The Delusion of the Consciousness
In response to a grief-stricken father who reported that he’d lost a eleven-year-old son to polio, Albert Einstein wrote, A human being is part of the whole world, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical […]
Famous High School Dropouts
The Futility Closet notes, Cary Grant George Carlin Groucho Marx Hank Williams Herman Melville Humphrey Bogart Joe DiMaggio John Travolta Johnny Depp Keanu Reeves Kid Rock Kiefer Sutherland Neil Young Orville and Wilbur Wright Prince Quentin Tarantino Ray Charles Roy Rogers Tom Cruise William Faulkner Woody Guthrie
“Desks Made Out of Doors:” Jeff Bezos’s Frugality
Amazon is frugal to an extreme. Amazon is obsessed with reducing waste. Ben Horowitz of venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz writes, Very early on, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, envisioned a company that made money by delivering value to rather than extracting value from its customers. In order to do that, he wanted […]
Digitized Manuscripts v the Real Thing
Naomi Appleton, scholar of ancient Buddhist texts at the Divinity School at the University of Edinburgh, recognizes the value of the “real thing.” Notwithstanding the advantages of digitized manuscripts, Appleton writes, “to see a manuscript in the flesh—to touch it and hold it and appreciate its overall presence—still holds a certain magic.” My visits to […]
Deng Xiaoping on Mao Zedong
British journalist Michael Rank, who served in China in the 1980s, wrote in the Guardian: Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci’s interview with Deng Xiaoping was one of the revealing ever of any Chinese leader by any western journalist (apart from Mao Zedong and Edgar Snow in the 1930s.) Deng told Fallaci how Mao “did not readily […]
COVID-19: The Airline Industry Will Shrink
Emirates Airline’s Sir Tim Clark, in an interview with The National, Abu Dhabi, opines that that COVID-19 pandemic is upsetting the airline industry, with airlines facing significant risk despite government intervention. He feels that the airline industry will shrink 20%—30% and carriers should write off the summer, “We have just got to accept that in […]
A Celebration: W. H. Auden at Sixty
The American poet John Hollander wrote in his essay “Auden at Sixty” in the July 1967 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, It is hard to think of another writer in English the progress of whose lustra—those five-year periods by which the Romans marked out life’s phases or stages—would seem to matter so much. It is […]
No Obsessing Over Mistakes
Charlie Munger at the 2019 Daily Journal Meeting: We can all go back and make some decision better. But it’s the nature of things. You’re going to blow one occasionally. My general idea is, there’s no point in fretting too much about what you can’t fix.
Mistaken Perception
Cognitive scientist and author Guy Claxton writes in The Heart of Buddhism: Practical Wisdom for an Agitated World (1999): Buddhism does not tell you to pull your socks up and be nicer to everybody, nor does it wag a stern finger at you when you behave badly or thoughtlessly. The fundamental problem is not of […]
Impermanence is the Nature of Everything
Kagyu Lama Khandro Rinpoche writes in Buddha’s Daughters: Teachings from Women Who Are Shaping Buddhism in the West (2014): When we look back, at the time of death, the experience of this life will seem like a dream. And – just as with our nighttime dreams – it will seem useless to have put so […]