A quibble about notes: could we please put them at the bottom of the page?

Reading more than one book at a time means that it takes me longer to finish a particular book, but I find that that disadvantage, such as it is, is usually outweighed by the insights gained by the sometimes serendipitous and sometimes planned connections between the books that I’m reading. I developed this practice while teaching at a small liberal arts college, when it was common for me to be teaching three or four different courses in a semester.

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Authoritarianism as a response to external threats

Luke Kemp:

Authoritarianism — obedience to high-status authorities and the desire to punish rule-breakers — increases when individuals face a threat to their safety and security. Some percentage of a population appears always to harbor stronger authoritarianism, and studies of twins suggest that it may be largely genetic. Surveys across eight modern high-income countries found that around 10-25 per cent ranked as highly authoritarian (with the US scoring the highest). These authoritarians tend to become more politically active and aggressive when they are activated by a social challenge, most commonly the emergence of a threat. Threats triggering authoritarian behavior don’t just happen to those with underlying authoritarian tendencies. They happen to those who generally see the world as a dangerous place and affect even the most devoted peacenik (albeit to a lesser extent).

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A cleaving in my mind

I’ve claimed for years to be absolutely tone-deaf regarding poetry. I suspect I’ve even said something about this in a blog post. It’s not at all unusual for my wife (who loves poetry) to come to me, excited to read a poem that she’s just discovered, hoping that it will finally inspire the poetry-appreciating brain cells lying dormant in my brain. So far, not so much.

But I recently heard and then read a poem by Emily Dickenson that has had an impact on me. It’s called “I felt a cleaving in my mind,” and it goes like this:

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Screen time report

Time to pay the piper. When I wrote yesterday about my commitment to reduce the time spent on my phone, I didn’t realize that I’d have to come clean so soon. (One thing I’ve noticed in retirement is that weekends tend to disappear. One weekday is pretty much the same as the next, so it’s hard to keep track. I’m aware of the privilege reflected there.) But here it is: my report of phone screen time for last week. I’m happy to say that it’s lower than the week before, and a good bit lower than the 4-5 hours I was spending. So the commitment I’d already made has had an impact. I’ll also say that I’m discounting the time in Fitness (timing my workouts) and Insight Timer (timing my meditation). Perhaps that’s cheating, but I’d argue that I’m not really engaging with my phone while those are open. I spent just over 7½ hours with those apps open last week. Call that an average of 1:04 each day, which lowers my daily average for last week to 1:47. I’ve not yet worked up the courage to delete the Proton Mail app from my phone. I’m pondering that.

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Stemming the tide, cutting the cordless

Last week I finally decided to push myself really, really hard to cure myself of phone attachment. For months I’d noticed the seemingly automatic behavior of reaching for my pocket whenever I had the slightest amount of time in which I was not explicitly focused on doing something else. Sometimes the urge came when I was doing something else – I’d be in the middle of a paragraph of a very interesting book and I’d suddenly find myself reaching into my pocket for my phone. Sometimes I managed to resist the urge — to stop my hand — but even when I did that I felt as though I was really in a stand-off with someone else — call him Johnny.

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Tagging the blog

Anyone looking carefully at my blog (as if!) might have noticed that I’ve used very few tags. I decided very early to tag the commonplace entries, simply because those are clearly in a category by themselves. And I realized yesterday that I used two other tags (software and economics) in the first month, but used them only one time each. This is a brief post to say that I’m going to try adding tags to many of my posts.

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The cost of the decay of literacy

George Scialabba:

The attrition of civic memory and craft knowledge, a reduced attention span and loss of discrimination, the attenuation of nuance and the homogenization of vocabulary — in all these ways the decay of literacy currently serves both the manufacture of consent and the accumulation of capital. A populace that cannot recognize rhetorical devices, make moderately subtle verbal distinctions, or remember back beyond the last election or ad campaign is defenseless against official propaganda and commercial hype. Only rootedness makes sustained resistance to the modern Leviathan — state, corporations, and media — possible. And an important form of rootedness is our internalization of the Word in one form or another: sacred scripture or poetic tradition or civic mythology or family lore.

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Time passes, but the ephemeral survives

Time is on my mind these days. It occurred to me recently that I’ve now lived over a third of my life since my mother died; in less than two years I’ll be as old as she was when she died. She was such a significant figure in my life for so many years that it’s a bit unsettling to realize I’ve lived this much of my life without her. I’m not sure why, but realizing this makes the sense of my mortality more vivid somehow.

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The compromised freedom of intellectuals

George Scialabba:

Imagine a society in which intellectuals are free to write anything they want but it is forbidden to sell magazines or books. Under these peculiar circumstances, intellectuals would technically be free, but their freedom wouldn’t be worth much. Now imagine a society in which intellectuals are still free but the overwhelming majority of the society’s members — their intended readers, who desperately need the truths the intellectuals have to offer — are tired and stressed, have very little spare money for books or free time to read, are continually distracted by gaudy and often sexualized advertisements in every medium, did not receive a high-quality education, and have internalized the society’s dominant ethic of competitive individualism rather that cooperative solidarity. These are not, unfortunately, peculiar circumstances but pretty much they way things are in the United States and have been for the last forty years. Under these circumstances the freedom of intellectuals is, again, not worth much.

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Creativity depends on community and solitude

Janna Malamud Smith:

We look with awe upon groups of great thinkers or artists who came together in the past — the transcendentalists in mid-nineteenth-century Concord, the cubist painters in early twentieth-century Paris, the friendship between Coleridge and Wordsworth, to name only a few of these many pairings and groups. We realize that people seek out each other to find sympathetic spirits. But that’s only half the story. The other half is that even when we are not geniuses, our own thinking and creativity are often better catalyzed and stimulated in discourse, not in isolation. We need to work alone; we need to have privacy — sometimes a lot of it — and closing the door and returning to our pens and paper or keyboards or brushes and easels can be bliss; but we also need to be stirred up, stimulated and challenged by others, especially others who share our interests and with whom we feel some modicum of mental respect.

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