THE BENEFITS OF LUCK
George Sarton:
Every creature needs luck, and he is very ungrateful who ascribes his success to his merit and naught else.
LIVING IN THE CURRENT CRISIS
I have no doubt that we’re living in a crisis, on the cusp of watching the (physical, economic, political, cultural) world as we know it fall apart.
Read moreCRISES, PAST AND PRESENT
Annie Dillard:
We have no chance of being here when the sun burns out. There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times.
20 BOOKS OF SUMMER UPDATE
In an earlier post, I laid out my reading goals for the summer. As we approach the midpoint of the three-month period, it seems appropriate that I record my progress on working through the list.
Read moreINDEPENDENT CELLS OR CELLS IN COMMUNITY?
Siddhartha Mukherjee:
But there are still gaps in our understanding of the interconnectedness of cells. We are still living in a world where we imagine the cell, as Leeuwenhoek did, as a “living atom” – unitary, singular, and isolated, a spaceship floating in body-space.
ARE WE CONSUMERS OF OUR LIVES OR PRODUCTS OF THEM?
Eleanor Catton:
There are no wrongs. There’s just choice, and choice is neutral, and we’re neutral, and everything is neutral, and everything’s a game, and if you want to win the game then you’re going to have to optimise yourself, and actualise yourself, and utilise yourself, and get the edge, and God forbid that you should have an actual human experience of frailty, or mortality, or limitation, or humanity, or of the fucking onward march of time – those are just distractions, those are obstacles, they’re defects, they’re inconveniences in the face of our curated, bespoke, freely fucking chosen authentic existence, and sure, we can never quite decide if we’re the consumers of our lives or the products of them, but there’s one thing we are damn sure of, which is that nobody on earth has any right to pass any judgment on us, either way.