Only the beginning

https://www.threads.net/@debpixcom/post/C6MZkRPr9FQ/?xmt=AQGzN2mHOSlEdTqzFhaaR778guMt4Pt4W1g4nfIWjXlmsg

Einstein 1921

https://www.threads.net/@beatgrrrl/post/C6MijO1xvaj/?xmt=AQGzXPS6WYku4JPKlH9SU6IR4xlRTjZzCw0h1sdVg6eybw

The "root of judgment, character, and will"

"The idea of mindfulness itself is by no means a new one. As early as the end of the nineteenth century, William James, the father of modern psychology, wrote that “the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will…. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.” That faculty, at its core, is the very essence of mindfulness. And the education that James proposes, an education in a mindful approach to life and to thought."

"Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes" by Maria Konnikova: https://a.co/3Omi6OR

RWE: contradiction isn’t persecution

https://www.threads.net/@debpixcom/post/C537uchgYeM/?xmt=AQGzmerldnjI5vuhEcfLRANsgP8zPUJuQ5KmdoByFwQeIQ

Philosophy in Warm Weather

…Now all the doors and windows

are open, and we move so easily
through the rooms. Cats roll
on the sunny rugs, and a clumsy wasp
climbs the pane, pausing
to rub a leg over her head.

All around physical life reconvenes.
The molecules of our bodies must love
to exist: they whirl in circles
and seem to begrudge us nothing.
Heat, Horatio, heat makes them
put this antic disposition on!

… Jane Kenyon

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-wednesday-970?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Walk better

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

The Beatles did

"I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did.'" ― Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Timequake

https://www.threads.net/@thatericalper/post/C5KXGjWLqjD/?xmt=AQGzXvb-tglkrTh5UDZZs_TmLA7qttG-98MMqlzMXgQwLQ

Christian Cooper, the "Extraordinary Birder"

How Spock's stoicism helped him in Central Park…

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/christian-cooper-the-extraordinary-birder/

A lively "dead" language

 My favorites: Solvitur ambulando... Sapere aude... mens sana in corpore sano...

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

I find that if am ever feeling bad about buying too many books in addition to the other books I already own and will probably never get time to read all of, looking at this "small section" of the late Umberto Eco's personal library helps…

https://substack.com/@tomcox/note/c-52070718?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

“Starstuff, contemplating the stars”

https://www.threads.net/@the_intellectualist_official/post/C4qen8AOd0a/?xmt=AQGzuLLann7JAuNQnoxKOS8Il93Jj_5fwfknptpe5_-ypw

With a twist

https://www.threads.net/@secularstudents/post/C4ldY7RpyuK/?xmt=AQGzS4EPsZQrPIeTnFjkg65_dfbvAoTPAeUoISINPLSjvQ

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

"A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength."

https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/regret-sky-arendt

Conscious addition: Barzun on reading

"Reading of course can easily be nothing more than a way to kill time; but if it is calculated and intense, it is a steady extension of one's life.

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

Annoyingly pragmatic

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The New Yorker Cartoons (@newyorkercartoons)

The deep thrill of teaching

"I have projected a process of choice and shape as if teaching were really what the ancients and their Renaissance emulators said it was, a sculpting process, whereby the clay or stone or wax, inorganic material but malleable, could, through choices, be made to take a shape that nature never saw, a shape art supplies to the stuff the world provides. While I do not think teaching is as painless or effortless as I may have made it sound, I do believe it is essentially the ethical and aesthetic activity I propose. I do believe that it involves the making and setting of right and wrong choices in the interests of a larger, shaping process and that the deep thrill a teacher can experience comes from the combination of these activities, so that you feel what you think, do what you talk about, judge as you talk about judgment, proceed logically as you reveal logical structure, clarify as you talk about clarity, reveal as you show what nature reveals-all in the service of encouraging the student in imitation and then repetition of the process you have been summoning, all so that the student may turn himself not into you but into himself. - - A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI, A Free and Ordered Space"

"BART: A Life of A. Bartlett Giamatti" by Anthony Valerio, Robert Brower: https://a.co/8bbPUDD

"to organize the daylight"

"There comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it. Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight. - -A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI, "The Green Fields of the Mind""

