An online commonplace book
So, as men become more equal and individualism more of a menace, newspapers are more necessary. The belief that they just guaranteed freedom would diminish their importance; they sustain civilization.
– Alexis de Tocqueville
If Tocqueville believed this in the 1800s, then how does it apply today?
What happens when newspapers fade? What replaces them?
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. London, Penguin Publishing Group, 2003. pg 601
I would like people to go away having not just been entertained or gotten some useful information, but be better people, in however slight a sense. To have an aspiration that web pages could be better, that the Internet could be better: “You too could go out and read stuff! You too could have your thoughts and compile your thoughts into essays, too! You could do all this!”
Gwern and the role he wants to fill. As heard on The Dwarkesh Podcast.
The AI avatar is creepy. For me, audio listen only. Brilliant interview – insightful and inspiring.
Too many adjectives on this post?
Patel, Dwarkesh. “Gwern Branwen – How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI’s Trajectory.” Dwarkesh Podcast (blog), November 13, 2024. https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/gwern-branwen.
I thought I was going to be a painter. At 22, I killed the painter inside of me and began writing novels. In 2008, I walked into a stationery shop, bought two big bags of pencils, paints, and brushes, and began joyfully and timidly filling little sketchbooks with drawings and colors. The painter inside of me hadn’t died after all. But he was full of fears and terribly shy. I made all my drawings inside notebooks so that nobody would see them. I even felt a little guilty: surely this must mean I secretly deemed words insufficient. So why did I bother to write? None of these inhibitions slowed me down. I was eager to keep drawing, and drew whenever I could.
More goodness from from Memories of Distant Mountains.
Wake up! The painter inside of you is alive not dead!
Keep drawing and draw whenever you can!
Pamuk, Orhan. Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022. United States, Knopf Canada, 2024. pg 16
Once in a while I feel like leaving a drawing unfinished. So that years later it can show me or someone else how I came to draw these pictures in the first place. And also because I’ve suddenly noticed the drawing below looks pretty enough in its unfinished form.
As read from Memories of Distant Mountains – Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022
Beautiful book.
No regrets, no remorse, no re-anything, for buying this one. Every page an invitation to keep drawing.
Pamuk, Orhan. Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022. United States, Knopf Canada, 2024.
“There is endless room for rebellion against ourselves.”
– George MacDonald
From the tidy and often forgotten C.S. Lewis book: George MacDonald.
It’s Lewis’s tribute to the writer who influenced him most.
It’s great to carry around like a smartphone and scroll through.
Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald. United Kingdom, HarperCollins Publishers Limited, 2016. pg 53.
The thing you should try to do in your writing is to be grateful for being alive. Just to be suffused with gratitude at what is given you.
– Dana Gioia
A masterclass on tap. Coincidence that two of America’s best writers, The Gioia brothers, are also openly very metaphysical?
Maria was precocious, and published an essay advocating higher education for women when she was nine years old. The essay was actually written by one of her tutors, but she translated it into Latin and delivered it from memory to an academic gathering in the garden of the family home. Her father also arranged for her to debate philosophy in the presence of prominent scholars and public figures. She disliked making a public spectacle of herself and asked her father for permission to become a nun. When he refused, she extracted an agreement that she could attend church whenever she wished, wear simple clothing, and be spared from all public events and entertainments.
Love how this passage appeared out of nowhere in Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities.
Maria is labeled a mathematician, but she was also a philosopher, a master of languages, and also would run hospices.
Next level polymath.
Stewart, Ian. Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities. United States, Basic Books, 2009.
there’s the sheer beauty of it for athet, you know know all the sports have great athletes but for sheer grace and speed, for for, the combination of power and grace there’s nothing like what happens say in the infield when a beautiful double play is turned to see Ozzie Smith made plays at short stop that that were balletic in a way that nothing, and I mean nothing that happens in those other games matches
– David Bentley Hart
No one. And I mean no one, speaks baseball the way David Bentley Hart does. The details, the passion, the reverence.
All in time for Spring Training.
That from the new documentary DBH: Cutting Forms from Mystery:
I am a biography nut myself. And I think when you’re trying to teach the great concepts that work, it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them. I think you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend.
– Charlie Munger
Second time this week an Adam Smith reference has found it’s way to me.
I need to make him my friend. First up The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Munger, Charles T.. Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. N.p., Stripe Matter Incorporated. pp37
Floodlights and Goalposts 