Will > Books: brain-candy‎ (154)

The road to ruin is paved with certainty. The end of the world is only ever hastened by those who think they will be able to protect their own from

The road to ruin is paved with certainty. The end of the world is only ever hastened by those who think they will be able to protect their own from the coming storm.

Love is the mind killer.

They were definitely not inspired by anyone specifically who could sue me for everything I’m worth and barely notice it…They are composite characters made up of some of the ridiculous and awful things that tech billionaires have done and some of it just made up out of my head. But of course the companies are inspired by real companies. - from the LitHub interview

“Margaret [Atwood] has very much covered how bad it can get, so we don’t need a lesser writer doing that,” Alderman says. “I’m interested in the most radical ideas about how we can make things better, and what are the avenues we can pursue.” - from the AP interview

The wealthier you are, the less you have to ask people things and the less you ask people for things, the less you have to discover that you can trust and rely on them. Eventually, that erodes your ability to trust. Then, you’re sunk. - from the Electric Literature interview

In today’s culture, technology, particularly social media, “encourages us not to really trust each other,” Alderman explains. “The ways that we use to communicate with each other have been monetized in order to make us as angry at and afraid [of one another] as possible.” And while the internet can all too often amplify “absolute hateful stupidity” to feed our distrust of one another, the author continues, “It can also demonstrably, again and again, multiply our knowledge and capacity to understand.” - from the Shondaland interview

Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures. The pulse beats faster, the pressure rises, the voice of instinct drives out reason and education. At a certain point, things become inevitable.

Naomi Alderman is the bestselling author of The Power, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was chosen as a book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and was recommended as a book of the year by both Barack Obama and Bill Gates. As a novelist, Alderman has been mentored by Margaret Atwood via the Rolex Arts Initiative, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. As a video games designer, she was lead writer on the groundbreaking alternate reality game Perplex City, and is cocreator of the award-winning smartphone exercise adventure game Zombies, Run!, which has more than 10 million players. She is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University. She lives in London.

What makes a person the same person over time? Is it our consciousness, the what-it’s-like to be us? Is consciousness like a light that’s either on

What makes a person the same person over time? Is it our consciousness, the what-it’s-like to be us? Is consciousness like a light that’s either on or off?

What remains of a person once they’ve died? It depends on what we choose to keep.

I always understood my father’s desire to resurrect his father’s identity as being connected to two different kinds of trauma. One is the loss of his father at a young age in a common but tragic scenario, with heart disease. The other trauma is this loss of a whole culture. Jewish life in Vienna was incredibly vibrant. Literally overnight it was lost. The suddenness of that loss was profound, and it took me a while to appreciate that. My great-aunt Dorit, who died this past year at 98, said they were following all the arbitrary protocols of the Nazis to save all this documentation. Saving documentation is an inheritance in my family that is a response to that traumatic circumstance. - from the PW interview

I used to wonder if I could wake up into a different self. For all I knew, it could have happened every morning. A new self would have a new set of memories.

AMY KURZWEIL is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir. She was a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow with the American Academy in Berlin, a 2019 Shearing Fellow with the Black Mountain Institute, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, and elsewhere.

She has been nominated for a Reuben Award and an Ignatz Award for “Technofeelia,” her four part series with The Believer Magazine. Her writing, comics, and cartoons have also been published in The Verge, The New York Times Book Review, Longreads, Literary Hub, WIREDand many other places. Kurzweil has taught widely for over a decade. See her website (amykurzweil.com) to take a class with her.

I had no idea my experience was so different from other people’s. Now I’m convinced that everybody has their own unique holographic experience of t

I had no idea my experience was so different from other people’s. Now I’m convinced that everybody has their own unique holographic experience of the sensory world.”

Synesthesia has been incorrectly defined, in my humble opinion, as “crossed wires in the brain” or “mixed-up senses.” In fact, synesthetes have the same primary response to a stimulus as neurotypical people do. If the numeral 5 appears in newsprint, I know that it is black on a white (well, somewhat beige) background. However, simultaneously, I see navy blue around that number and above that number it, like an aura. Therefore, I’ve created what I believe is a much better definition: Synesthesias are traits in which a sensory stimulus yields the expected sensory response plus one or more additional sensory responses.

Patricia Lynne Duffy, a member of the United Nations Staff 1 Percent for Development Fund committee, was safely ensconced in her Manhattan office, but when she read the proposals before her, she felt the pain of the world’s most fragile people.

There’s plenty of evidence that humans are adapting to, even passing, machines by using their senses. Just look at the mind-meld young people have with their personal devices and the manual deftness with which they use them compared to older generations. Maybe the singularity moves in two directions, and we meet somewhere along the way. There’s a human-based component not yet considered. And since we’ve recently learned that human sensory potentials are far greater than we knew, perhaps we have a little more time to think about the value of being Homo sapiens.

