life."</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><img alt="Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike" class="yiv541853236licence" src="http://bookdrum.com/images/licence-cc-sa.png" style="text-align: center;" title="Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike" /><span style="text-align: center;">Kabbalah - Tree of Life - Image Credit: </span><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tree_of_Life_2009_large.png" rel="nofollow" style="text-align: center;" target="_blank">Alan James Garner/wikimedia commons</a></span></i>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><a href="http://www.bookdrum.com/bookmark-of-the-day-20120813.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><i>Read More</i></a></b> </span><br />
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Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-2404690961342114942012-07-22T13:57:00.001-07:002012-07-22T15:23:37.268-07:00Carte du Jour: Brain Pickings<div style="background-color: white; color: black;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic;">…The wandering one couldn't decide which to post so settles for most of the week's as usual smashing newsletter, somewhat but not excessively trimmed. Still wondering why <span style="font-weight: bold;">you</span> haven't subscribed yet...don't count room service being a habit here when the internet is one big buffet...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">An extraordinary love letter from Balzac, Susan Sontag on the commodification of wisdom, humanistic hope for the present from 1930, and more. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Looking crappy?</span><br />
<a href="http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=dcf05e2b7b&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; font-size: 10px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;">View here</span></a></div>
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<tr> <td class="yiv894708074headerContent"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=dd836b0cd8&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><img height="auto" src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/newsletter_new.png" width="640" /></a> </span></td> </tr>
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<img align="left" height="auto" src="http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/twitter1.jpg" style="margin: 3px 10px 5px 0;" width="70" /><span style="font-family: inherit;"> If you missed last week's edition – Carl Sagan's reading list, Francis Bacon on studies, Vita Sackville-West's love letter to Virginia Woolf, and more – you can catch up <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=440e79bdc9&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_blank">right here</a>. </span></div>
<h2 class="yiv894708074h2">
<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=65fe8003a0&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Green Card Stories: A Visual Catalog of Immigrants' Triumphs and Tribulations</span></a></h2>
<div class="yiv894708074intro" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 17px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 52px;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Poignant portrait of a system caught between hope and despair.</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c96c068ac5&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><img align="right" src="http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/greencardstories.jpg" style="margin: 5px 0 3px 15px;" width="180" /></a>Having spent a good portion of my adult life wrangling the nine circles of my very own immigration hell, I feel a profound personal investment in the immigration debates that have swelled to particularly prodigious proportions around this year's election. <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c971e7ea4f&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><em>Green Card Stories</em></b></a> (<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=45c195b489&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><i>public library</i></a>) tells the heartening, and often dramatic, tales of fifty immigrants who recently attained their American residency or citizenship, accompanied by powerful profiles by journalist <b>Saundra Amrhein</b> and evocative portraits by documentary photographer <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=aa6c4f49f3&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Ariana Lindquist</a>.</span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Created in collaboration with acclaimed immigration lawyers and scholars <b>Laura Danielson</b> and <b>Stephen Yale-Loehr</b>, the project is in some ways a beautiful celebration of the triumph of hope embedded in the promise of the American Dream, and in others a poignant glimpse of a brutal system of struggle that can, if allowed to, eat away at one's deepest sense of dignity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">At its heart, however, the project aims straight for the bigoted misconceptions that immigrants are somehow less hard-working and passionate and full of potential than <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0c44bf2b95&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">"real Americans,"</a> revealing instead the remarkable kaleidoscope of human life and purpose in those who have come to share their gifts with America. Humble yet proud, the voices in these stories – of artists, of scientists, of entrepreneurs, of dancers – bespeak a simple truth about place and personhood: Who you are and what you have to contribute to society cannot, nor should it, ever be reduced to or measured by a few legal check boxes, a set of biometric data, and a passport.</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">With its cross-section of magnificent diversity within a lump-sum "minority," <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=6b58b595e4&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><em>Green Card Stories</em></b></a> is part <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c8ea1cdac5&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><i>Gay In America</i></a>, part <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=89fecd6784&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><i>Created Equal</i></a>, part something else entirely. Find out more about it on the <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=dc2ffd0b81&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">project site</a>.</span></div>
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<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=6bd88ffc17&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">:: SHARE ::</span></b></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><img height="7" src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/hr.gif" width="410" /> </span><br />
<h2 class="yiv894708074h2">
<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a0f0cfdb8f&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; font-size: 22px; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This Is a Monomania: A Love Letter from Balzac</span></a></h2>
