Courage to write

Hannah Arendt:

The connotation of courage, which we now feel to be an indispensable quality of the hero, is in fact already present in a willingness to act and speak at all, to insert one’s self into the world and begin a story of one’s own. And this courage is not necessarily or even primarily related to a willingness to suffer the consequences; courage and even boldness are already present in leaving one’s private hiding place and showing who one is, in disclosing and exposing one’s self. The extent of this original courage, without which action and speech and therefore, according to the Greeks, freedom, would not be possible at all, is not less great and may even be greater if the ‘hero’ happens to be a coward.

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Social media from the quiet corner of the room

When I was in college, I worked as a student assistant to a philosophy professor. It was a good gig for me – I was majoring in philosophy and hoped to teach it in college myself some day. It was good to get an inside look at things. One of the more striking memories of this professor wasn’t from the classroom or the department office. It was from a holiday party.

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Rigging the algorithm on TikTok

I wrote in my Getting started post that I still have facebook and instagram accounts. I no longer post there, but I’ve not yet deleted them (as much as meta would let me delete them, that is). But I’ve avoided other, more recent, platforms – most notably, TikTok. Still, it’s interesting to learn that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has its own way of controlling the flow of things to maximize their profits. TikTok’s secret ‘heating’ button can make anything go viral.

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Academic departmentalization and teaching mentality

Alfred North Whitehead:

…the increasing departmentalization of universities during the last hundred years, however necessary for administrative purposes, tends to trivialize the mentality of the teaching profession.

Modes of Thought, p. 131. (I can’t resist noting that this book was first published in 1938.)

Lived life and stories

Claire Messud:

Each of us is made up of our lived experiences, of course; but also, both consciously and unconsciously, of all the stories that we have heard, read, or watched. Without realizing it, we come to understand what a story is and how it means by the accretion of narratives in our heads.

Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, p. 65

Isn’t it nice to be home again?

Yesterday we returned home after just over two weeks away, doing things we enjoy doing, in a city we enjoy visiting. It was a good trip, and I’m glad that we went. But, to recall a line from an old James Taylor tune, it’s surely nice to be home again. It’s nice to settle in.

Writing when empty

One of the big blogging challenges I face is the challenge of settling on a topic to write about. I don’t have to be writing for any sort of public (even the public of the two or three people who might stumble on this blog in a given year) in order to face this challenge.

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The luxury of yearning for less

= “See the citation”

Supply chain weirdness

I listen to a variety of podcasts, some of them covering topics I know little about. One that I’ve been following recently is Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast.
Some factoids about the supply chain (or, as they suggest, the supply web) from a recent episode bring out some surprising connections.

First, it’s common knowledge that one of the effects of the 2008 meltdown was the collapse of the housing market in the United States. Few houses were being built, which means that there were fewer boards being cut. Fewer cut boards meant that there was less sawdust. A lot of that missing sawdust would have made for better resting places for cows. Dairy cows were less comfortable than they might have been, and uncomfortable cows produce less milk than comfortable cows. Less milk made for higher milk prices. So, the upshot: the housing crisis brought about higher milk prices.

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Getting started

Yes. Pretty bare bones so far. But more to come.

I’ve been saying for years that I really should start blogging again. I say “again” because long ago I managed two different web sites very much like the sites that we’re calling blogs these days (onReligion.com and LTSeek). Some of the onReligion pages can be found in the wayback machine. I stopped publishing onReligion sometime in the mid 2000s — ironically enough, not too long after people started using the term “blog” to describe what I was doing — because I grew weary of reading through two dozen or so newspapers early each morning looking for stories about religion and culture. After all, I also had a full-time job. And I was never all that comfortable being out in the open as I was, though having all those newspaper articles between me and my readers helped me to deal with that.

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