There is a Latin word that has no satisfying translation in English, and precisely for that reason it is worth pausing on it. The word is otium. It does not mean “idleness” in the sense we usually intend: laziness, inactivity, time wasted on the couch. In Latin, otium denotes something precise and precious: time free from public and professional obligations, dedicated to what nourishes the mind and spirit. Reading, reflection, philosophical conversation, writing, study. For Roman intellectuals, otium was not an occasional luxury but a structural necessity of the well-lived life. Its opposite was negotium, literally, the negation of otium: business, public duties, work, social obligations. The nec-otium, that which is not rest... Massimo Pigliucci https://figsinwintertime.substack.com/p/the-ancient-contrast-between-otium?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios
Outsourcing your critical thinking, being willfully ignorant, conforming (Bonhoeffer, via Jonny Thomson) https://youtu.be/HbQ-t8GXYTA?is=7JFt8t7OJUN6fqpE
Same for celebrity fans (and voters):
May 1, 1994. Yuge! 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump
Linda Holmes was an apostate Phillies fan who only recently returned to fandom for her team, and for baseball. I think she rationalizes it well here, somewhat echoing Roger Angell’s point about the crucial importance of caring— even for something as trivial as the flight of a ball or the fate of professional sports team—as a consistent feature of life.*
— Big Fan: Two Friends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love by Michael Schur, Joe Posnanski https://a.co/0gkG3PNy
==
*“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.” Five Seasons
Mr. Sanders said he plans to finish, even if he runs out of time for it to count officially. Either way, he said he will soon have to look for a new record: “I’m not going to stop unless physically I simply cannot do it anymore.”
It’s the birthday of American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, tax resister, and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, born in Concord, Massachusetts (1817). After graduating from Harvard, he worked in his father’s pencil factory. He taught for a time, but resigned because he didn’t want to administer corporal punishment. He opened a school with his brother, John, but John caught tetanus after cutting himself shaving and died in Thoreau’s arms.
He went to work for Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet and leader of the American transcendentalist movement. Thoreau moved into Emerson’s house and tutored his children. After he accidentally burned down 300 acres of woods near Concord, his friend Ellery Channing told him: “Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.”
On July 4, 1845, Thoreau entered the woods at Walden Pond near Concord, built a small cabin, and spent two years, two months, and two days listening to whip-poor-wills singing, frogs croaking, and owls hooting. He cultivated beans, ate fish, salt pork, and woodchuck, and spent considerable time pondering which pond was more beautiful: Walden Pond, Flint’s Pond, or White Pond. He always left three chairs ready for visitors. It was a grand experiment: to see if simple self-sufficiency could lead to a greater, more objective understanding of society.
It took almost nine years for Thoreau to complete his book on his experience in the woods. He titled the book Walden; or, A Life in the Woods (1854). The book became the foundation for the future movements of ecology and environmentalism. Thoreau developed a penchant for yoga and Hinduism. He contracted tuberculosis, which set his health back, and after spending a rainy evening counting tree rings on a stump, he developed bronchitis and never recovered. On his deathbed, his Aunt Louise asked if he had made his peace with God. Thoreau replied, “I did not know we had ever quarreled.”
In Walden, Thoreau writes: “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
“Believe it or not (I certainly have a hard time believing it!), it has been three decades since the publication of Carl Sagan’s famous essay “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” incorporated as chapter 12 in his The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995). I therefore thought it would be a good idea for skeptics to reconsider Sagan’s essay and see how it has stood up to the passage of time and how it might be improved as we move toward the middle section of the twenty-first century. Let’s begin with a bird’s eye view of the original. It starts out, very symbolically I think, with a long quote from Francis Bacon’s Novum Organon, published in 1620; it marked the beginning of modern philosophy of science. While Bacon’s main concern was to reject the Aristotelian approach that had been dominant during the Middle Ages (the Organon was a collection of six books by Aristotle on the topic of logic and its use in scientific inquiry), he was also preoccupied with several common errors in judgment that human beings are prone to make. The quote chosen by Sagan reads, in part: “For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride.” You can see why Sagan thought it appropriate. His essay is roughly divided into four parts: an introduction that sets the stage, positive tools, negative tools, and a conclusion. I will focus mostly on the second and third parts, but allow me a few comments on the introduction. Sagan reminds us that belief in nonsense is widespread…” Massimo Pigliucci https://skepticalinquirer.org/2026/06/the-fine-art-of-baloney-detection-sagans-essay-three-decades-later/
https://youtu.be/QTQVZuBV9oA?is=qovXshk6K8d8-Ra6
…A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning. While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”
…
Bad dentition, inferior cuisine, funny names...
I assume the irony is intentional, if not self-deprecatory.
But yes, to be Canada wouldn't be so bad. No Kings, though.
It’s said they planted trees by graves
to soak up spirits of the dead
through roots into the growing wood.
The favorite in the burial yards
I knew was common juniper.