<div class="yiv894708074intro" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 17px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 52px;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">"I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them."</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=4bf23532b2&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><img align="right" src="http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/balzac.jpg" style="margin: 5px 0 3px 15px;" width="155" /></a><a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=002d3595ec&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Honoré de Balzac</a> (1799-1850) might be as well-known for his literary legacy as he is for his tumultuous love life. At twenty-three, he fell for Mme. Berny, a woman nearly twice his age known as "la Dilecta," whose creative and intellectual influence on Balzac had a profound impact on shaping his budding voice. When the two split up in 1832, he entered a troubled relationship with the Marquise de Castries, whom he later portrayed rather unflatteringly in <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f073a48921&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><i>The Duchesse of Langeais</i></a>. That year, he received a fan letter from Countess Ewelina Haska, a married Polish noblewoman to whom he came to refer to as "The Foreigner." They embarked upon an intense correspondence, which quickly escalated into a passionate bond, which lasted seventeen years. The two met twice – once in Switzerland the following year, and once in Vienna in 1835 – and the two vowed to marry once Ewelina's husband died. Though the Count passed away in 1842, Balzac's poor finances prevented the couple from marrying. In March of 1850, when he was already fatally ill, the two finally wed – five months before Balzac died in Paris.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Their correspondence, an exquisite and enduring paean to love and patience, is gathered in <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b95b2eece7&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><em>The Letters Of Honore De Balzac To Madame Hanska</em></b></a> (<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=58675c5bdc&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><i>public library</i></a>). Here is a small but deliciously telling taste:</span></div>
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<img align="left" height="auto" src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/blockquote.png" style="margin-right: 10px;" width="40" /><span style="font-family: inherit;">June 1835</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">MY BELOVED ANGEL,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them. I can no longer think of nothing but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me. As for my heart, there you will always be – very much so. I have a delicious sense of you there. But my God, what is to become of me, if you have deprived me of my reason? This is a monomania which, this morning, terrifies me. I rise up every moment say to myself, 'Come, I am going there!' Then I sit down again, moved by the sense of my obligations. There is a frightful conflict. This is not a life. I have never before been like that. You have devoured everything. I feel foolish and happy as soon as I let myself think of you. I whirl round in a delicious dream in which in one instant I live a thousand years. What a horrible situation! Overcome with love, feeling love in every pore, living only for love, and seeing oneself consumed by griefs, and caught in a thousand spiders' threads. O, my darling Eva, you did not know it. I picked up your card. It is there before me, and I talked to you as if you were here. I see you, as I did yesterday, beautiful, astonishingly beautiful. Yesterday, during the whole evening, I said to myself 'She is mine!' Ah! The angels are not as happy in Paradise as I was yesterday!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This gem also appears in <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0c3b0267b5&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><i>The 50 Greatest Love Letters of All Time</i></a>, the anthology that brought us the <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=46d2ca3784&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">exquisite</a> <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b67ac30a50&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">correspondence</a> between Virginia Woolf and her lover, Vita Sackville-West.</span></div>
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<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=54a7260802&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">:: SHARE ::</span></b></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><img height="7" src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/hr.gif" width="410" /> </span><br />
<h2 class="yiv894708074h2">
<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=af0b9f47b5&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Susan Sontag on Aphorisms and the Commodification of Wisdom</span></a></h2>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=41ba0c756c&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><img align="right" alt="" src="http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/susansontagdiaries.jpg" style="margin: 5px 0 3px 15px;" width="150" /></a>In <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=da65f3a752&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">devouring</a> the newly released volume of Susan Sontag's diaries, <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=feda979d97&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><em>As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980</em></b></a> (<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=32a94c70bc&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><i>public library</i></a>), I came across two passages addressing something that concerns me daily – the reckless reduction of complex ideas into sticky soundbites and catchphrases, a practice that in the three decades since Sontag's writings has become not merely an accepted cultural standard, but a profitable business model in the "ideas economy." Under such commodification of thought, after a while, all these bite-sized ideas begin to sound, look and, eventually, act the same.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In an entry dated April 26, 1980, Sontag offers a short but brilliant meditation on aphorisms – the ultimate soundbitification of thinking:</span></div>
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<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<img align="left" height="auto" src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/blockquote.png" style="margin-right: 10px;" width="40" /><span style="font-family: inherit;">Aphorisms are rogue ideas.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Aphorism is aristocratic thinking: this is all the aristocrat is willing to tell you; he thinks you should get it fast, without spelling out all the details. Aphoristic thinking constructs thinking as an obstacle race: the reader is expected to get it fast, and move on. An aphorism is not an argument; it is too well-bred for that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">To write aphorisms is to assume a mask – a mask of scorn, of superiority. Which, in one great tradition, conceals (shapes) the aphorist's secret pursuit of spiritual salvation. The paradoxes of salvation. We know at the end, when the aphorist's amoral, light point-of-view self-destructs. </span></div>
