Monday, March 25, 2024
Christian Cooper, the "Extraordinary Birder"
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/christian-cooper-the-extraordinary-birder/
Saturday, March 23, 2024
A lively "dead" language
My favorites: Solvitur ambulando... Sapere aude... mens sana in corpore sano...
Thursday, March 21, 2024
A. Bartlett Giamatti would not approve
"...don't introduce, for instance, instant replay into umpiring and remove the whole principle of judgment and as long as you don't introduce limits on the allowable time between pitches."
"BART: A Life of A. Bartlett Giamatti" by Anthony Valerio, Robert Brower: https://a.co/agh8Z2F
Umberto Eco’s personal library
https://substack.com/@tomcox/note/c-52070718?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Sunday, March 17, 2024
Hannah Arendt and the art of beginning afresh: “we are free to change the world”
Hannah Arendt is a creative and complex thinker; she writes about power and terror, war and revolution, exile and love, and, above all, about freedom. Reading her is never just an intellectual exercise, it is an experience.
[…]
She loved the human condition for what it was: terrible, beautiful, perplexing, amazing, and above all, exquisitely precious. And she never stopped believing in a politics that might be true to that condition. Her writing has much to tell us about how we got to this point in our history, about the madness of modern politics and about the awful, empty thoughtlessness of contemporary political violence. But she also teaches that it is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, matters the most.
She too lived in a "post-truth era," she too watched the fragmentation of reality in a shared world, and she saw with uncommon lucidity that the only path to freedom is the free mind. Whether she was writing about love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss or about lying in politics, she was always teaching her reader, as Stonebridge observes, not what to think but how to think — a credo culminating in her parting gift to the world: The Life of the Mind...
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/03/15/we-are-free-to-change-the-world-hannah-arendt/Rachel Carson's lost ode to the science of the sky
https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/regret-sky-arendt
Conscious addition: Barzun on reading
If life is measured by consciousness, one whose mind is full lives longer than one whose mind is empty — just as one who is awake 18 hours a day lives longer than one who sleeps away every 12 hours.
You can add to life by adding to the quantity of conscious moments through reading."
— Jacques Barzun
https://substack.com/@poeticoutlaws/note/c-51709813?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action