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Reading a book: the burdens of commitment
Screen time report #3
Emacs Carnival: Completion in Beancount Plain Text Accounting
Screen time report #2a
Authors and Books: Intersections on the outside, drawing me in
Screen time report #2
The cleaving in Dickinson's mind, and the role of a teacher
Who has ever experienced a successful day?
Serious reading: deep engagement is self-fulfilling
Live into a new way of thinking
Thoughts on reading and the world I experience
A quibble about notes: could we please put them at the bottom of the page?
Authoritarianism as a response to external threats
A cleaving in my mind
Screen time report
Stemming the tide, cutting the cordless
Tagging the blog
The cost of the decay of literacy
Time passes, but the ephemeral survives
The compromised freedom of intellectuals
Creativity depends on community and solitude
Discoveries of the day
Living with instead of living from
Emacs Carnival: This year, I'll …
Celebrating imperfection
Toward utopia: the moral and psychological prerequisites
A tiny experiment: daily blogging
Commodified Community vs RSS
Old things, and the people behind them
Creativity: Where it comes from and where it leads
Paying for search
Plain text: portable data, portable workflow
Why plain text?
Another day; another search for something to write about
For all you know, I could be a dog
Whitehead again: the self as synthesis of the past and anticipation of the future
If no one reads the words, do the words have meaning?
Reading and writing in the chaos
Reading trails and memory lapses
Thinking together: citizenship and the web
Totalitarianism and the elimination of political freedom
Fossil fuels and authoritarianism
Luxury doesn't mean freedom
Boredom, daydreaming, and writing
Medical lexicon: what's your complaint?
Reading thick and thin
The enduring power of anxieties
Birth, death, and the abyss of unlearning
Freedom for some but not for others
Ephemeral world, ephemeral thoughts
Whitehead again – this time on growth, good, and evil
Burning the stuff but cherishing the memories
Whitehead matters
Memory and imagination
A father's gift of a lifetime
No disappointment can fully exhaust the reserve of hope
Book collecting
Another role for university: learning how to live
Walls and surveillance in a troubled world
Creating culture to avoid loneliness
Thinking out loud about thinking out loud
Emacs/elfeed discovery
The death of the ad hominem
The destructive power of human "intelligence"
Getting older, and facing the surprise
Getting older by surprise
Scrambling to catch up
Strange self emerging from strange self
Stories that tell a story of a man
Retrospective conversion and a story of celebration
It's really not very simple
What Dan Read
Still reading; still wondering what to read next
State of emergency, indeed
Reading, intellect, emotion
Emacs excitement
Egregiously gregarious or gregariously egregious
How much tree is in that book you're reading?
Vice and virtue in fiction and the real world
Web presentation reduces the person
What if social status were based on time of arrival?
Reading updates
We used to think, but now we know
Scholarship's three questions
Age of science and technology: The beginning of the end?
Walker Percy on the self, the other, and the world
A teacher's legacy
Borders, commerce, immigration
Study the Self
The time for art is now
Reading, learning, and compassion
Confronting the madness of fascism
To be expelled from a state is to be expelled from humanity
Little time for reflection, but still holding out hope
Echoes of the past; responding in the present
May 2025 reading report
The irony of autonomous vehicles in a community of drivers
Life is beautiful, even in the wake of an accident
Living through loss, seeing the light
On the recurrence of genocide
On the brink. Hope or despair?
Bezos's Amazonian grandiosity
Value, worth, and commoditization
Impact of economic inequality goes beyond money
Colonialism, fascism, totalitarianism
Aligning the two selves
Word for the day: Hypernormalization
A reading report
The power of reading – the power of translation
Words instead of action
Two bodies: the innocent and the implicated
Small town Texas roots
Connections across time and space
Writing is mysterious
Treasures of independent bookstores
Rights and obligations
Universities teaching ignorance
Plugging for democracy
Contemplating Mortality
The character of a nationalist
Re-thinking my reading (yet again)
The empty power of authoritarians
Buying books I don't read
Social media: advertising the self
On the language of parenting
Schools, news media, awareness, and meeting the challenges
Ecology, ethics, and governmental power
Selecting books; selecting ideas
Self as the endpoint of history
Why write?
Permanently Philosophically Puzzled
Intimacies: Entering the world of an author
We write to taste life twice
Using the HTML details disclosure element
Nature: Commodity or Community
Political despair in 1939
Success: Solo achievement, others' support, or luck?
A. J. Ayer, Mike Tyson, and Alfred North Whitehead
Shy octopus looking at you
I cannot be silent
Conservation, Narratives, and Identity
Free Speech and Democracy
Ruminating on language and word frequency
A lot goes on inside a fish
On keeping a notebook
The shortcomings of the United States
On the abolition of all political parties
Remembering Germany's past; reflecting on the present
Power of great fiction
Quotidian life in the midst of turmoil
What to say on a day like today?