</blockquote>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Then, ten days later, on May 6, she continues:</span></div>
<blockquote>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<img align="left" height="auto" src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/blockquote.png" style="margin-right: 10px;" width="40" /><span style="font-family: inherit;">With the (1943) epigraph of Canetti. 'The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other very well.'</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">One wonders why. Can it be that the literature of aphorisms teaches us the sameness of wisdom (as anthropology teaches us the diversity of culture)? The wisdom of pessimism. Or should we rather conclude that the form of the aphorism, of abbreviated or condensed or rogue thought, is a historically-colored voice which, when adopted, inevitably suggests certain attitudes; is the vehicle of a common thematics?</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The traditional thematics of the aphorist: the hypocrisies of societies, the vanities of human wishes, the shallowness + deviousness of women; the sham of love; the pleasures (and necessity) of solitude; + the intricacies of one's own thought processes.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">[…]</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Aphoristic thinking is impatient thinking: by its very brevity or concentratedness, it presupposes a superior standard … </span></div>
</blockquote>
<div>
<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e6cd602c26&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">:: SHARE ::</span></b></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><img height="7" src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/hr.gif" width="410" /> </span><br />
<h2 class="yiv894708074h2">
<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=70c7b9356b&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren: A Hopeful Vision for Post-Occupy Humanity circa 1930</span></a></h2>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=93f93a2d3e&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><img align="right" src="http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/economicpossibilitieskeynes.jpg" style="margin: 5px 0 3px 15px;" width="150" /></a>Modern macroeconomics traces many of its central tenets to the work of British economist <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=deb1d6fb1d&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">John Maynard Keynes</a> (1883-1946). Besides his seminal work on understanding the causes of business cycles and developing strategies for countering recessions and depressions, Keynes was also a champion of humanism and a sociocultural optimist at heart. Nowhere does this shine more brightly, and with more prescience, than in his 1930 essay, <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=19b39a066e&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><em>Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren</em></b></a> (<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=be4b49346e&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">free PDF</a>), in which Keynes sets out to "to disembarrass [himself] of short views and take wings into the future" by envisioning culture and society 100 years later, or in the near-present. His insights are, in retrospect, bittersweet – at once standing in stark contrast with the realities of the <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=70d4a11295&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Occupy era</a> and presenting a poignant reminder that our future is, indeed, still our choice.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Keynes speaks of "technological unemployment," driven by the emergence of new technologies that displace human labor through more efficient modalities, which engenders the same sort of disillusionment and a general lack of purpose tragically common today:</span></div>
<blockquote>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<img align="left" height="auto" src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/blockquote.png" style="margin-right: 10px;" width="40" /><span style="font-family: inherit;">To those who sweat for their daily bread leisure is a longed-for sweet – until they get it.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">He offers this poetic illustration:</span></div>
<blockquote>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<img align="left" height="auto" src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/blockquote.png" style="margin-right: 10px;" width="40" /><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is the traditional epitaph written for herself by the old charwoman:–</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin-left: 20px;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Don't mourn for me, friends, don't weep for me never,</span></i></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin-left: 20px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">For I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This was her heaven. Like others who look forward to leisure, she conceived how nice it would be to spend her time listening-in-for there was another couplet which occurred in her poem:–</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin-left: 20px;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">With psalms and sweet music the heavens'll be ringing,</span></i></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin-left: 20px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">But I shall have nothing to do with the singing.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Yet it will only be for those who have to do with the singing that life will be tolerable and how few of us can sing!</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Keynes goes on to reach into the heart of the economy of purpose, in which the existential value of <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=db5747a013&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">finding your purpose and doing what you love</a> far exceeds the economic value of making money, and the challenge of <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=575e83ba0a&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">defining success through joy</a> rather than through materiality:</span></div>
<blockquote>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<img align="left" height="auto" src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/blockquote.png" style="margin-right: 10px;" width="40" /><span style="font-family: inherit;">Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard – those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me – those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties – to solve the problem which has been set them.</span></div>
</blockquote>
