A politics of nothing but individual rights in a world dominated by social forces is a recipe for domination by those sufficiently powerful or organized to shape those forces.
Will Wilkinson on Steve Jobs’ advice:
“Find what you love and never settle for less” is an excellent recipe for frustration and poverty. “Reconcile yourself to the limits of your talent and temperament and find the most satisfactory compromise between what you love to do and what you need to do feed your children” is rather less stirring, but it’s much better advice.
It’s a sad fact of our world that most folks spend their lives working deeply unsatisfying jobs. It’s not that their ambitions are too lofty, but that their jobs are too menial. It’s a fact that should continue to give political philosophers pause.
Steve Jobs was one of the crazy ones. He could see. He once took time to respond to an email from a precocious college kid in a small Missouri town. Imperfect and unconventional, he will always be, to me, the best that America has to offer.
He will be missed.
Living Root Bridges. These are an incredible use of nature.
Get out the (grammatical) vote:
…When people were asked to answer “How important is it to you to be a voter in the upcoming election?” they were quite a bit more likely to actually cast their ballot in the election than if they were asked “How important is it to you to vote in the upcoming election?”
Lev Grossman on reading technologies in the New York Times:
The codex [i.e. the book] is built for nonlinear reading — not the way a Web surfer does it, aimlessly questing from document to document, but the way a deep reader does it, navigating the network of internal connections that exists within a single rich document like a novel. Indeed, the codex isn’t just another format, it’s the one for which the novel is optimized.
This is almost certainly the coolest way to fold your shirts.
1 organic chicken = 22 meals for $49. A grad student could get into this. {via lifehacker}
Although Jefferson was not the first American to serve ice cream or macaroni and cheese, he certainly helped popularize both dishes: The first American ice cream recipe is in Jefferson’s handwriting, and at the time of Jefferson’s presidency macaroni and cheese was so unusual that the aforementioned Cutler did not recognize the dish and thought that he was being served a crust filled with shallots. He was less than thrilled.
Uncovering our thought in Aristotle’s:
Some time in the 1920s, the Conservative statesman F. E. Smith — Lord Birkenhead — gave a copy of the “Nicomachean Ethics” to his close friend Winston Churchill. He did so saying there were those who thought this was the greatest book of all time. Churchill returned it some weeks later, saying it was all very interesting, but he had already thought most of it out for himself. But it is the very genius of Aristotle — as it is of every great teacher — to make you think he is uncovering your own thought in his.
I can attest to this phenomenon in Aristotle and Kant. “They agree with me!” you think, before realizing they’re already several steps ahead of you.
The market is a megaphone
When folks talk about the evils of unrestrained capitalism, what they’re really criticizing is avarice. The function of a market is to connect people and increase productivity. If people are avaricious, the productivity of the market will heighten that avarice, magnify its effects. If they destroyed the environment before living in a commercial society, they’ll do so even more with better technology.
The market is a megaphone that takes what it is given and amplifies. It is amoral. It does not speak in its own voice.
Markets aren’t avaricious, but people are, and so it is to them our criticism should be directed. It’s easy to make “capitalism” the scapegoat for the moral problems of our age: Enron, the treatment of livestock in factory farms, environmental pillaging, and so on. After all, the market is a vast and complex social arrangement that none of us fully understands, which makes it an appealing foe; as a reflex we fear and loathe that which we do not understand and cannot control.
But the truth is that the moral outrages with which we charge capitalism are actually caused by us, by people like you and me, and it is those actions, rather than the market where they take place, that should feel the heat of our indignation.
We must regulate the market, yes, to prevent harm where harm can be prevented, but we must remember that we are preventing harm carried out not by capitalism, but by ourselves.
Michael Pollan on sustainable meat-eating:
To visit a modern CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) is to enter a world that, for all its technological sophistication, is still designed according to Cartesian principles: animals are machines incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this any more, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert your eyes on the part of everyone else.