Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
I want to explore what feels like the transcendent power of beauty to change our lives. That was the motivating question behind Beautiful World, Where Are You—the title sums it up. I have spoken about my ideological commitments—how I look at the contemporary world through a Marxist lens and through the lens of climate change, and how I feel like we
... See moreIf neurasthenic sensitivity was the hallmark of nineteenth-century invalidism, a kind of hyperpersonalized concern with wellness is the hallmark of twenty-first-century invalidism—a quality that lets the rest of us dismiss the invalid as fussy or oversensitive while we get back to our frenetic, endlessly connected, productive lives.
Meghan O'Rourke • The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness
Just as practices like logging and large-scale farming decimate the land, an overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose “production” slowly destroys the soil until nothing more can grow.
Jenny Odell • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
I think my mother is beautiful. But her negative feelings about her body can generate a force field that repels any appreciation of it.
Maggie Nelson • The Argonauts
As I reflected on this, I started to think again about a book I had read ten years before: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr—a landmark work that really alerted people to a crucial aspect of the growing attention crisis. He warned that the way we are reading seems to be changing as we migrate to the internet—so
Johann Hari • Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again
Refusing to take up the burden of how one’s art may make innumerable, heterogeneous, essentially uncontrollable others feel does not to me signify ethical failure.
Maggie Nelson • On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
I had simply been too busy to think about myself.
Jay Rubin • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel (Vintage International)