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<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=5312538087&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img src="http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/studioonfire10.jpg" width="410" /></span></a></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Turning his gaze to the shifting value-system behind money-making, he presages the words of Jimi Hendrix:</span></div>
<blockquote>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<img align="left" height="auto" src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/blockquote.png" style="margin-right: 10px;" width="40" /><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Keynes envisions a value shift from the "useful" to the "good":</span></div>
<blockquote>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<img align="left" height="auto" src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/blockquote.png" style="margin-right: 10px;" width="40" /><span style="font-family: inherit;">We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">He concludes by proposing four factors that would make this vision a reality, which ring all the more presciently true today, and circles right back to the essential lubricant, <a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=9415629aa2&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">purpose</a>:</span></div>
<blockquote>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<img align="left" height="auto" src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/blockquote.png" style="margin-right: 10px;" width="40" /><span style="font-family: inherit;">The pace at which we can reach our destination of economic bliss will be governed by four things – our power to control population, our determination to avoid wars and civil dissensions, our willingness to entrust to science the direction of those matters which are properly the concern of science, and the rate of accumulation as fixed by the margin between our production and our consumption; of which the last will easily look after itself, given the first three.</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 13.5px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Meanwhile there will be no harm in making mild preparations for our destiny, in encouraging, and experimenting in, the arts of life as well as the activities of purpose.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div>
<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=4661b631c9&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">:: SHARE ::</span></b></a></div>
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<a class="yiv894708074via" href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2ec62336d9&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Remembering Steven R. Covey with Timeless Insights from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People</span></b></a></h4>
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<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=aad579c444&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img src="http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/sevenhabits.jpg" width="160" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny."</span></div>
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<a class="yiv894708074via" href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=9848c3a9f9&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">A Vintage Love Letter to NYC's Heat as the Ultimate Class Equalizer</span></b></a></h4>
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<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=cdb0be8855&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img src="http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/manhattan45.jpg" width="160" /></span></a></div>
<div class="yiv894708074web" style="font-size: 12px; font-style: italic; line-height: 100%; padding: 0 10px 10px 10px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">How the extremities of the thermometer bridge the most insurmountable of social barriers.</span></div>
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<tr> <td><h4>
<a class="yiv894708074via" href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a1fdd79fcc&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Designers on Top: MoMA's Paola Antonelli on the Evolution of Design</span></b></a></h4>
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<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e002ce9379&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/paolaeyeo.png" width="160" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The quest for elegance and empowerment, or how design went from process to authorship.</span></div>
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<tr> <td><h4>
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<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e7f2829fce&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img src="http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/thoreau.jpg" width="160" /></span></a></div>
<div class="yiv894708074web" style="font-size: 12px; font-style: italic; line-height: 100%; padding: 0 10px 10px 10px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal – that is your success."</span></div>
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<tr> <td><h4>
<a class="yiv894708074via" href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=84899d6ce0&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Good Morning, Mr. Orwell: John Cage, George Plimpton, and the World's First Satellite "Installation"</span></b></a></h4>
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<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e6e9b4da52&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/cage.png" width="160" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Countering George Orwell's dystopian vision with improvisational music and experimental art.</span></div>
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<a class="yiv894708074via" href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=5b4d3a2988&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Einstein, Gödel, and the Science of Time Travel</span></b></a></h4>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">How to meet your future grandchildren in a rotating universe.</span></div>
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<a class="yiv894708074via" href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b00857c2bb&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hemingway Shoots His Cat</span></b></a></h4>
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<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=ad74b3a912&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img src="http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/hemingwayscats1.jpg" width="160" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Have had to shoot people but never anyone I knew and loved for eleven years. Nor anyone that purred with two broken legs."</span></div>
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<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=3b094c1d99&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img src="http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/howtokiss.png" width="160" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Here's to every him and miss who loves a pure and sunny kiss."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">How one of history's greatest artists almost became history's greatest anatomist.</span></div>