A very small subset of the neurological outliers known as mirror-touch synesthetes have extreme empathy for machines. They are sometimes able to feel the mechanisms in their own sensitive bodies. I call them machine synesthetes or machine empaths.

“We genuinely experience scent as the emotion we have attached to it,” one sensory educator said. “Our hearts lift at the aroma that reminds us of a happy day at the beach, or our hearts break a little when we smell the aroma of a long-dead relative’s soap.”

…it feels today that we are in the middle of a profound transformation of humanity.

We don’t live in a cos

…it feels today that we are in the middle of a profound transformation of humanity.

We don’t live in a cosmos. We live in a cosmogenesis, a universe that is becoming, a universe that established its order in each era and then transcends that order to establish a new order.

As a child I had learned that the Mass was where the sacred lived.

Humans have expressed their faith in a great variety of symbols, many of which have inspired me at one time or another. But today, if you ask for the foundation of my faith, I would say the stone cliffs of the Hudson River Palisades.

Everything is up in the air. We are living in a deranged world where nihilism dominates every major state. The contest today is for the next world philosophy.

…sensation is not simply a process of gathering information from the periphery and funnelling it to the brain, but that actually the brain can infl

…sensation is not simply a process of gathering information from the periphery and funnelling it to the brain, but that actually the brain can influence the data being captured. This is referred to as bottom-up and top-down processing, respectively. But this two-way flow of information is not limited to sensation, or even our senses; it is a feature of how every tenet of our nervous system works.

…when we listen, what we hear is the result of the process of making sense of these pressure waves all around us, ascribing meaning to these tremblings of molecules. It is an early warning system, an awareness of what lies in wait immediately beyond our bodies or outside our field of vision. It is also an effective mode of communication. As the authors of the textbook Auditory Neuroscience state, ‘Every time you talk to someone, you are effectively engaging in something that can only be described as telepathic activity, as you are effectively “beaming your thoughts into the other person’s head,” using as your medium a form of “invisible vibrations”.’

‘My favourite Tube station was Tottenham Court Road, because there’s so many lovely words in there. “Tottenham” produced the taste and texture of a sausage; “Court” was like an egg – a fried egg but not a runny fried egg: a lovely crispy fried egg. And “Road” was toast. So there you’ve got a pre-made breakfast. But further along the Central Line was one of the worst ones, that used to taste like an aerosol can – you know, the aftertaste you get from hairspray. That was Bond Street.’

not only is there an overlap between olfaction and emotion, but also olfaction and emotional memory. Those regions of the brain involved in olfaction and emotional processing also have a strong role in memory.

‘Perception is nothing more than a controlled hallucination.’ This is a commonly used sentence in the world of cognitive neuroscience. Essentially, our brains work as guessing machines, interpreting what is coming in through our senses in the context of our model of the world. What we perceive relates to our existing beliefs about the world, to how what the information our senses provide us interacts with our virtual-reality simulation of the universe.

the brain is not simply an absorber of information. It is a prediction machine. Our perception of the world is based upon predictions of how we expect our world to be, a necessary shortcut to deal with those three flaws, of data capacity, inherent delay and ambiguity.

Big changes are taking place across the vast plain stippled by spruce and striated with water that unfolds below the aircraft at 10,000 feet. The

Big changes are taking place across the vast plain stippled by spruce and striated with water that unfolds below the aircraft at 10,000 feet. The skin of the earth is melting, microbial life waking after thousands, possibly millions, of frozen years. The soil is transpiring—perspiring one could say since more moisture is being released than absorbed—and animals and plants are taking note. It is a new world, and intelligent life—the smart genes—is sniffing it out, sending out suckers, seeds and scouts, ranging north, getting ready.

Understanding that the conflict and the displacement that was going on was driven by climate change I began to look for other examples, other parts of the world where we could see this process in action, where we could see climate breakdown as history already, and we could catch a glimpse of the future that awaits the rest of us. So I began digging around and doing research and came across this very arresting image of the trees and the forest moving north towards the pole. I discovered that the forest was on the move and the trees were turning the white arctic green. They shouldn’t be on the move. That’s not supposed to happen. And this sinister fact has huge consequences for all life on earth. - from the 5x15 piece

Scots pine in Scotland, birch in Scandinavia, larch in Siberia, spruce in Alaska and, to a lesser extent, poplar in Canada and rowan in Greenland. I decided to visit each tree in its native territory, to see how the different species were faring in response to warming, and what their stories might mean for the other inhabitants of the forest, including us.