"BART: A Life of A. Bartlett Giamatti" by Anthony Valerio, Robert Brower: https://a.co/cii31HQ

Diamonds in the desert

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Phil Oliver (@osopher)

Large-hearted

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fur Friends (@fur.friends2)

Yogi

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Yogi Berra Museum (@yogiberramuseum)

CJ just doesn’t get it

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C36ZuYixY0d/?igsh=enRua3R5YmxybWd6

Roger Angell, chronicler of the experience of caring

Nobody Did It Better Than Roger Angell

...Angell profiled generations of the biggest stars in the game. He wrote about every World Series for decades; he covered spring training and the minor leagues and entirely forgettable weekday contests. But what tied all of this work together was its sense of purpose: Angell understood just why people watched baseball and just why people wanted to read about it. He knew what made the game important alongside what made it anything but. And he understood all of this because he lived all of this: Roger Angell was a baseball fan. If this seems like it should be a given for a baseball writer, it hasn’t always been, and that’s illuminated by the gap between his work and that of so many others. Who else could write this experience of spring training from the stands (1962) and this incisive profile of Bob Gibson (1980) and this meditation on watching a blown save with his wife (2011)? The common thread is the understanding of what it means to love the game...
https://www.si.com/mlb/2022/05/21/roger-angell-death-nobody-did-it-better

Twain on travel

https://www.threads.net/@debpixcom/post/C32XsXXrl_l/

No cult required

Christopher Hitchens Dismisses the Cult of Ayn Rand: There's No "Need to Have Essays Advocating Selfishness Among Human Beings; It Requires No Reinforcement"

https://www.threads.net/@openculture/post/C31zYOTLoX0/

Nashville skyline

 Definitely not Dylan's...

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Nashville Tennessee (@nashvilletn)

Feynman on others’ expectations

https://www.threads.net/@thepoetnotarockstar/post/C3rK3J6rWZ_/

Earth and moon from Cassini

https://www.threads.net/@amaziingastronomy/post/C3qSbz1o8HB/

Wiped out

@asherperlman: https://www.instagram.com/p/C3nLx5POY_Y/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=M2M0Y2JmOTAyOA==

Guess who?

@petesouza: https://www.instagram.com/p/C3khI9JOn7O/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=M2M0Y2JmOTAyOA==

Flying Dutchman

"He registered a dizzy 7.6 mmv over Brodmann 32, the area of abstractive activity. Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Instead he orbits the earth and himseIvlf. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman."

"Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World" by Walker Percy: https://a.co/jbrgM0E

Ur OK

https://substack.com/@figsinwinter/note/c-49915469?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

A former slave’s remarkable letter to his old “owner”

Letters of note

https://open.substack.com/pub/lettersofnote/p/i-meet-the-proposition-with-unutterable?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

How to manage a busy schedule

https://www.instagram.com/p/C3h-hdkrqmK/?igsh=eTlyMTlsdDZ5dzI0

Got it

"He gets us" doesn't get it:

https://open.substack.com/pub/johnpavlovitz/p/everyone-gets-jesusexcept-american?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

‘Reading is so sexy’: gen Z turns to physical books and libraries

Can this be true?!

They have killed skinny jeans and continue to shame millennials for having side partings in their hair. They think using the crying tears emoji to express laughter is embarrassing. But now comes a surprising gen Z plot twist. One habit that those born between 1997 and 2012 are keen to endorse is reading – and it's physical books rather than digital that they are thumbing... Guardian

What all prospective parents need to know

"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams." ~Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

Reconstruction Amendments

"…It seems clear that the men who wrote the Reconstruction Amendments expected men like former president Trump to be disqualified from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment, as 25 distinguished historians of Reconstruction outlined in their recent brief supporting Trump's removal from the Colorado ballot.

But the Fourteenth Amendment did far more than ban insurrectionists from office. Together with the other Reconstruction Amendments, it established the power of the federal government to defend civil rights, voting, and government finances from a minority that had entrenched itself in power in the states and from that power base tried to impose its ideology on the nation." HCR

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/february-4-2024?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Why you should keep a journal

Inspiration | Elevation | Consiousness ♾️ (@inspiring.thought8) on Threads threads.net

https://www.threads.net/@inspiring.thought8/post/C25XhzRgmNZ/

Ontological Airbnb

"...I don’t desire a personal God. (When I went to Jewish services with my wife and read the translations of the prayers, the relentless praise made me cringe.) What I want is not a superhero dad but for the universe to make sense, for it to meet what Hegel called our “absolute need” to be at home in the world. I can see why Baddiel might frame this need in filial terms, as a desire for God the Parent. But those who didn’t feel at home at home may crave a more impersonal consolation: a rational proof, or truth, or narrative that salves our ontological homelessness.

