PolyArchive

One of  the first TED talks made available online in 2006, Sir Ken Robinson’s “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” remains the most-watched talk on the TED.com website. In addition to the speaker’s excellent rhetorical techniques (which, indeed, have helped set the tone for many future TED and TEDx events), the subject matter, if anything, rings even […]

I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes & barrens & wilds. It still dwarfs & terrifies & crushes. The rivers […]

I have been alone in Paris, alone in Vienna, alone in London, and all in all, it is very much like being  alone in Green Town, Illinois. It is, in essence, being alone. Oh, you have plenty of time to think, improve your manners, sharpen your conversations. But I sometimes think I could easily trade […]

The Underground Seamus Heaney There we were in the vaulted tunnel running, You in your going-away coat speeding ahead And me, me then like a fleet god gaining Behind you before you turned to a reed Or some new white flower japped with crimson As the coat flapped wild and button after button Sprang off […]

Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations — that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be […]

I love, love, love T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (previously). The words, “We shall not cease from exploration” give me goosebumps every time I read them. How does one take those words to heart, to take a visceral experience and illuminate the everyday tedium with it? To just not cease from exploration? Can it be that […]

“The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look […]

So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. […]

A few days ago, I finally finished Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The fact that it took me so long to read a book about typewriters, the internet, psychology, and other things I love probably proves Carr’s point better than anything I can write here. So here are […]

i can read. There are some things I miss about my old job, such as the awesome schedule and some great colleagues. I miss the concise emails signed only “gs” and the trips across the street to the basement where a very cool crew of a former navy seal, an artist/fashionista, and an independent scholar/former […]

    Photo by George Berkentin / Conde Nast Archive myvintagevogue.

They Might Be Hipsters.  

How To Steal Like An Artist And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me – Austin Kleon. Wow. Lovely. Concise. Visual–or rather, graphic, in the good sense. Some common-sense tried-and-truisms, for sure, but he’s tried them. It’s funny, I have The Happiness Project blog in my reader, and I want to delete it every time I […]

It started, as many things do, with Metafilter. Someone posted a link to a story which quickly engaged me (at one of those thesis-work moments during which I want nothing more than to be distracted), about a blogger facing down her stalker. It was a gripping and well-written story–I read every part in one sitting. […]

131 – US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs | Strange Maps | Big Think. There are some amazing cultural juxtapositions there…