In his book, Daily Rituals, Mason Currey explores William James’s thoughts on Habit. “Recollect,” (James) wrote, “that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action — and consequently accumulate grain on grain of wilful choice like a very miser — never forgetting how one link dropped undoes [...]
Philosophy
Is Dante still relevant in our new world? As if to prove this point, the most recent season of Mad Men kicked off with John Ciardi’s 1954 translation of Inferno: Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. Last month poet [...]
Some life insight from someone who retired at 30: The latte is just the foamy figurehead of an entire spectrum of sloppy “I deserve it” luxury spending that consumes most of our gross domestic product these days. Among my favorite targets: commuting to an office job in an F-150 pickup truck, anything involving a drive-through, [...]
Brainpickings put me onto this timeless wisdom from famous eccentric James T. Mangan’s 1936 book You Can Do Anything! 14 Ways to Acquire Knowledge: PRACTICE Consider the knowledge you already have — the things you really know you can do. They are the things you have done over and over; practiced them so often that [...]
Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality-call it an alternate reality-to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible [...]
If you missed out on attending the famous TED conference this year — you’re not alone. But now you can queue up some of the books that were available at the TED Bookstore for your spring reading pile. The bookstore was curated this year by Maria Popova (Brain Pickings). I haven’t been able to find [...]
“Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.” In this short video, British philosopher Alan Watts, asks an important question, what would you like to do if money were no object? What would you do if money were no object? [...]
Monopoly‘s true origins go unmentioned in the official literature. Three decades before Darrow’s patent, in 1903, a Maryland actress named Lizzie Magie created a proto-Monopoly as a tool for teaching the philosophy of Henry George, a nineteenth-century writer who had popularized the notion that no single person could claim to “own” land. In his book [...]