We may also be more modest in our hopes. I’m as terrified of death as anyone, but I have no dreams of immortality. I cannot think that justice will be done in some divine tribunal, that everything has happened for good reason in the best of all possible worlds. My hopes are more precarious, more painful, more provisional: that we will bend the arc of future history towards justice—an ontological Airbnb..."

Kieran Setiya
https://open.substack.com/pub/ksetiya/p/ontological-airbnb?r=35ogp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Humanists International Declaration of Modern Humanism

Agreed at the General Assembly, Glasgow United Kingdom, 2022

"Humanist beliefs and values are as old as civilization and have a history in most societies around the world. Modern humanism is the culmination of these long traditions of reasoning about meaning and ethics, the source of inspiration for many of the world's great thinkers, artists, and humanitarians, and is interwoven with the rise of modern science. 

As a global humanist movement, we seek to make all people aware of these essentials of the humanist worldview: 

1. Humanists strive to be ethical 

    We accept that morality is inherent to the human condition, grounded in the ability of living things to suffer and flourish, motivated by the benefits of helping and not harming, enabled by reason and compassion, and needing no source outside of humanity. 

We affirm the worth and dignity of the individual and the right of every human to the greatest possible freedom and fullest possible development compatible with the rights of others. To these ends we support peace, democracy, the rule of law, and universal legal human rights. 

We reject all forms of racism and prejudice and the injustices that arise from them. We seek instead to promote the flourishing and fellowship of humanity in all its diversity and individuality. 

We hold that personal liberty must be combined with a responsibility to society. A free person has duties to others, and we feel a duty of care to all of humanity, including future generations, and beyond this to all sentient beings. 

We recognise that we are part of nature and accept our responsibility for the impact we have on the rest of the natural world. 

2. Humanists strive to be rational 

    We are convinced that the solutions to the world's problems lie in human reason, and action. We advocate the application of science and free inquiry to these problems, remembering that while science provides the means, human values must define the ends. We seek to use science and technology to enhance human well-being, and never callously or destructively. 

3. Humanists strive for fulfillment in their lives 

    We value all sources of individual joy and fulfillment that harm no other, and we believe that personal development through the cultivation of creative and ethical living is a lifelong undertaking. 

We therefore treasure artistic creativity and imagination and recognise the transforming power of literature, music, and the visual and performing arts. We cherish the beauty of the natural world and its potential to bring wonder, awe, and tranquility. We appreciate individual and communal exertion in physical activity, and the scope it offers for comradeship and achievement. We esteem the quest for knowledge, and the humility, wisdom, and insight it bestows. 

4. Humanism meets the widespread demand for a source of meaning and purpose to stand as an alternative to dogmatic religion, authoritarian nationalism, tribal sectarianism, and selfish nihilism 

Though we believe that a commitment to human well-being is ageless, our particular opinions are not based on revelations fixed for all time. Humanists recognise that no one is infallible or omniscient, and that knowledge of the world and of humankind can be won only through a continuing process of observation, learning, and rethinking. 

For these reasons, we seek neither to avoid scrutiny nor to impose our view on all humanity. On the contrary, we are committed to the unfettered expression and exchange of ideas, and seek to cooperate with people of different beliefs who share our values, all in the cause of building a better world. 

We are confident that humanity has the potential to solve the problems that confront us, through free inquiry, science, sympathy, and imagination in the furtherance of peace and human flourishing. We call upon all who share these convictions to join us in this inspiring endeavor."

— Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell - appendix

Humanly Possible by Sarah Bakewell, conclusion

"Posthumanism and transhumanism are opposites: one eliminates human consciousness, while the other suffuses it into everything. But they are the sort of opposites that meet at the extremes. Both agree that our current humanity is something transitional or wrong—something to be left behind. Instead of dealing with ourselves as we are, both imagine us altered in some dramatic way: either made more humble and virtuous in a new Eden, or retired from existence, or inflated to a level that sounds like that of gods. 