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<a class="yiv894708074via" href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=299c4d1202&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator</span></b></a></h4>
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<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=96a4a6019a&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img src="http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/trustmeimlying.jpg" width="160" /></span></a></div>
<div class="yiv894708074web" style="font-size: 12px; font-style: italic; line-height: 100%; padding: 0 10px 10px 10px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">How the economics of the Internet are exploited to change public perception.</span></div>
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<a class="yiv894708074via" href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=4aee81868e&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Alligators All Around: A Maurice Sendak Alphabet Book from 1962e</span></b></a></h4>
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<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=aa419c7a7f&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img src="http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/alligatorsallaround8.jpg" width="160" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Juggling jellybeans, keeping kangaroos, and other shockingly spoiled yackety-yacking.</span></div>
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<a class="yiv894708074via" href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=bfe9b3db2a&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar</span></b></a></h4>
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<a href="http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=9d437a4b86&e=fcf76a4900" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990000; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img src="http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/sugarwendy3.jpg" width="160" /></span></a></div>
<div class="yiv894708074web" style="font-size: 12px; font-style: italic; line-height: 100%; padding: 0 10px 10px 10px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"The useless days will add up to something....These things are your becoming."</span></div>
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</div>Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-25216267377993954912012-07-20T08:31:00.001-07:002012-07-22T15:07:13.579-07:00Credit Alchemy!<i>… or the Alchemical Roots of the Financial Revolution. Not just alike in opacity and aim (gold from base material whether metal or sweat), <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_(finance)" target="_blank">credit</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy" target="_blank">alchemy</a> are more connected historically, than you might imagine. </i><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<a href="http://www.berfrois.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/alchemy2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="301" src="http://www.berfrois.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/alchemy2.jpg" width="400" /></a>When the philosopher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza" target="_blank">Baruch de Spinoza</a> received word of a successful transmutation of lead into gold in December of 1666, he quickly sought to quell his skepticism by personally visiting the adept, and the visit left him fully convinced of the veracity of the adept’s account. <br />
<a name='more'></a>Spinoza was just one of many seventeenth century intellectual luminaries who seriously engaged with alchemical thought and practice: others included <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_locke" target="_blank">John Locke</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Boyle" target="_blank">Robert Boyle</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton" target="_blank">Isaac Newton</a>. In England, confidence in the utility of alchemy was widespread. It was therefore unsurprising that metallic transmutation was pursued as a solution to the stubborn scarcity of money problem that had severely curtailed England’s commerce for decades. </blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">....</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 28.47222137451172px; text-align: left;">Numerous ambitious projects were launched; some were undoubtedly motivated by personal enrichment, while others were designed to generate a more flexible money stock. Despite many reports of successful transmutations, efforts to find the lever that would give mankind control over the money stock failed to materialize. At this point, the same social reformers who had pursued alchemical transmutations switched their attention to the promotion of a generally circulating credit currency, authoring some of the first proposals for such a currency. The similarity between alchemy and credit was far from lost on them</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 28.18181800842285px; text-align: left;">....</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><em style="background-color: white; line-height: 28.47222137451172px; text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674047389/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il?ie=UTF8&tag=berfrois-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0674047389" style="color: #2978c0; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Casualties of Credit</a> </em><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 28.47222137451172px; text-align: left;">argues that there was indeed a link between alchemy and credit, but one that goes deeper than credit money replacing alchemy as the solution to the scarcity of money problem. I suggest that the new political economy that laid the foundation for the Financial Revolution was greatly influenced by the Scientific Revolution, which included alchemical, as well as, Baconian and probabilistic thinking.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: left;"><i>What follows is Wennerlind's </i>"</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 28.47222137451172px; text-align: left;">brief account of the school of political economic thought prevalent during the first half of the seventeenth century." <i>Closing with Newton's tenure at the Mint emphatically connects Scientific and Financial Revolutions, adding context to the the modern concept of credit. </i></span></span><i>Read the rest of <a href="http://www.berfrois.com/2012/03/carl-wennerlind-credit-alchemy/">Carl Wennerlind's Credit Alchemy! at berfrois</a></i></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: inherit;">About the Author:</span></strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; line-height: 28.47222137451172px; padding: 0px 0px 20px; text-align: left;">
