EMACS/ELFEED DISCOVERY

Just a brief post about a today I learned something about emacs experience. Like many of those experiences, the learning was purely accidental. But it’s going to enhance my emacs workflow — in fact, it sparked another one of those Emacs excitement surges. I’m recording it here in large part because I want to remember how to do this, but perhaps someone else will find it useful as well.

I use elfeed to read my RSS feed (and elfeed-org to manage the feed list). I was happily reading through today’s entries just now, when I messed up a keystroke. Suddenly, each of the links in the post I was reading had an initial letter highlighted. It took me a second to realize that if I input the letter highlighted in one of those links, the page linked there would open in my browser. That’s really cool, I thought — much more efficient than what I had been doing — using the regular cursor movement keys to move point to a link that looked interesting.

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THE DEATH OF THE AD HOMINEM

Zadie Smith:

…if you grew up online, the negative attributes of individual humans are immediately disqualifying. The very phrase ad hominem has been rendered obsolete, almost incomprehensible. An argument that is directed against a person, rather than the position they are maintaining? Online a person is the position they’re maintaining and vice versa. Opinions are identities and identifies are opinions. Unfollow!

“The Instrumentalist: On Tár,” in Dead and Alive: Essays, pp. 46f

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THE DESTRUCTIVE POWER OF HUMAN "INTELLIGENCE"

Christine Webb:

To cut a long story short, there is no universally accepted definition of “intelligence,” or way to measure it. Perhaps most generally, “intelligence” can be defined as how fast and successful organisms are in solving problems to survive in their natural and social environments. If chimpanzees had transformed the world but in doing so jeopardized their own livelihood, not to mention that of countless other species, would we be praising their intellect? In response to the ecological destruction caused by the dominant culture and eonomy, I’ve often heard people say we’re just “too intelligent for our own good,” but this view of intelligence remains stuck in seeing only one template — the human one.

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GETTING OLDER, AND FACING THE SURPRISE

You’ll note that many of my blog posts are tagged as commonplaces. My usual practice is to post these quotes from other writers without comment, without indicating why I found them to be worth quoting here. I’ve often wondered how well they stand up out of context — i.e., what readers who’ve not read (or not recently read) the text from which they’re taken make of them. I’ve even thought I might set myself the task of selecting a commonplace I quoted years ago (I find it hard to believe that I can say “years ago” in reference to this blog!), offering my reflections on it without consulting the larger work.

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GETTING OLDER BY SURPRISE

Jenny Erpenbeck:

The illnesses that begin to afflict us take us by surprise, they set our bodies in motion in different ways than we intend, slowing them down, speeding them up, disturbing their rhythm. They take us by surprise. The years leave their marks on our skin, which was still a child’s skin only recently, they leave the brown marks of old age, they make small letters blur before our eyes, they take us by surprise, and because it all happens so slowly, we don’t even understand when the transition took place, slowly the years carry men’s youth away, one hair at a time, they gradually, very gently, crease women’s skin, and we, we that remain in that skin, we see with those eyes, which now perceive small letters as an illegible blur, but we don’t see signs of aging in our thoughts, and that’s why we’re taken by surprise when the years have slipped over us like a dress, and we think that actually, if we wanted to, we could take them off again, that’s why our arms appear to grow more unfamiliar to us the older they get, to grow more distant the more they try to force us to acknowledge their closeness by confronting us with pain and impossibilities, that’s why we’re taken by surprise when our own exhaustion makes us faint, and when we consider the fact that death is drawing nearer to us, one friend at a time, we’d prefer to forget that our lives often last longer than our ability to grow older.

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SCRAMBLING TO CATCH UP

Perhaps this post is mistitled. Scrambling? Odd choice of verb there. But that’s the word that came to mind as I sought a title to this post. I’m hoping that what you read here is more in line with “identifying and then avoiding multiple obstacles as I try to complete a task” than with “scrambled eggs.” (I should admit that it could well be a sign of the latter if that last sentence survives the editing process!)

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STRANGE SELF EMERGING FROM STRANGE SELF

Jenny Erpenbeck:

Time has the power to separate us, not only from others, but also from ourselves — a fact that’s hard to grasp. We know that time also separates us from circumstances that might have turned us into very different people. We know it, but we don’t understand it. … We know only one thing: That behind everything we can see, hear, and touch, another reality is concealed — a reality that we can’t see and can’t hear and can’t touch, a reality made of time. We know that transformations lie behind us, and we know, according to scientific findings, that the present belongs to us for precisely 3 seconds before it plunges down the throat of the past. That means that every 3 seconds, we produce ourselves again as strangers.

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STORIES THAT TELL A STORY OF A MAN

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my time at a symposium dedicated to honoring and responding to the work of my dissertation director, Schubert Ogden, and one of his students. But I said nothing in that post about Schubert himself. Since then I’ve been thinking more about the power of his person and of his influence on me, both as a teacher and as a human being. I hope to write something soon describing what I learned from him about teaching and learning, but as I’ve thought about this a couple of stories from my time with him have come to mind, stories that I think do much to capture the person that he was.

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RETROSPECTIVE CONVERSION AND A STORY OF CELEBRATION

I know. There are horrible things going on in the US and in the larger world. I know. We need to continue to do what we can to fight against such things. But even as we resist, there are still some things worth celebrating. Perhaps celebrations will distract us from the trauma for at least a few minutes. But there’s more than distraction here — celebrations expand the narrative of our lives so that we can find meaning even in the face of trauma. This morning’s post is a bit different from other things I’ve written. Call it a story of celebration.

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IT'S REALLY NOT VERY SIMPLE

Zadie Smith:

Any essay that includes the line “It’s really very simple” is never going to be the essay for me. Nothing concerning human life is simple. Not aesthetics, not politics, not gender, not race, not history, not memory, not love.

“On the Impersonal Essay: Thinking in Six Parts,” in The New Yorker, Sept 29, 2025