I am a humanist; I cannot happily contemplate any of these alternatives. As a science fiction enthusiast, I used to have a weakness for transhumanism, however. Years ago, my mind was blown by a classic science fiction novel: Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, published in 1953. 

The story begins, as many in the genre do, with aliens arriving on Earth. They promptly shower us with gifts, which include hours of entertainment. "Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels?" asks one character in the book, conveying 1953' s idea of a cornucopian abundance. But the bounty of the aliens comes with conditions: humans must stay on Earth and give up exploring space. 

A few people resist the gilded cage, declining to watch the entertainment and proclaiming defiant pride in human achievements. But as time goes on, this aging minority is forgotten and a new generation emerges. They have new mental gifts, including the first stirrings of an ability to access the "Overmind," a mysterious shared consciousness in the universe, which has outgrown "the tyranny of matter." 

That generation in turn gives way to the next, and these beings are hardly human at all. Needing no food, having no language, they simply dance for years, in forests and meadows. Finally they stop and stand motionless for a long time. Then they slowly dissolve upward, into the Overmind. The planet itself becomes translucent like glass and shimmers out of existence. Humanity and the Earth have gone, or rather, they have been transfigured and merged into a higher realm. 

Such an ending for humanity is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, writes Clarke; it is just final. So is his novel, in a way. It pushes fiction to its limits. Earlier science fiction writers had also imagined a future in which humanity dies, notably Olaf Stapledon in his 1930 work, Last and First Men. But Clarke goes further, into a realm where there can be no more stories at all. Species have vanished; even matter has vanished, at least from Earth. He goes where Dante went in his Paradiso—and Dante complained in that work's first canto that this necessarily defeats the powers of any writer. To write about Heaven is "to go beyond the human"—transumanar—and, says Dante, this also means going beyond what language itself can accomplish. 

When I first read Childhood's End, I loved its finale. Now I feel the melancholy of such a vision far more. It leaves me in mourning for those flawed, recognizable individuals that we are and for the details of our planet and our many cultures, all lost to a universal blandness. Every particularity has gone: the atoms of Democritus, Terence's nosy neighbor, Petrarch's lack of patience and Boccaccio's bawdy stories, the Lake Nemi ships and the fishlike Genoese divers, Aldus Manutius and his exuberance (" Aldus is here!"), students floating down rivers, Platina's recipe for grilled eel à l'orange, Erasmus's polite farts, the Encyclopédie (all 71,818 articles of it), Hume's games of backgammon and whist, Dorothy L. Sayers's comfortable trousers, Frederick Douglass's magnificently photographed face and his eloquent words, the priestly and poetic Kawi language, sea squirts, bloomers, the Esperanto plaque by Petrarch's beloved stream, M. N. Roy's good soups, ridiculous heraldry, Rabindranath Tagore's classes under the trees, the windows of Chartres, microfilms, manifestos, meetings, Pugwash, busy New York streets, the yellow line of morning. They have all gone up in the ultimate bonfire of the vanities. To me, this no longer says sublimity; it says, "How disappointing." 

Where, in all this pure divinity and mysticism, is the richness of actual life? Also, where is our sense of responsibility for managing our occupancy of Earth? (Not that Clarke himself supported abdicating such responsibilities—quite the contrary.) And what about our relationships with fellow humans and other creatures—that great foundation for humanist ethics, identity, and meaning? 

These dreams of elevation perhaps emerge from memories of being a small child, lifted out of a cradle by big arms. But the Earth is not a cradle; we are not alone here, since we share it with so many other living beings; and we need not wait to be spirited away. Give me, instead of the Overmind, or the sublime visions of any religion, these words of a more human wisdom by James Baldwin: 

One is responsible to life. It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. 

A sense of sin is of no help on that journey; neither is a dream of transcendence. Dante was right: we really cannot transumanar, and if we have fun trying—well, that can produce beautiful literature. But it is still human literature. 