More than the Amazon rainforest, the boreal is truly the lung of the world. Covering one fifth of the globe, and containing one third of all the trees on earth, the boreal is the second largest biome, or living system, after the ocean. Planetary systems—cycles of water and oxygen, atmospheric circulation, the albedo effect, ocean currents and polar winds—are shaped and directed by the position of the treeline and the functioning of the forest.

Wherever there are mushrooms, ferns, bracken and particular kinds of woodland plants like violets there was once forest. Rings of mushrooms are usually the outline, the long-ago earthwork of a tree stump. There are between fifteen and nineteen ecto-mycorrhizal fungi (fungi growing around the roots) in a mature pine forest, and they play a role in everything from carbon and nutrient transport to lichen cover, taking sugar from the tree and providing it with minerals in exchange. Planting trees without regard for the essential symbiotic “other half” of the forest below ground may be far less effective than allowing the ground to evolve into woodland at its own pace. Oliver Rackham describes a planted oak wood in Essex that even after 750 years still does not possess the orchids, plants and mushrooms that you would expect of a natural wood.

Some studies have suggested that an unstable seabed could release a methane “burp” of 500–5000 gigatonnes, equivalent to decades of greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to an abrupt jump in temperature that humans will be powerless to arrest.

The brilliant sun on the pinkish cliffs and the starched blue of the sky, which has been mostly hidden all week, make the morning sing. The scent of a meadow is so heady it should be bottled. The hay has been freshly cut: huge plastic-covered bales guide the eye to a combine harvester abandoned mid-job, its windows covered in sparkling dew. Beyond, the path crosses the meadow to a wide bend that the flooding river has worked into a series of interlinked channels. The little bridges have been overwhelmed and carefully placed stepping-stones lie visible in the clear stream, half a meter underwater. Feet have cut a higher path along the edge of the valley, around drowned shrubs, riparian willow now floating midstream. The roar of the main river is all around. Gray water cradling slabs of dirty ice meanders around a cliff and then widens into a foaming skirt over even-sized white granite boulders that snag the ice and make it dance and nod until it falls apart and joins the sea-ward torrent.

In the future, when the ice is gone, there may be no such thing as a treeline at all.

Deification has been defiance: from the depths of abjection, creating gods has been a way to imagine alternative political futures, wrest back sove

Deification has been defiance: from the depths of abjection, creating gods has been a way to imagine alternative political futures, wrest back sovereignty, and catch power.

Gods are born ex-nihilo and out of lotuses, from the white blood of the sea-foam, or the earwax of a bigger god. They are also birthed on dining room tables and when spectacles of power are taken too far. They are born when men find themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time. Gods are made in sudden deaths, violent accidents, they ascend in the smoke of a pyre, or wait, in their tombs, for offerings of cigars. But gods are also created through storytelling, through history-writing, cross-referencing, footnoting, repeating.

There is no single definition of what it means to be a god, or divine. Divinity emerges not as an absolute state, but a spectrum, able to encompass an entire range of meta-persons: living gods, demigods, avatars, ancestor deities, divine spirits who possess human bodies in a trance.

White supremacy will not leave us until we reject the divinity of whiteness. White is a moral choice, as James Baldwin writes. Faced with the choice, I blush and refuse.

It doesn’t matter whether anyone believes it or not; belief is not the right question to ask. As Merton wrote, “When a myth-dream is constantly in the papers and on TV, it seems pretty real!” The religion of Philip is real because it has been told and retold, by South Pacific priests and BBC storytellers, by journalists and Palace press officers, in a continuous, mutual myth-making over the course of forty years.

…dealing with fellow group members is a much greater mental challenge than manipulating objects. For this reason, many scientists have adopted the

…dealing with fellow group members is a much greater mental challenge than manipulating objects. For this reason, many scientists have adopted the social brain hypothesis, which is the idea that primates evolved large brains to manage the social challenges inherent in dealing with other members of their highly independent groups.

…lying is a uniquely human form of social manipulation that requires substantially greater cognitive sophistication. To tell a lie is to intentionally plant a false belief in someone else’s mind, which requires an awareness that the content of other minds differ from one’s own. Once I understand what you understand, I’m in a position to manipulate your understanding intentionally to include falsehoods that benefit me. That is the birth of lying.

If we had not become bipedal, we almost assuredly would never have learned to throw so well, in which case the social-cognitive revolution that made us human might not have happened, either.

…dealing with fellow group members is a much greater mental challenge than manipulating objects. For this reason, many scientists have adopted the social brain hypothesis, which is the idea that primates evolved large brains to manage the social challenges inherent in dealing with other members of their highly independent groups.

But most of our smarts are going be dedicated to jockeying and manipulating our position among others. And if that’s the case, then the truth is only semi-important. If I can convince you of a world that’s actually favorable to me, then I can get you to back down in conflicts or defer to me when you really shouldn’t; that is a form of power. - from the Vox interview

…potential ancestors who wandered the woods in the moonlight were less likely to survive and procreate, and thereby less likely to pass on their proclivity for midnight strolls. This is how evolution shapes our psychology, with the end result being that no one needs to tell you to be afraid of the dark; it comes naturally.

Of all the preferences that evolution gave us, I suspect the desire to share the contents of our minds played the single most important role in elevating us to the top of the food chain.

The disaster goes by different names. Sometimes it’s called the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. For years, it was called the Cretaceous-Tertiary, o

The disaster goes by different names. Sometimes it’s called the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. For years, it was called the Cretaceous-Tertiary, or K-T, mass extinction that marked the end of the Age of Reptiles and the beginning of the third, Tertiary age of life on Earth. That title was later revised according to the rules of geological arcana to the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction, shorted to K-Pg. But no matter what we call it, the scars in the stone tell the same story. Suddenly, inescapably, life was thrown into a horrible conflagration that reshaped the course of evolution. A chunk of space debris that likely measured more than seven miles across slammed into the planet and kicked off the worst-case scenario for the dinosaurs and all other life on Earth. This was the closest the world has ever come to having its Restart button pressed, a threat so intense that—if not for some fortunate happenstances—it might have returned Earth to a home for single-celled blobs and not much else.

The loss of the dinosaurs was just the tip of the ecological iceberg. Virtually no environment was left untouched by the extinction, an event so severe that the oceans themselves almost reverted to a soup of single-celled organisms.

From the time life first originated on our planet over 3.6 billion years ago, it has never been extinguished. Think about that for a moment. Think through all those eons. The changing climates, from hothouse to snowball and back again. Continents swirled and bumped and ground into each other. The great die-offs from too much oxygen, too little oxygen, volcanoes billowing out unimaginable quantities of gas and ash, seas spilling over continents and then drying up, forests growing and dying according to ecological cycles that take millennia, meteorite and asteroid strikes, mountains rising only to be ground down and pushed up anew, oceans replacing floodplains replacing deserts replacing oceans, on and on, every day, for billions of years. And still life endures.

Vertebrate Paleontologist & Science Writer
Riley Black is a vertebrate paleontologist and science writer. She is passionate about sharing science with the public and writes about her experiences as a transgender woman in paleontology.

Riley began her science writing career as a Rutgers University undergraduate. She founded her own blog, Laelaps, and later wrote for Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, and more. Riley has authored books for fossil enthusiasts of all ages, including Did You See That Dinosaur?, Skeleton Keys, My Beloved Brontosaurus, and Written in Stone.
Riley loves to spend time in the field, searching the Utah landscape for signs of prehistoric life. Her fossil discoveries are in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum of Utah, and the Burpee Museum of Natural History. Riley’s work in the field fuels her writing. She believes doing fieldwork is the best way to learn about paleontology.

In your own words, what is your work about?

“What really holds my work together is the idea that science is a process. Science is not just a body of facts or natural laws. What we find today will be tested against what we uncover tomorrow, and sometimes being wrong is a wonderful thing. I love the fact that the slow and scaly dinosaurs I grew up with are now brightly-colored, feathered creatures that seem a world apart from what we used to think. I believe fossils and dinosaurs provide powerful ways to discuss these ideas, how there is a natural reality we wish to understand with our primate brains. The questions, and why we’re asking them, are more fascinating to me than static answers.”

We think of wilderness as an absence of sound, movement and event. We rent our rural cottages ‘for a bit of peace and quiet.’ That shows how switch

We think of wilderness as an absence of sound, movement and event. We rent our rural cottages ‘for a bit of peace and quiet.’ That shows how switched off we are. A country walk should be a deafening, threatening, frantic, exhausting cacophony.

If today’s shorn, burned, poisoned apology for wilderness should do that to us, just think what the real wild, if it still existed, would do. It’d be like taking an industrial cocktail of speed, heroin and LSD and dancing through a club that’s playing the Mozart Requiem to the beat of the Grateful Dead, expecting every moment to have your belly unzipped by a cave bear.

All humans are Sheherazades: we die each morning if we don’t have a good story to tell, and the good ones are all old.

I thought that, if I knew where I came from, that might shed some light on what I am…It’s a prolonged thought experiment and non-thought experiment, set in woods, waves, moorlands, schools, abattoirs, wattle-and-daub huts, hospitals, rivers, cemeteries, caves, farms, kitchens, the bodies of crows, museums, breaches, laboratories, medieval dining halls, Basque eating houses, fox-hunts, temples, deserted Middle Eastern cities and shaman’s caravans.

We’re not making the wood into our image: projecting ourselves onto it. It’s making us. If we let it.

To maintain a group that size strictly by grooming, we’d have to groom for about 43% percent of our time, which would be deadly. Something else had to make up for the shortfall, and other things have. We have developed a number of other endorphin-releasing, bond-forming strategies that don’t involve touching [social distancing?]. They are…laughter, wordless singing/dancing, language and ritual/religion/story.

…the first evidence of sedentary communities comes from around 11,000 years ago. We see the first evidence of domesticated plants and animals at about the same time. Yet, it is not for another 7,000 years that there are settled villages, relying on domesticated plants or fixed fields. For 7,000 years, that is, our own model of human life, which we like to assume would have been irresistibly attractive to the poor benighted caveman, was resisted or ignored, just as it is by more modern hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers only become like us at the end of a whip. Our life is a last resort for the creatures that we really are.

I’ve come to wonder whether symbolism is all it’s cracked up to be, and in particular whether its use really is the great watershed separating us from everything else that had gone before.

Later I wrote in panic to biologist David Haskell, an expert on birdsong, begging him to reassure me that music is ‘chronologically and neurologically prior to language.’ It surely is, he replied. ‘It seems that preceding both is bodily motion: the sound-controlling centers of the brain are derived from the same parts of the embryo as the limb motor system, so all vocal expression grows from the roots that might be called dance or, less loftily, shuffling about.

The first time (and one of the only times) I felt useful was shoveling cow shit in a Peak District farm when I was ten. It had a dignity that piano lessons, cub scouts, arithmetic and even amateur taxidermy did not. What I was detecting was that humans acquire their significance from relationship, that relationships with non-humans were vital and that clearing up someone’s dung is a good way of establishing relationships.

The last thing I ate was a hedgehog. That was nine days ago. From the taste of them, hedgehogs must start decomposing even when they’re alive and in their prime. This one’s still down there somewhere, and my burps smell like a maggot farm. I regret it’s death under the wheels of a cattle truck far more than its parents or children possibly do.

We try to learn the liturgy: the way to do things properly; the way to avoid offending the fastidious, prescriptive and vengeful guardians of the place. Everything matters. We watch the rain fall on one leaf, trace the course of the water under a stone, and then we go back to the leaf and watch the next drop. We try to know the stamens with the visual resolution of a bumblebee and the snail slime with the nose of a bankvole and the leaf pennants on the tree masts with the cold eyes of kites.

Charles Foster (born 1962) is an English writer, traveller, veterinarian, taxidermist, barrister and philosopher. He is known for his books and articles on Natural History, travel (particularly in Africa and the Middle East), theology, law and medical ethics. He is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford. He says of his own books: 'Ultimately they are all presumptuous and unsuccessful attempts to answer the questions 'who or what are we?', and 'what on earth are we doing here?'

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weav

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. - from Chief Sealth’s letter to President Pierce on a treaty giving much of what is now Washington state over for white settlement

I think what I’ve done is to get obscure figures from history and tell the stories like I’ve told you about Mister Penck and his maps, Mister Struve and his survey, Mister Radcliffe and his line, and turn them into what they truly are, which is heroic, forgotten figures from history….I just become fascinated by these characters. - from the Kinukinaya interview

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land. -- Desmond Tutu

We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. - Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1948)

“The post-1989 liberal movement—this was the exception,” Strathis Kalyvas said. Unity is an anomaly. Polarization is normal. Skepticism about liber

“The post-1989 liberal movement—this was the exception,” Strathis Kalyvas said. Unity is an anomaly. Polarization is normal. Skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal

Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.

…these movements are new. There was no authoritarian-nationalist antidemocratic wave after 1989 in central Europe, outside of ex-Yugoslavia. It has arisen more recently, in the past decade. And it arose not because of mythical “ghosts from the past” but as a result of specific actions of people who disliked their existing democracies. They disliked them because they were too weak or too imitative too indecisive or too individualistic—or because they personally were not advancing fast enough within them.

In ancient Rome, Caesar had sculptors make multiple versions of his image. No contemporary authoritarian can succeed without the modern equivalent: the writers, intellectuals, pamphleteers, bloggers, spin doctors, producers of television programs, and creators of memes who can sell his image to the public. Authoritarians need the people who will promote the riot or launch the coup. But they also need the people who can use sophisticated legal language, people who can argue that breaking the constitution or twisting the law is the right thing to do. They need people who will give voice to grievances, manipulate discontent, channel anger and fear, and imagine a different future. They need members of the intellectual and educated elite, in other words, who will help them launch a war on the rest of the intellectual and educated elite, even if that includes their university classmates, their colleagues, and their friends.

