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Hiding your ideas in plain sight
I recently read Shadi Bartsch‘s Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism. The book’s topic is fascinating to me: the ways that modern Chinese intellectuals have taken up classical Greek philosophy. In some ways it made me feel oddly hopeful – that even under the totalitarian régime that has run China since…
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How to Make the Impossible Possible: Cristina Campo on the Crucial Difference Between Hope and Trust
“What are we, anyway, at our best, but one small, persistent cluster in a greater ferment of human activity — still and forever turning toward, tuned for, the possible,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her classic Arts of the Possible while the field of counterfactuals was emerging in theoretical physics as the science of the possible….
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Decoding the Mystery of Intuition: AI Prophet Margaret Boden on the Three Elements of Creativity
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world’s first algorithm for the world’s first computer. Meanwhile, she was reckoning with the nature of creativity, distilling it to a trinity: “an intuitive perception of…
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Erich Fromm’s 6 Rules of Listening: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist on the Art of Unselfish Understanding
“Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.” “An experience makes its appearance only when it is being said,” wrote Hannah Arendt in reflecting on how language confers reality upon existence. “And unless it is said it is, so to speak,…
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The Work of Happiness: May Sarton’s Stunning Poem About Being at Home in Yourself
“What is happiness but growth in peace.” In a culture predicated on the perpetual pursuit of happiness, as if it were a fugitive on the loose, it can be hard to discern what having happiness actually feels like, how it actually lives in us. Willa Cather came consummately close in her definition of happiness as…
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A General Theory of Possibility: The Abstract Art of Otherwise and the Physics of Resilience
“As always happens with contradictions, something in the assumptions has to give… Declaring something impossible leads to more things being possible.” “Everything that is possible is real,” Bach scribbled in the margins of his music three centuries ago, when the existence of other galaxies was unimaginable and hummingbirds were considered magic, when the fact of…
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Václav Havel on How to Hold Your Failure
Few things in life are more devastating than to give something your all and still fail. Not the “fail better” of startup culture, not the “fail forward” of self-help, not the failure that is childhood’s fulcrum of learning, not the inspired mistakes that propel creative risk, but simply that helpless and harrowing moment when you…
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The Day Hermann Hesse Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Tree
“It was the great and eternal made visible: a confluence of opposites, their fusing together in the fire of reality. It meant nothing… or, rather, it meant everything… and it was beautiful, it was happiness and meaning… like an earful of Bach or an eyeful of Cézanne.” “Whoever has learned how to listen to trees,”…