I prefer the humanist combination of freethinking, inquiry, and hope. And, as the late scholar of humanism and ethics Tzvetan Todorov once remarked in an interview: 

Humanism is a frail craft indeed to choose for setting sail around the world! A frail craft that can do no more than transport us to frail happiness. But, to me, the other solutions seem either conceived for a race of superheroes, which we are not . . . or heavily laden with illusions, with promises that will never be kept. I trust the humanist bark more. 

Finally, as always, I am brought back to the creed of Robert G. Ingersoll: 

    Happiness is the only good. 

    The time to be happy is now. 

    The place to be happy is here. 

    The way to be happy is to make others so.

    —

It sounds simple; it sounds easy. But it will take all the ingenuity we can muster."

— Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell

The Antidote to Melancholy: Robert Burton’s Centuries-Old Salve for Depression, Epochs Ahead of Science – The Marginalian

"'Seek out what magnifies your spirit'…

Precisely a quarter millennium before Thomas Bernhard observed that "there is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking," and two centuries before Nietzsche extolled the mental benefits of walking, Burton writes:

To walk amongst orchards, gardens, bowers, mounts, and arbours, artificial wildernesses, green thickets, arches, groves, lawns, rivulets, fountains… brooks, pools, fishponds, between wood and water, in a fair meadow, by a river side… in some pleasant plain, park, run up a steep hill sometimes, or sit in a shady seat… [is] a delectable recreation…

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/01/18/robert-burton-melancholy-body-mind/

Richard Powers on the Most Important Attitude You Can Take Toward Your Life and the World – The Marginalian

Sound advice from several sources…

We live in an open, evolving universe. We have choices to make, lives to live. All is not already set in plaster. Try to make it better.

"Never forget what you were born knowing. That this fluke, single, huge, cross-indexed, thermodynamic experiment of a story that the world has been inventing to tell itself at bedtime is still in embryo. It's not even the outline of a synopsis of notes toward a rough draft yet. Buy the plot some time."

https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/09/12/richard-powers-advice/

John Cleese speaks for philosophy

 Short Spots for Radio Stations

One of the tasks of the APA Centennial Committee, chaired by John Lachs, was to create a broader public awareness for philosophy by calling attention to its personal value and social usefulness. The Committee enlisted the help of the actor, John Cleese, in bringing this about. Mr. Cleese has recorded a disk of short philosophical reflections that were written for use on radio stations throughout the country. The disc contains 22 spots ranging from 30 seconds to 1 minute in length.

We've converted the CD to MP3 files and shared them below. You can listen to each individually, or you can download the whole set as a zip file.

01 Survey
02 Scientific Life
03 In The Present
04 Information
05 The Meaning Of Life
06 Future Obligation
07 Somewhere Else
08 Tabloid
09 Starting Point
10 Worldly Good
11 Things That Matter
12 Fun
13 Quality Of Life
14 What To Fear
15 Dream
16 Kids Today
17 Decision
18 Silenced
19 Century
20 Neighbor Policy
21 To Die For
22 Reachable Stars

Download all as a zip file.

From Volume 80, No. 2 of the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association

https://www.apaonline.org/page/Cleese/John-Cleese-Talking-About-Life-and-Philosophy.htm

When the Sky Offers an Unexpected Gift of Time

…In "The Book of (More) Delights," the poet and essayist Ross Gay writes about the gift of time that opens up whenever he unexpectedly arrives at an appointment early, or when the person he plans to meet is running late. Such unplanned changes in agenda can feel, he writes, "like the universe just dropped a bouquet of time, and often a luminous bouquet of time, in your lap."

That's what a snow day feels like here. A snow day in the American South on an overheating planet is exactly like an extravagant bouquet of luminous time that comes out of nowhere and lasts as long as it cares to, on a schedule we cannot entirely predict, much less control. Last week the sky offered an unexpected gift of time. Thank God I had no choice but to take it.  —Margaret Renkl

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/opinion/snow-winter-climate-change.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Another Gun Fight Is Looming in Tennessee

"…this growing coalition of new gun-safety advocates continues to give me hope. They were back at the Capitol last week — parents, teenagers, children and just about every other group, from both sides of the political aisle. They are not giving up, and so far they have not fallen prey to the political divisions that so often splinter bipartisan advocacy efforts…" —Margaret Renkl

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/15/opinion/gun-safety-tennessee.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare