What’s the point of the news? What purpose does it serve, does it do us any good, and how can we, as information consumers, manage the flow in a purposeful way? Answers via those who have tried and suggest that cultivating purposeful ignorance might actually empower rather than overload our intellect.
The pleasure of finding things out: Happy Birthday Mr Feynman
A life less ordinary: Why freedom beats security
Why I went back to vegetarianism
Buoyed on by Morrissey’s pronouncement that Meat is Murder, a love of animals, and a rampantly militant attitude towards anything conformist (i.e.: I was a moody teenager), in 1993 I swore never to eat another living creature again. For ten years I lived by that oath, embracing lentils, tofu and quinoa, riding the hippy wave of independent spirit that every generation mistakes as unique to itself. Ten years later, I did the terrible thing that my teenage self would have hated me for — I started to eat fish.
To have or to be? That is the question
The pleasure of a blue sky moment
The phrase “blue sky thinking” litters conversations these days, the supposition being that it will prompt radical new ideas to flutter through. But rather than sparking the imagination, the call for forced creativity can invoke dread. And rightly so; as Orwell pointed out, this kind of inane management speak is a deliberate distortion of reality.
Love, poetry, women and war
Based on the advice of writers from Stephen King to David Foster Wallace, Susan Sontag, Henry Miller, Zadie Smith and many more, when I cannot write my designated daily quota of 500 words on one subject, I turn to reading. I scour the net, my bookshelves and every local bookshop, in search of inspiration, thirsty for facts that might ultimately furnish each of my projects with added authenticity.
The raw matter of the examined life: Straw Dogs by John Gray
If you follow Socrates' line of thought, the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if, when you examine it, it’s worth even less? That is John Gray’s conclusion; in fact it’s the beginning, middle and end of his entirely nihilistic polemic, Straw Dogs, in which he catalogues a history of rapacious human activity, taking down science, philosophy and everything in between.