They are…a specific kind of right, one that has little in common with most of the political movements that have been so described since the Second World War. British Tories, American Republicans, East European anti-Communists, German Christian Democrats, and French Gaullists all come from different traditions, but as a group they were, at least until recently, dedicated not just to representative democracy, but to religious tolerance, independent judiciaries, free press and free speech, economic integration, international institutions, the transatlantic alliance, and a political idea of “the West.”

Two decades ago, different understandings of “Poland” must already have been present, just waiting to be exacerbated by chance, circumstance, and personal ambition. Before Trump’s election, different definitions of what it means to be “American” were on offer as well. Even though we fought a civil war that struck powerfully against the nativist, ethnic definition of what it means to be an American, it lived on long enough to be reincarnated in 2016. The Brexit vote and the chaotic debates that followed are proof that some older ideas about England and Englishness, long submerged into a broader definition of “Britain,” also retain a powerful appeal. The sudden support for Vox is a sign that Spanish nationalism did not disappear with Franco’s death. It merely went into hibernation.
All of these debates, whether in 1890s France or 1990s Poland, have at their core the questions that lie at the center of this book: How is a nation defined? Who gets to define it? Who are we? For a long time, we have imagined that such questions were settled—but why should they ever be?

Above all, the old newspapers and broadcasters created the possibility of a single national conversation. In many advanced democracies there is now no common debate, let alone a common narrative. People have always had different opinions. Now they have different facts…False, partisan, and often misleading narratives now spread in digital wildfires, cascades of falsehood that move too fast for fact checkers to keep up. And even if they could, it no longer matters: a part of the public will never read or see fact-checking websites, and if they do they won’t believe them.

Since the Cold War, bunkers had never really disappeared: the subsurface of the earth continues to be a geological-geopolitical space. What’s reall

Since the Cold War, bunkers had never really disappeared: the subsurface of the earth continues to be a geological-geopolitical space. What’s really different now is that, globally, bunkers are being built by a wide range of government, corporate, and private actors all over the world. Ranging from new government DUMBS (Deep Underground Military Bases) to tiny walk-in-closet panic rooms, contemporary bunkers are as ubiquitous as they are diverse.

Garrett’s interest in survivalism was sparked by the discovery of a giant bunker under Corsham in Wiltshire, built by the government during the Cold War. “We went down there with crowbars and prised the doors open. We found these electric buggies, stuck a screwdriver in and hotwired them and drove them around,” he says. “It has 97km of roads, connecting radiobroadcasting stations, beds and an underground reservoir. It’s an underground city.” - from The Times vis Scribd article

I got the sense that these preppers were operating on a variation of Pascal’s wager: the precept that even if the existence of a higher power is unlikely the potential upsides of believing in one are so vast that we might as well. If these preppers were right about some, or just one, of their theories, then they all just might survive a cataclysm—it’s a payoff for faith that costs little in the present. [Well, it is actually pretty clear that the cost is considerable, but maybe not for the very wealthy.]

By the year 2000, a third of all new homes in the United States were being built in gated communities: a kind of social-contract failure architecture in which every community must fend for itself.

“I know that in the after time I’ll just kill, which is why I don’t want to shoot this pistol, I can’t break that seal yet,” Blake said, pulling it from the shoulder holster. “When the time comes, though, I won’t feel remorse, I won’t feel bad, I’ll kill anybody that gets in my way. I’ll kill anybody that tries to get in this facility, and I won’t think twice about it. There won’t be any conversation, just action. The only thing stopping me doing that now are the consequences—in the after time there will be no consequences. What there will be is survival.

“You know how you change yourself into a different person?”
“How?”
“This is gonna sound cheesy, but.” He blushed. “What they say in there, it’s true

“You know how you change yourself into a different person?”
“How?”
“This is gonna sound cheesy, but.” He blushed. “What they say in there, it’s true. You change by making one decision you wouldn’t have made before. You walk into the meeting. Even going to the meeting and leaving before it starts. It’s something. One decision at a time. You are what you choose, right? All you have to do is choose different.”

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How much can something change before it becomes something else?