Complications in Sagen's pale blue dot
Writing for clarity, but not total clarity
The internet I want
Mastodon's Eugen Rochko and the turtle in the mud
Taking note in emacs: a move to denote
The connections of music, with strings attached
Lies undercut community
Imagination beyond knowledge
Ramesses II, Assad, and Elon Musk
Factory farming: a life worth living?
Writing and Control
On leaving Facebook
Consciousness, conspiracies, and the vanishing researcher
Three hundred elephants in a gas tank
New beginnings
The impositional power of the canon: safe spaces
The power of powerlessness
The end is where we start from
The worth of life is at stake
Creating a self and world through reading
Hope in times of despair
The burden of advertising
The wonder of a child
Vanity, vanity everywhere
Active reading
One's universe is built on trust
Reading alters the reader
Wrapping up a life of reading
Balancing physical work with intellectual work
Taking note (as in note-taking) can change oneself and the world
Human fragility
Ephemerality
Tribal nationalism
Writing abstracts the embodied concrete
Understanding, frameworks, and interpretation
Responding to an assassination attempt
Responding to Project 2025
How many words does it take?
Looking for news about Trump
Adventures in the used bookstore
Living in the US and looking for hope
More on US election – challenge to democracy
Joe Biden 2024: Should he stay or go?
Search Engine Optimization
Forgiveness and creativity
Stability in an unstable and destabalizing world
Life is embodied network
Political parties and polarization
Sophisms past and present
Note to self: Topics and themes to think about
Reading Arendt and Solnit
The power of conversation (and hope)
The power of hope
Remembering my mother
Living without a home
Too many details, not enough story
Missing the story for the details
Live and let live
On studying Kant
Chance meetings and the forming of an identity
The more refined the error, the more obscured the truth
Cars and the trolley problem
Why we do what we do
Reading list revisited
A perspective on the moment
Depressing utopias
Will you join me at the ActivityPub?
Where do we go when we retire?
The danger of political parties
Culture, the world, and fictive constructions
More thoughts about the NTBR pile
The cost of speaking the truth
Bookstores, value and scarcity
From the TBR pile to the NTBR pile
Finding a writing topic
Reading Plan: December 2023 through February 2024
September to November Reading
To die is to pass into fiction
Emerging mysteries with aging
Parts of a whole
Stop with the procrastinating, already!
Witticism as Criticism
The risks of freedom
Remembering Joe Stamey
On (not) reading Kant
A 'Good Society' supports dutiful action
Stories make a life
There's reading, and then there's reading
Reading Plan: September through November 2023
The fuzzy line between fiction and non-fiction
It takes as long as it takes
Summer reading recap
Happiness as by-product rather than end
Freedom to chew over odd ideas
The worst of times, the best of times
Why study philosophy?
Confronting again the question why do I blog
Wondering about wondering
Arendt, Kant, and Judgment
Social insecurities and FOMO, 1954 version
Grief and regret
The bonds of reading
Making a reading plan
The practice of writing
Respecting tradition at the Holocaust Museum
On turning 70
The Past in the Present
Smells of the past
The companionship in reading
The benefits of luck
Living in the current crisis
Crises, past and present
20 books of summer update
Independent cells or cells in community?
Are we consumers of our lives or products of them?
Why is it so hard for us to change course?
Ego, emptiness, and rebirth
Looking for hope wherever I might find it
On the validity of the biblical text
Whitehead on reading Kant
Human "progress" and nature
Random thoughts while reading Elisa Gabbert
It looks as if…
2023 Books of Summer
On managing aristocrats
Lewis Thomas on Altruism
Longevity challenges – self and climate
Writing (or not) without a deadline
The price of books
Revisiting the pasts in the present
Genes: fate and choice
Cycling: Inside or outside?
So many words, so little time
The value of civilization
Living an entirely private life is a deprivation
Of a certain age …
Reason, properly understood, is public and sharable
Purpose vs goals
ChatGPT: Point and Counter-point, etc
Self interrupting the self
Brokenist or Status-quoist?
Writer's block
Teaching as thinking in public
Bertrand Russell on dictators
Nazis and socialists (and the KKK)
My experience is what I attend to
The burden of writing
FOSS and plain text
What to read in retirement
Cognition and locomotion
Totalitarianism, Perfection, and Oppression
All the beauty and the bloodshed
Why write and why blog?
Reading (and translating) one’s past writings
Sharing a microbiome
Reading is its own reward
Courage to write
Social media from the quiet corner of the room
Rigging the algorithm on TikTok
Academic departmentalization and teaching mentality
Lived life and stories
Isn’t it nice to be home again?
Writing when empty
The luxury of yearning for less
Supply chain weirdness
Getting started