One could do worse than pass into
such a species. I like to think
that when I’m gone the chemicals
and yes the spirit that was me
might be searched out by subtle roots
and raised with sap through capillaries
into an upright, fragrant trunk,
and aromatic twigs and bark,
through needles bright as hoarfrost to
the sunlight for a century
or more, in wood repelling rot
and standing tall with monuments
and statues there on the far hill,
erect as truth, a testimony,
in ground that’s dignified by loss,
around a melancholy tree
that’s pointing toward infinity.
“Living Tree” by Robert Morgan from Dark Energy. © Penguin, 2014. Reprinted with permission.
https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-tuesday-june-23-2026/
Sign’s been gone for years (like Angel and many of our other walking companions in this neighborhood from ‘96 on) but I’ve carried its message ever since. Wisest words the Baptists ever shared. There are new signs there now, the result of a Boy Scout project. This one was better.
Leaving MAGA’s Billboard Campaign Targets Nashville | City Limits | nashvillescene.com https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/citylimits/leaving-maga-billboard-nashville/article_e23e9459-5a85-4939-b789-a96040022721.html
..,The details of the encyclical were interesting, but on some level they didn’t matter: “The Pope is basically telling us that AI is here to stay,” the economist Tyler Cowen wrote.
That doesn’t mean that it’s time to start “living with the machines” and automating every aspect of your life. But it might indicate that it’s time to begin the more specific work of figuring out, in a conscious and considered way, where artificial intelligence might help and hurt you, in all your particularity. If those students were to ask me their question again, I’d answer differently. I’d say, use it, definitely—but use it seriously. Be open about it. And keep track, in different contexts, of what you’re gaining and giving up. Make a list. Take notes. ♦︎
“…Whitman placed Fanny Wright alongside Thomas Paine as the two most unjustly vilified figures in the convention-bound collective memory we call history. Freedom of thought was what Walt Whitman wanted, and Fanny Wright armed him with the arsenal of self-permission to pursue it, to go where she herself had gone while still in adolescence. On the pages of her precocious book that so impressed itself upon Whitman’s imagination, Fanny Wright had stepped into and beyond deism to argue—to demonstrate with reason—that the religious notion of an afterlife is a romance of mythology for which there is no physical evidence; that it is therefore far less compelling and interesting than the romance of reality, in which matter itself is in a sense immortal, since atoms undergo a continual reconfiguration from one thing to another. Without her early and lasting imprint on his cosmogony, Whitman might never have written that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”” — Traversal by Maria Popova https://a.co/0bUKGTBg
Maria Popova echoes Richard Dawkins: “Someday this constellation I love will grow dim, then disband into atoms, and so will this constellation I am. “To die is different from what any one supposed,” Whitman wrote, “and luckier.” The poet who knew the amplitude of time knew too that death betokens the luckiness of having lived—the roll of the dice on the granite floor of eternity that configures each improbable existence, each I drawn from the myriad possible not-I’s that were never born and will never get to die. Everything we know of mathematics tells us that this infinite set of possible unconstellated atoms contains poets greater than Walt Whitman, chemists greater than Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, versions of you and me kinder and crueler than we will ever be. And yet here we are, between the dice, between the trees—probable impossibilities, each of us a brief traversal between not yet and never again, having only these arms to hold the borrowed atoms that we love. That is enough.” — Traversal by Maria Popova https://a.co/09v7APU0
We forget that none of this had to exist — that we weren’t owed mountains and music by the universe. And maybe we have to forget — or we would be too stupefied with gratitude for every raindrop and every eyelash to get through the daily tasks punctuating the unbidden wonder of our lives. But it is good, every once in a while, to let ourselves be stupefied by gratitude, to cast upon ourselves a spell against indifference: https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/12/12/thank-you-everything-icinori/
"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind." God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (and see Mr. Rogers, below)
"Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail."
Jailbird, prologue
When asked in 1978 about his writing process, Updike said, “I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them, you will never write again.”
After the birth of his third child, he had rented an office above a restaurant in Ipswich, and spent several hours each morning writing there. Throughout his 50-year career, he remained devoted to that schedule, writing about three pages every morning after breakfast, sometimes more if things were going well. He said: “Back when I started, our best writers spent long periods brooding in silence. Then they’d publish a big book and go quiet again for another five years. I decided to run a different kind of shop.” WA
 | Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton) |
Why ‘Earthrise’ Matters thebookoflife.org/why- | |
 | Five Books (@five_books) |
The 'father of science fiction' HG Wells suffered terribly from class anxiety. Huxley and Woolf thought him 'vulgar' == Five books on... | |
Charles Darwin (@cdarwin)1/11/15, 6:51 AM"And maybe this is what I have learned more than anything from my great-great-grandfather: to keep my eyes and my mind open, to enjoy the wonders of nature and never cease to ask questions." Sarah Darwin, foreword to "A Modest Genius: The story of Darwin's life and how his ideas changed everything" by Hanne Strager
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