Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
The turn, in art, from the reparative to a demand for repair, treats art less as “a ‘third thing’ between people whose meaning ‘is owned by no one, but which subsists between [artist and spectator]’” and more as something whose meaning and function can be named and adjudicated—something that can, in fact, be moved out of the category of art, and in
... See moreMaggie Nelson • On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
David Pierce • Spotify for Readers: How Tech Is Inventing Better Ways to Read the Internet
The Uilsa story reveals his strong, almost violent emotional side and his ability to tap the Dionysian spirit; the ethics essay reflects his lifelong interest not in epistemology but in ethics. Already his question is not “What can I know?” but “How should I live?”10
Robert D. Richardson • Emerson: The Mind on Fire
The story that isn’t Mark Nechtr’s by Mark Nechtr concerns a young competitive archer, named Dave, and his live-in lover, named L____. Dave, who is not nearly so healthy as Mark, believes that the only things that give his life meaning and direction are his competitive archery and his lover, L____, who is a great deal more attractive and sympatheti
... See moreDavid Foster Wallace • Girl With Curious Hair
Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and tak... See more
Pearls Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let’s find out.
twenty pages in length during the entire year.
Derek Bok • Higher Education in America
In the west, Apollo and Dionysus strive for victory. Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful. Apollo is law, history, tradition, the dignity and safety of custom and form. Dionysus is the new, exhilarating but rude, swe
... See moreMyth, Mind, and the Screen: Understanding the Heroes of Our Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.