Is Banking Bad? - No, says Nicholas Kristof - NYTimes.com
Good news! You’ve been given moral free reign to go work for the big-time capitalists….
(via The Rise Of The “Creative” Class | TechCrunch)
“LinkedIn has put out its annual list of top buzzwords (over)used on members’ professional profiles. The top word people in the U.S. use to describe themselves on LinkedIn? “Creative.” That word did not even make the top ten list last year, when “Extensive Experience” topped the list.”
Basing life’s meaningfulness on the existence of a deity not only leaves all atheists out of the picture; it leaves different believers out of one another’s picture. What seems called for is an approach to thinking about meaning that can draw us together, one that exists alongside or instead of religious views.
A promising and more inclusive approach is offered by Susan Wolf in her recent and compelling book, “Meaning in Life and Why it Matters.” A meaningful life, she claims, is distinct from a happy life or a morally good one. In her view, “meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.” A meaningful life must, in some sense then, feel worthwhile. The person living the life must be engaged by it.
Death and Budgets - David Brooks - NYTimes.com
David Brooks can always be counted on for pointing the way to great longer reads… and this column is a good example.
I hope you had the chance to read and reread Dudley Clendinen’s splendid essay, “The Good Short Life,” in The Times’s Sunday Review section. Clendinen is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S.
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As Daniel Callahan and Sherwin B. Nuland point out in an essay in The New Republic called “The Quagmire,” our health care spending and innovation are not leading us toward a limitless extension of a good life.
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In the online version of this column let me provide links to three other essays, which offer other perspectives on why we should accept the finitude of life and the naturalness of death. They are: “Born Toward Dying,” by Richard John Neuhaus, “L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?” by Leon Kass and “Thinking About Aging,” by Gilbert Meilaender.
The Born Toward Dying essay by Richard John Neuhaus references a book Max first raved about -
It used to be said that the Victorians of the nineteenth century talked incessantly about death but were silent about sex, whereas today we talk incessantly about sex and are silent about death. In 1973, Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death contended that Freud had gotten it exactly backwards. It is not true, said Becker, that our fear of death is rooted in our denial of sex, but, rather, that our fear of sex is rooted in our denial of death.
I suspect once I do finish reading it, it will go on the shelf next to my college-classic, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History - by Norman O. Brown.
This Awesome Urn Will Turn You into a Tree After You Die | Design for Good | Big Think
A great idea by a Spanish designer…
Reminds me of the book “Stiff” by Mary Roach…. all the interesting things that can be done with dead bodies….
(Thanks, Sam….)
It’s the first thing people try to hide when they hit success, and yet the only thing we like about each other are the flaws.
Mitch Hurwitz | TV | Interview | The A.V. Club
(article via Max)
Explanation: My Story. (Forever and Always - Taylor Swift) (by ZackHourihane)
This is a Dover 8th grader… He refers to events from three years ago… Made me teary…
Another — much more dramatic — teen/online story is in Rolling Stone - re Kiki Kannibal. Have you read it?
Programming Human Perfectibility? by Esther Dyson - Project Syndicate
How computers might allow companies to not only find but “create” better employees….
Touches upon the business of “life coaches” - who offer their services (for money) in order to make you (the buyer) develop yourself into a more attractive hire prospect…..
Could a computer program do the same thing? Challenge and train us for different jobs?
“The best people usually find jobs (or are found) through professional connections, and most mediocre people get mediocre or worse jobs where they lose whatever potential they had. Even at their best, all job boards do is allocate scarce talent resources; they don’t create them.”
“Experience shapes us as much as our genes (or innate talents) do, and online experience is cheaper and easier to shape. In real life, success could be due to luck, and it might teach us the wrong lessons. In a game, we can make sure that it teaches us the right ones.”
This is from an interesting website called Project Syndicate: A World of Ideas, where pretty prominent intellectuals blog about different issues…. Peter Singer, Nouriel Roubini, Simon Johnson, etc.
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.
(Ira Glass abridged quote via Kotke.org)
As you will know, Ira Glass is the host/producer of This American Life on public radio.
The quote above is from a series of YouTube video interviews with him on storytelling - and becoming a storyteller. (See this video)
There’s also a good Salon article on him where he discusses the importance of being wrong and failing…. Read here…. How it took him YEARS to master his craft…
by ant.photos
How To Steal Like An Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me) - Austin Kleon
A great blog post… re a presentation he gave….
Here are a few of my favorites parts (btw, it’s not all slides - he does elaborate on each — go read it).