I wanted to write a book about amnesia that was a story not about finding out about the past but about building a new life from scratch, and trying to figure out who you would be if you had no memories, and no baggage, and no obligations. For me it was a chance to explore the science of memory, the history of psychology… - from Bookreporter

…can you discuss the various influences on your book?
Bach fugues. General Hospital. Abandoned mental asylums. The hysterics of the Salpêtrière. Dropping out of grad school. Growing up in the Philly suburbs…Loneliness. Rage. Paris. Ongoing existential confusion about what it means to be an adult woman without any of the supposed trappings (partner, kid, house, etc.) of adulthood. - Q/A from Lit Hub interview

What kind of symptom wants to find its own cure?

fugue
/fyo͞oɡ/
noun
noun: fugue; plural noun: fugues
Music - a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts
Psychiatry - a state or period of loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy

Benjamin said the fugue was like the self: frugal subjects inverting, subverting, transforming over time, but always, somehow, ineffably and fundamentally the same. He said the fugue was like the mind, rigid rules imposed on finite elements spawning an infinity of combinatorial possibility, a generative complexity from which arose thought, beauty, human consciousness. He said fugue was a junction of reason and unreason, enlightenment rationalism fused with renaissance mysticism, a limited space where finite met infinite. He said Bach used music to encode the divine—like our neurons, Benjamin said, our axons and dendrites, our neurotransmitters, every mind its own creator.

Lizzie had puzzled over this line from the Confessions more than any other. Any duration is divisible into past and future: the present occupies no space. And yet Augustine also said the past and future were only figments. Consequence: there is no now, there are no thens. There is only memory and imagination, no differential of reality wedged between.

Memories make us who we are. They create our worldview in ways we hardly realize. Like a character made of Legos, we're built of blocks of memory that all fit together to form our consciousness. How can it be otherwise? - Aug 8, 2017 – Psychology Today

On January 13, 2017, a brief article from Washoe’s [Washoe County, in Nevada] public health officials was published in the Centers for Disease Cont

On January 13, 2017, a brief article from Washoe’s [Washoe County, in Nevada] public health officials was published in the Centers for Disease Control’s Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, and it sent shockwaves around the world. It was the first report of its kind—never before had a US county public health official written about a complete failure of every single antibacterial drug that they had available to them.

If nothing changes, and we continue on the path we’re now on, by 2050 the world will lose 10 million people a year, every year, to resistant infections.

Why this Book? To paraphrase the political scientist Liam Neeson: “I have a very particular set of skills. Skills that I acquired over a very long

Why this Book? To paraphrase the political scientist Liam Neeson: “I have a very particular set of skills. Skills that I acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.”
…I no longer use those skills to serve the party I once loved. That party is gone…I’m telling you this because Democrats are going to lose to Donald Trump in 2020 unless they understand what my former team is about to do.

…Think of it this way: When a senior KGB officer who decided he’d had enough of throwing people into the gulag or supporting a corrupt kleptocracy walked into an American embassy during the Cold War, the right response wasn’t “Fuck you.” The correct response was “Hey, we’d LOVE to check out this boatload of intel, plans, strategies, and data you’ve collected while you’ve been kicking our asses.” It was “Oh, so that’s how you did it.”
I’m coming in from the cold, whether you like it or not. I have a low tolerance for stupidity, and by God I will overcome your stubborn resistance to the truth.

Yeah, unfortunately, there was always a dynamic pressure inside the party. The fiscal people and the individual liberty people would keep the social conservatives from getting too out of control. The social conservatives would keep the fiscal people from getting too out of control. The foreign policy people, this tripartite internal, the three-legged stool they used to call it. Well with Trump, that all fell apart. It's all gone. It's all id. It's everything that's in their heads. They're told, "You can have whatever you want, we're going to burn it all down." And that's what they're doing. - from the Salon interview

Q - If you were advising on the economy to these Democrats, what would you recommend?
A - First off, I would talk about the stories of real people in the swing states. "I'm farmer X, I am a soybean farmer in Iowa. Donald Trump said that this trade war was going to help me. My farm is in foreclosure now." And we do have record farm foreclosures in Wisconsin and Iowa right now. "I'm a steelworker in Pennsylvania. Donald Trump promised his trade war was going to help me. Instead, our plant is closed." - from the Salon interview

Rick's theory is not (yet) endorsed by any Gallup poll. But it makes sense. So how would Rick hit Trump? "I'd hit him on his mental instability, because he thinks he's smart and sane and he's not. He thinks he's a remarkable communicator ... he's not, he's a 70-year-old asshole from Queens." Then Rick would go after his "reputation for wealth, which is unfounded in large measure, and that's a soft spot for him ..." A billionaire client of Rick's once said: "I'm a billionaire. Trump is a clown living on credit." So having real billionaires like Mark Cuban attack Trump in an ad would be an effective tactic. - from Cracked interview

@realDonaldTrump: some lying liberal media who are DFAILING BADLY and will soon be bankrupt like the Bezos Washington Post are reporting that Stephen Miller was arrested for making a suit from a woman’s skin and eating her. FAKE NEWS. He did NOT EAT HER! Stephen is doing a GRATE job!