<a href="http://www.berfrois.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/carl-wennerlind.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-23292" height="154" src="http://www.berfrois.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/carl-wennerlind.jpg" style="border: none; height: auto; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 640px; width: auto;" title="carl-wennerlind" width="120" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Carl Wennerlind</b> is an Associate Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University. Professor Wennerlind specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, with a focus on intellectual history and political economy. He is particularly interested in the historical development of money and credit, as well as attempts to theorize these phenomena. </span></div>Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-14571149470892640832012-07-14T19:04:00.001-07:002013-02-06T22:12:04.925-08:00How to Think<i>…advice</i><i> from <a href="http://www.truthdig.com/chris_hedges" target="_blank">Chris Hedges</a> </i><i>that many need but few recognize. That includes education systems, most ed theory wonks working for Foundations and government agencies…indeed society itself,</i><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.truthdig.com/images/eartothegrounduploads/AP111012014929-300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="142" src="http://www.truthdig.com/images/eartothegrounduploads/AP111012014929-300.jpg" width="200" /></a>Cultures that endure carve out a protected space for those who question and challenge national myths. Artists, writers, poets, activists, journalists, philosophers, dancers, musicians, actors, directors and renegades must be tolerated if a culture is to be pulled back from disaster<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_to_think_20120709/"><i>Chris Hedges: How to Think - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig</i></a>Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-73843971403358373122012-06-26T17:15:00.001-07:002012-06-26T17:15:48.414-07:00We Built This City<i>Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution</i>, by David Harvey, Verso, 206 pp. Reviewed in <a href="http://berfrois.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Berfrois</a> by Jonathon Moses. Image below: 1871 Paris Commune.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.berfrois.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/pariscommune1871.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="196" src="http://www.berfrois.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/pariscommune1871.jpg" width="400" /></a>It would be impossible to cover here the range of ideas in Harvey’s recent book, Rebel Cities, but it is worth considering one of its key themes: how might the city, rather than the workplace, be the key site of anti-capitalist struggle?<br />
<br />
<b>The Urban Proletariat</b><br />
<br />
In prioritising the site of production and the industrial proletariat as the revolutionary class, traditional Marxism created a number of problems. To begin with, it excluded all those who did not, or could not work from possessing any kind of agency – with the result that the struggles of domestic labourers (women), the unemployed, the disabled were largely ignored. It also left us blind to other forms of value creation outside of the sphere of ‘work’, or indeed forms of exploitation centred not around production but consumption....<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 29px; text-align: left;">For Harvey, it is the city which offers a way out – since everyone who lives in the city creates the city but only a minority take ownership of the value that is created.</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 29px; text-align: left;"> </span></span><br />
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<i>Read the rest of <a href="http://www.berfrois.com/2012/06/we-built-this-city/">We Built This City</a> by Jonathan Moses, </i><em style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 29px; text-align: right;">originally published at </em><a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jonathan-moses/city-we-built-and-they-stole" style="background-color: white; color: #2978c0; font-family: inherit; line-height: 29px; text-align: right; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><i>Open Democracy</i></a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 29px; text-align: right;"><i> </i>|</span><img alt="Creative Commons" src="http://www.opendemocracy.net/sites/all/themes/od2/images/cc-banner.jpg" style="background-color: white; border: none; font-family: inherit; height: auto; line-height: 29px; margin: 0px; max-width: 640px; text-align: right; width: auto;" />. <i>See also, David Harvey <a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">essay</a>, "The Right to the City" in <a href="http://newleftreview.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">New Left Review</a>.</i>Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-63720917625332739892012-06-12T09:54:00.000-07:002012-06-12T09:54:00.801-07:00Multilingual Protest and Scholarship<i>An essay from <a href="http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Mobilizing Ideas</a>, a production of </i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><a href="http://cssm.nd.edu/" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #1873a1; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">The Center for the Study of Social Movements at the University of Notre Dame</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #585858; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">, editorial home of the journal </span><a href="http://www.mobilization.sdsu.edu/" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #1c9bdc; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Mobilization</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #585858; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">.</span></i></span><br />
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<a href="http://mobilizingideas.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/babel.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" height="200" src="http://mobilizingideas.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/babel.jpg?w=500" title="Tower of Babel by Andreaszi" width="177" /></a>The increasing development of transnational ties and coalitions among social movement activists and organizations through the decades reveals how multilingualism can act as a vital and empowering resource for promoting sociopolitical change. Yet, the global hegemony of English also reveals how underlying power dynamics present dilemmas for progressive movements founded upon inclusive principles of multiculturalism and participatory democracy. Social movement scholarship also reflects this linguistic power dynamic and scholars should take heed. By providing more opportunities and venues for non-English speakers to participate in shaping academic debates and discussions new insights and theoretical perspectives are more likely to develop.<br />
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The ability of grassroots activists to speak multiple languages helps them to better reach out across borders, establish new allies, expand social networks and bolster visibility through mass media outlets. When Zapatista rebels launched their insurrection from the heart of Mayan territory in 1994, the capacity of leaders to integrate indigenous languages with Spanish and English allowed the movement to establish a broad base of support characterized by both transnational breadth and deep local roots. When North American and European television journalists descended upon Tunis and Cairo during the Arab Spring in 2008, the voice of protest which they captured was multilingual with Tunisian and Egyptian youths displaying banners and placards written in English and French as well as Arabic.<br />
