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26 Oct 09

The End of Solitude - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

  • Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants.
  • If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.
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The Way We Live Now - Going Offline in Search of Freedom - NYTimes.com

  • I’m not wishing the Internet away. It has become so integral to my work — to my life — that I honestly can’t recall what I did without it. But it has allowed us to reflexively indulge every passing interest, to expect answers to every fleeting question, to believe that if we search long enough, surf a little further, we can hit the dry land of knowing “everything that happens” and that such knowledge is both possible and desirable. In the end, though, there is just more sea, and as alluring as we can find the perpetual pursuit of little thoughts, the net result may only be to prevent us from forming the big ones.
07 Aug 09

“And Now Your Moment of Zen”: The Cultural Significance of The Daily Show < Features | PopMatters

  • when it’s done well, comedy in this country can become a counterbalance to journalism, like journalism is a counterbalance to government
  • To be sure, humor is what it is because it’s rooted in some larger complex truth. Jokes are a palatable way of examining those things about ourselves, either culturally or individually, that may otherwise not be so easy to stomach. A successful joke operates as a kind of reductio ad absurdum, highlighting the deceptively large gap between language and meaning.
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24 Mar 09

Joho the Blog » Arguing for the sake of Heaven

  • Disagreement is, in its nature, like the creation of the world.

    For the creation of the world came about in essence by way of open space,

    without which all would have been endless divinity,

    and there would have been no place for the creation of the world.

    Therefore, God withdrew light to the margins,

    and the open space was formed,

    and in that space God created the world,

    through acts of speech.

    And so it is, too, with disagreement—

    for if all the sages were of one mind

    there would be no place for the creation of the world.

    It is only by way of the disagreement between them,

    and their dividing one from another,

    each one drawing to a particular side,

    that open space comes into being between them—

    which, in its nature, is like the withdrawing of primordial divine light to the margins—

    in the midst of which creation can take place, through acts of speech.



    —Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1772–1810)
    Jonah Steinberg, translator

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