@PressSec: Correction: Mr Miller did not eat the woman in question raw. Unlike degenerate migrants, Mr. Miller cooks his food.

He will always be with us, to the end of our days, either as a warning or as a boot stomping on our faces, forever.

There is a vast arterial power humming all around us, hiding in plain sight. It has shaped our civilization more than any road, technology, or poli

There is a vast arterial power humming all around us, hiding in plain sight. It has shaped our civilization more than any road, technology, or political leader. It has opened frontiers, founded cities, settled borders, and fed billions. It promotes life, forges peace, grants power, and capriciously destroys everything in its path. Increasingly domesticated, even manacled, it is an ancient power that rules us still.

…not only are we humans an urban species, we are also a river species. Indeed nearly two thirds (63 percent) of the total world population lives within 20 kilometers of a large river Some 84 percent of the world’s large cities…are located along a large river. For the world’s megacities the number rises to 93 percent.

Today it is bedrock legal principle across the globe that rivers cannot be owned. Even in countries with strong capitalist traditions, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, rivers are a class apart, reserved for the public good. This puts rivers in a category distinctly different from other natural resources. It is extremely common for land, trees, minerals, and water from other natural sources (e.g. springs, ponds, aquifers) to be deemed private property. Rivers, air, and oceans, however, are treated very differently.

I like driving a pickup and heating my house as much as the next person, and the through line between energy and economic growth and development is

I like driving a pickup and heating my house as much as the next person, and the through line between energy and economic growth and development is as clear to me as an electric streetlight piercing the black night. But the political impact of the industry that brings us those things is also worth recognizing as a key ingredient in the global chaos and democratic downturn we’re now living through.

Rachel Maddow didn't set out to write a book. But a nagging question led her there: Why did Russia interfere in America's 2016 presidential election, and why attack the United States in such a cunning way? Although the MSNBC host regularly devotes ample airtime to the topic of Russia on The Rachel Maddow Show, her digging led her to a thesis she thought was too long for TV.
- from the NPR interview

Russia's shaky economy, hampered by a reliance on oil and gas, helps explain the country's weakness, and "some of Russia's weakness explains why they attacked us in the way they did," Maddow argues. She says Vladimir Putin exploited Russia's lucrative oil industry to support his vision of making Russia a superpower again. "When you've got one resource that's pulling in such a big revenue stream, you tend to end up with very rich elites who will do anything to hold onto power who stopped doing the other things that governments should otherwise be doing to serve the needs of the people," she said in an interview with All Things Considered. - from NPR

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an indi

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly…sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.

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“Everything good is somewhere else, baby. I’m telling you.”

In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one used to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I'm here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new work entirely, one that’s charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.

As I plucked, the blank walls around us did not so much fill with fantastical landscapes as open to them, the plaster disintegrating to reveal the past behind it. Scenes from the war, mythologies of manlike monkeys, of ancient ghost catchers from the hills of Da Lat who were paid in jugs of rice wine, who traveled through villages with packs of wild dogs and spells written on palm leaves to dispel evil spirits.

Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.

Reading was particularly hard, and he suspects that dyslexia runs in his family, though he says now: “I think perhaps the disability helped me a bit, because I write very slowly and see words as objects. I’m always trying to look for words inside words. It’s so beautiful to me that the word laughter is inside slaughter.” - from The Rumpus

I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son. If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron…

It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being.
Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you.

Freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and the prey.
or
the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.
or
I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?

...the sensors jammed into a mako’s head resemble the cockpit of an F-35 fighter jet. [presumably without the design flaws and cost overruns] The mako

...the sensors jammed into a mako’s head resemble the cockpit of an F-35 fighter jet. [presumably without the design flaws and cost overruns] The mako’s sensors are equal in sophistication to the fighter jet’s advanced systems except they are bundled in nerves, flesh, and blood.

While sharks kill an average of four humans a year, humans kill 100 million sharks each year. That is not a typo. Humans kill 100 million sharks each year.

Numerous popular articles have described the brain of a white shark as being the size of a walnut, a misleading and inaccurate comparison. The brain of an adult white shark is shaped like a “Y,” and from the scent-detecting bulbs to the brain stem, a shark’s brain can measure up to approximately 2 feet in length…relative to the body weight of birds and marsupials…the great white’s brain is massive.

When tigers remove garbage—weak and sick fish—they remove from the ocean bacteria and viruses that can harm reefs and seagrass. However, the tiger’s work extends beyond mere custodial work: as apex predators, tiger sharks play an important role in maintaining the balance of fish species across the ecosystem. Moreover, the research shows that areas with more apex predators have greater biodiversity and higher densities of individuals than do areas with fewer apex predators.