Currently reading: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg 📚
Current listening: Chris Potter, Got the Keys to the Kingdom. 🎵
Absolutely scorching live set featuring a dream-team of some of my favorite musicians: not just Potter, but also Scott Colley on bass, Marcus Gilmore on drums, and Craig Taborn on piano. Highly recommended!
Currently reading: Night Train by A. L. Snijders; translated by Lydia Davis 📚
Reading stories about Davos attendees’ optimism, I’m reminded of Iain McGilchrist’s insight that our brains' left hemispheres—the blinkered perspective that dominates our modern world—are blithely optimistic, even in the face of significant disconfirmatory evidence. 🔗
Currently reading: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 📚
Currently reading: Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 📚
Still excellent advice, on the whole, though I’m not sure what Auden would replace “Read The New Yorker” with now.
Aesthetic judgments in an anti-aesthetic age 📚 🔗
Just because we don’t believe in aesthetic standards as a culture doesn’t mean we aren’t making constant aesthetic judgments that rely on a wide range of hierarchies: [Study authors] found that writers ‘with an elite degree (Ivy League, Stanford, University of Chicago) are nine times more likely to win than those without one. And more specifically, those who attended Harvard are 17 times more likely to win.’ They found that half of the prize-winners with an MFA “went to just four schools: [University of] Iowa, Columbia, NYU, or UC Irvine.
Rowan Williams on Iain McGilchrist 📚
Rowan Williams reviews Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things. A masterful and appreciative review, unsurprisingly. Williams points out that so many criticisms of McGilchrist’s work reflect exactly the tendencies that McGilchrist traces and decries in his work. He also rearticulates McGilchrist’s exceptionally helpful descriptions of thinking, truth, science, and objectivity: Thought takes time; encountering a limit suggests new questions — including the question of whether we have thus far been asking the right questions.
The result of more free time for the masses is not more leisure, as Aristotle conceived it, but more time to scroll social media, flick through online dating profiles, binge on Netflix, and/or work on what Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha call “The Startup of You.”