My friend Mario Nicolais, who writes for the excellent Colorado Sun, this morning recommended an Atlantic article to his Facebook friends: “Jonathan Haidt Is Trying to Heal America’s Divisions.” It’s a worthy read and I hope Mario will take it up in a forthcoming Sun column. I’m trying to frame my own response to Haidt’s hopefulness and I’m having trouble. I
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Another company has done something to offend a lot of people and, again, I don’t know how this keeps happening. This time it’s VW. The car giant Volkswagen has apologised for a ‘tasteless’ advert that appeared on social media following an online backlash that slammed its ‘racist’ undertones. The ten-second advert posted on Instagram and Twitter shows a giant white
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As any number of Facebook posts and memes have pointed out in recent weeks, we don’t wear masks to protect ourselves, we wear them to protect others. Our homemade cloth masks don’t do a great job of keeping the virus out, but they’re fairly effective at keeping it in. In other words, minimizing the spread of Coronavirus depends on concern
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Master Ikkyū sits by the well plinking at his lute. Sōgi waits patiently for a tune to emerge but none does. Finally he clears his throat. “Yes, Sōgi?” “Good morning, Master. I have a request.” The Master continues at the lute, to no end Sōgi can discern. “Go on.” Sōgi sits on the packed earth before Ikkyū. “They say you
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But that’s not how it used to be When the jester sang for the King and Queen Gone at 87. And if, as you watch this video, you catch yourself asking questions of … context … well, that’s probably appropriate.
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Thoughts and prayers. https://t.co/6aqoVQIx0h — Doc winterSmith (@docwintersmith) May 8, 2020
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Look who’s back.
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I’ve been a big fan of Kate Hinote and Tony Hamera’s work in The Blueflowers for several years. And I’m positively loving their new project, Sound of Eleven. Darker, more ambient in tone… From Discogs: Formed in late 2015, Sound of Eleven sought to re-define and expand the genre of apocalyptic folk. Influenced by folk legends of the past like Leonard
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I was nine when Kent State happened. I was a very current events-minded kid and read about it in the paper and saw the news. But I didn’t really understand it all. So I absorbed the narrative around me: buncha damned hippie punks got what they deserved. The event was never a big deal in my life. I grew up
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My buddy Jim Booth put together a quarantine reading list for our little S&R community this week and it got me thinking. So let’s pose a challenge. What is the greatest work of literature you’ve ever read? The Rules It can be a novel, a collection of short fiction, a book of poetry, a play (yes, Shakespeare is eligible), or
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How many times a day do we hear “reopen the economy”? And who’s saying it? The speaker is usually either a “business-friendly” politician or one of the billionaires they all report to. The message is, in and of itself, the sort of thing that ought to make every thinking American stop, sit up and ponder how exactly we got here.
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Happy Beltane, everyone.
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First Cat White posted this at me on FB. (I’m known to have issues with heights above, say, two feet, and my friends love tormenting me.) My response was the now-ritualized “Oh HELL no.” Her friend Chuck was skeptical and went sleuthing, which revealed this: That’s still more height than my back brain will tolerate, but this angle tells a
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Facebook is a discordant marketplace-of-ideas battle royale unlike anything in human history. Most of it is inane (or worse) dreck. But some of it is brilliant – enlightening, uplifting, empathetic. If we could get rid of the 99.99% that isn’t we’d have a foundation for a better world. But we can’t. So for now we’ll have to make do with
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