PURPOSE VS GOALS
I’m thinking today about the relationship between one’s sense of purpose in life and the goals one might set in life.
Read moreCHATGPT: POINT AND COUNTER-POINT, ETC
First prompt: write a blog post in the voice of George Orwell explaining why climate change is a problem.
Read moreSELF INTERRUPTING THE SELF
Mary Oliver:
Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It need the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once.
BROKENIST OR STATUS-QUOIST?
It’s a commonplace these days to say that the United States is in turmoil. While many understand the primary conflict as one between progressives and conservatives and others point to conflicts within both the progressive and conservative sides as being at least as significant, Alana Newhouse, the editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, suggests a different way of looking at things.
Read moreWRITER'S BLOCK
Joan Didion:
I am not sure what more I could tell you about these pieces. I could tell you that I liked doing some of them more than others, but that all of them were hard for me to do, and took more time than perhaps they were worth; that there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
TEACHING AS THINKING IN PUBLIC
I took the long route through graduate school, taking several leaves of absence to teach in different universities.
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