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Embracing multilingualism in social movement scholarship does not only entail having English works translated into other languages such as Spanish or Mandarin and Arabic, but also ensuring that research published in other languages gets translated and made available in English....our understanding of transnational movements and protest from the Global South will only be richer.<br />
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<i>Read the complete essay at <a href="http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2012/06/06/multilingual-protest-and-scholarship">Multilingual Protest and Scholarship</a></i><br />Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-26652563148549178092012-06-11T21:12:00.001-07:002012-06-11T21:12:57.155-07:00What kind of Muppet are you, chaos or order?<i>Chaos, of course... and you?</i><br />
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Every once in a while, an idea comes along that changes the way we all look at ourselves forever. Before Descartes, nobody knew they were thinking. They all believed they were just mulling....These dialectics can change and shape who we are so profoundly, it’s hard to imagine life before the paradigm at all.<br />
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<a href="http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/life/low_concept/2012/06/120607_LC_COOKIE_MONSTER.jpg.CROP.rectangle3-large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Cookie Monster." border="0" height="193" src="http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/life/low_concept/2012/06/120607_LC_COOKIE_MONSTER.jpg.CROP.rectangle3-large.jpg" width="320" /></a>The same thing is true of <b>Muppet Theory</b>, a little-known, poorly understood philosophy that holds that every living human can be classified according to one simple metric:<br />
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Every one of us is either a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet.<br />
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<i><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/low_concept/2012/06/what_kind_of_muppet_are_you_chaos_or_order_.html?fb_ref=sm_fb_plugin_activity">What kind of Muppet are you, chaos or order? - Slate Magazine</a> </i>Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-53707575880457772202012-05-18T10:10:00.001-07:002012-05-18T10:10:26.071-07:00Top 10 Best Museum Web Sites<i>Virtual museum flânerie... ça c'est bon</i><br />
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<a href="http://artinfo.com/sites/default/files/museumwebsites_promo1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="190" src="http://artinfo.com/sites/default/files/museumwebsites_promo1.png" width="320" /></a>Museum buildings have long been a redoubt of architectural innovation and a dependable method for institutions to refresh their images and programming — just look at the Guggenheim Bilbao, whose name has become synonymous with museum-led urban renewal. Given that new buildings and renovations are a rare occasion, what’s another way for 21st-century museums to get a brand boost? They might choose to redesign that other gallery space — their Web site.<br />
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<i>Which one is #1? Read on to find out and learn more about the rest at <a href="http://artinfo.com/news/story/804985/artinfo-ranks-the-top-10-best-museum-web-sites-from-the-hirshhorn-to-the-aspen-art-museum">ARTINFO Ranks the Top 10 Best Museum Web Sites, From the Hirshhorn to the Aspen Art Museum | Artinfo</a> ~ then click through their links for a virtual visit. </i>Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-39367455227336530672012-05-14T13:10:00.001-07:002012-05-14T13:32:38.368-07:00Walk like a Roman | TLS<i>quelques mots sur l'histoire de la flânerie... c'est classique... </i><br />
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<a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/multimedia/dynamic/00266/Beard_266360h.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="A foot on a fourth century wall mosaic" border="0" src="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/multimedia/dynamic/00266/Beard_266360h.jpg" /></a>In <i><a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item6222235/Walking-in-Roman-Culture/?site_locale=en_US">Walking in Roman Culture</a></i>, Timothy M. O’Sullivan eloquently explains that how and why a person walked were crucial cultural indicators in ancient Rome: ways of walking divided barbarians from Romans, and good Romans from bad. If this aspect of Roman culture has not often bulked large in modern studies of the ancient world, that is partly because – as O’Sullivan notes – we have chosen not to recognize it, or have even actively “translated it away”.<br />
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The key Latin word is incessus, which literally means “gait” or “how a person moves on their feet”. It is now regularly translated as “bearing” or “demeanour”; but that removes all the sense of movement from it. “He has a noble bearing” may seem to us a more “natural” thing to say than “He has a noble way of walking”. It is not often what the Romans said, wrote or meant. In ancient Rome how you walked was a sign of who you were....<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: left;">Walking was also closely related to morals and social status.</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: left;"> </span></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1034506.ece?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter"><i>Walk like a Roman | TLS</i></a>Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21826656.post-60661459267416080982012-05-09T12:25:00.001-07:002012-06-11T09:19:50.632-07:00What European Austerity?<i>... and why should we be worrying about someone else's when we're so absorbed with our own and hoping that someone else will be doing all unpleasant austerity stuff? It's the economy, stupid. Like it or not, we're all in it together. </i><i>Too important to take it straight from your favorite pundit or any single source. We've been remiss but plan to resume reading <a href="http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Jesse's Café Américain</a>, starting right now with a scary piece on <a href="http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2012/05/question-is-how-best-to-default.html" target="_blank">defaulting and unsustainability</a>. Be brave and do the same when you finish the "Dish" just served. </i><br />
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<a href="http://dailydish.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451c45669e20168eb508f32970c-popup" style="display: inline;"> </a><a href="http://dailydish.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451c45669e20163055ad5f2970d-popup" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Vero2" src="http://dailydish.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451c45669e20163055ad5f2970d-550wi" style="width: 515px;" title="Vero2" /></a><br />
