Escapism from the Cold Unkindness of Mankind
Sereno Sky writes in Lonely Traveller (2014,) Some of us are what they call ‘escapists.’ We like to disappear from hurtful situations, from things that haunt us, from pain. We flee out of sight into our own little world or to the purity and warmth of nature, where we find a measure of safety from […]
Tesla and Elon Musk’s Meltdown
By David Gelles, et al. write in the New York Times, In the interview on Thursday, Mr. Musk alternated between laughter and tears. He said he had been working up to 120 hours a week recently—echoing the reason he cited in a recent public apology to an analyst whom he had berated. In the interview, […]
Jean Racine’s Dramatic Mode of Expression
Literary critic Bernard Weinberg reveals his survey of Racine’s plays, The Art of Jean Racine (1963,) it is in Phèdre that Racine finally solved the challenge of his demanding dramatic mode of expression: Where the action had seemed to be satisfactorily compounded, the emotion had sometimes remained divided among several main personages, it had at […]
Consumers Buying Experiences Not Things
Explaining the shift in consumer values towards experiences over things that bring happiness and well-being, Caroline Bremner and Sarah Boumphrey of Euromonitor International explain, Unilever’s Persil brand’s “Dirt is good” campaign also taps into the experience trend. Rather than focusing on the laundry detergent’s technical attributes and stain-busting properties, the campaign signals that children in […]
Famous Bachelors
The Futility Closet notes, Ludwig van Beethoven Johannes Brahms Plato Lewis Carroll Sir John Gielgud J. Edgar Hoover Henry James Bill Maher Isaac Newton Al Pacino Blaise Pascal Alexander Pope Cecil Rhodes Arthur Schopenhauer Adam Smith Nikola Tesla Luther Vandross Voltaire King William II of England Ludwig Wittgenstein
Charlie Munger on the Power of Avoidance
Charlie Munger at the 2019 Daily Journal Meeting, How do you scramble out of your mistakes without them costing too much? And we’ve done some of that too. If you look at Berkshire Hathaway, think of its founding businesses. A doomed department store, a doomed New England textile company, and a doomed trading stamp company. […]
Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Awardees
The Futility Closet notes, Only nine people have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony award: Mel Brooks John Gielgud Marvin Hamlisch Helen Hayes Audrey Hepburn Rita Moreno Mike Nichols Jonathan Tunick Richard Rodgers If you count honorary awards, then Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli also qualify. If you count “daytime Emmys,” […]
Human Triumph Over Dehumanizing Pressures
In 1965, the American poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren reviewed Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952): No one has made more unrelenting statements of the dehumanizing pressures that have been put upon the Negro. And Invisible Man is, I should say, the most powerful artistic representation we have of the Negro under these dehumanizing […]
New Year’s Resolutions Are Stupid
The Federalist contributor Jacob Trunnell wonders why people continue to repeat making New Year’s resolutions every year—as though just making about those resolutions and bragging about them is in itself a sense of self-accomplishment: I hate New Year’s resolutions. They are a polite conversation piece while at a party with friends and family. It is […]
Learning by
British philosopher Alan Watts writes in The Joyous Cosmology (2013): The transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of […]