Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
One of the mirages that resides in many books today, of course, for him and for many of us, is the idea of its author being a “middle class writer.” That appellation seems somewhat fantastical, something borne of secret inheritances and side hustles. Becoming one has become the literary version of the illusory American Dream. It rhymes with the “do
... See moreDirt • Dirt: Cutting Class
By some measures you are lucky these days to get 47 seconds of focused attention on a discrete task. “Middlemarch” is tough sledding on that timeline. So are most forms of human interaction out of which meaningful life, collective action and political engagement are made. We are witnessing the dark side of our new technological lives, whose extract
... See moreJack Crosbie • Soon Will Come a Day That None of This Exists
Cory Doctorow • Pluralistic: How a billionaire’s mediocre pump-and-dump “book” became a “bestseller” (15 Feb 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
He sees Mark’s bag of fried flowers on the tip-pocked table. Funny thing about those flowers. Who’d voluntarily cook and eat a rose? It’s like planting and watering a breadstick. It’s perverse, and even sort of obscene, eating what’s clearly put on earth to be extra-gastric. Didn’t taste all that hot, either. And there’s still a piece stuck with th
... See moreDavid Foster Wallace • Girl With Curious Hair
Internet porn has replaced going to the moon as the explanation for all that is unexplainable. Here’s what I mean by that: People used to ask rhetorical questions like, “How is it that we can put a man on the moon, but I still can’t get a good martini in downtown Seattle?” Neil Armstrong made everything less complicated than a lunar landing seem pl
... See moreChuck Klosterman • Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
“Now, as all of you will have had reason aplenty to discover for yourselves, there are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with th
... See moreNeil Gaiman • American Gods
But the psychological parasite of the ideal woman has evolved to survive in an ecosystem that pretends to resist her.