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<a name='more'></a>Veronique de Rugy <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/299233/show-me-savage-spending-cuts-europe-please-veronique-de-rugy#">throws down</a>:<br />
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First, I wish we would stop being surprised by what’s happening in Europe right now. Second, I wish anti-austerity critics would start acknowledging that taxes have gone up too–in most cases more than the spending has been cut. Third, I wish that we would stop assuming that gigantic “savage” cuts are the source of the EU’s problems. </blockquote>
Wilkinson <a href="http://willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2012/05/07/veronique-de-rugy-on-austerity-facts/">reframes</a> the debate:<br />
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I suspect the entire debate hinges on a difference in assumptions about the relevant spending baseline. If your theory prescribes significantly ramping up spending during recession, low or flat spending growth can look perversely “austere,” even if absolute spending as a % of GDP is very high.</blockquote>
Tyler Cowen <a href="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/05/how-savage-has-european-austerity-been.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29">adds</a>:<br />
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It is fine to argue “due to automatic stabilizers, spending should have increased more than it did.” That is not how people phrase it, rather they are complaining rather vociferously about “spending cuts,” many of which are either imaginary or extremely small.</blockquote>
Some of this is above my paygrade. But surely some of the increased spending comes from the cost of unemployment and other "automatic stabilizers." Drum <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/05/austerity-austerity-no-matter-how-you-get-there">argues</a> that De Rugy's <a href="http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/05/what-european-spending-cuts.html">chart</a> is wildly misleading:<br />
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There are, obviously, some problems here: the figures are in nominal euros/pounds, there's no adjustment for population growth, and anyway, the whole point of the anti-austerity Keynesians is that during a massive recession spending should be sharply higher, especially in the face of relatively tight central bank policy. Spending that's flat or slightly down is massively contractionary.</blockquote>
Ryan Avent <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/05/euro-crisis-0">nods</a>:<br />
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The supposed absence of austerity in Ms de Rugy's figures is mostly a product of poor graph scaling and a reliance on nominal, absolute figures ...The spending cuts are there, in spades.</blockquote>
Brad Plumer <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/yes-theres-been-austerity-in-europe/2012/05/08/gIQAQ1NsAU_blog.html?wprss=rss_ezra-klein">echoes</a>:<br />
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[A]usterity really is happening in Europe. The best way to see this is to look at the change in the “structural budget deficit” for each euro zone country — that’s the amount of deficit countries have once you factor out economic conditions. In other words, this is the part of the deficit that governments have direct control over. And, according to data from the IMF’s <a href="http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2012/01/index.htm">World Economic Outlook</a> (see <a href="http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2012/01/pdf/tblpartb.pdf">table B-7</a>), most euro zone countries have been sharply cutting their structural deficits since 2009.</blockquote>
Plumer produces this chart as proof:<br />
<a href="http://dailydish.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451c45669e201676651b88e970b-popup" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Austerity_eurozone" src="http://dailydish.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451c45669e201676651b88e970b-550wi" style="width: 515px;" title="Austerity_eurozone" /></a><br />
Martin Wolf has an <a href="http://blogs.ft.com/martin-wolf-exchange/2012/05/01/does-austerity-lower-deficits-in-the-eurozone/?catid=486&SID=google#axzz1uIK508zK">excellent primer</a> on the question of whether austerity actually increases debt in the long term. His bottom line:<br />
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The first and most obvious point is that the fiscal impact of the crisis is forecast to have overwhelmed the impact of tightening, over this period. Thus, between 2008 and 2012, the actual fiscal deficit is forecast to improve in only three countries: Italy (marginally); Malta and Greece. In no country, is the actual improvement forecast to be more than 2.5 per cent of GDP (namely, Greece).</blockquote>
Yglesias <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/05/08/taxes_are_austerity.html">argues</a> that "the debate over austerity in Europe has been mapped onto the American partisan debate in a weird way." Howard Gleckman <a href="http://taxvox.taxpolicycenter.org/2012/05/08/the-politics-of-austerity/">takes</a> the debate in another direction:<br />
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[T]here is only real lesson for us to learn from the recent European experience: The U.S. needs to fix its long-term budget program as soon as it can, and on its own terms. Because you never, ever, want to find yourself at the mercy of the bond vigilantes. If you don’t believe me, just ask the Greeks.</blockquote>
My view, for what it's worth, is that Obama's infrastructure spending and tax cuts have worked well to avoid a depression - but without a clear long-term deal to cut the structural deficit, we remain in deep trouble. Worse: the US is likely to make European austerity look mild next year if there's deadlock and all the Bush tax cuts are ended, along with sequestration in entitlements and defense. I have no idea how deep the austerity would be under the Ryan plan as diligently executed by Romney. But to plunge into immediate austerity just as the recovery is gathering some steam strikes me as a very good reason to be skeptical of the GOP this fall.<br />
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We need smart long-term entitlement reform, revenue-enhancing tax reform and defense cuts. What voters have to figure out is which combination of partisan forces can bring this about. My fear is that the GOP is now so extreme we will eventually be delivered to the bond vigilantes. Even with a reserve currency - a luxury the Europeans do not have.<br />
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<i><img height="1" src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/andrewsullivan/rApM/~4/asBZkAOkF3U" width="1" /><a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/andrewsullivan/rApM/~3/asBZkAOkF3U/what-european-spending-cuts.html">What European Austerity?</a> and more good stuff at The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan</i>Vanessa Vailehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04647639725252430851noreply@blogger.com0