This week’s installment of Recommended Reading covers: the cinematic nature of the Book of Revelation’s apocalyptic vision; historical and psychological revelations and reflections on the nature of societal and cultural collapse; the nuttiness of America’s techno-optimistic utopianism; the rise of neuroscience-enhanced psychological/spiritual training for America’s military; the possible future of art as “post art” that…
The wisdom of waiting
In a super essay at FT.com (“Waiting Game,” June 22), Frank Partnoy, law and finance professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, delves into the psychology and physiology of optimum performance among professional athletes to draw out a profound insight about the supreme value of waiting. This value, he says, isn’t just…
Recommended Reading 13
This week’s installment of recommended links and readings covers: the psychological, spiritual, and cultural aspects of apocalypse; a bizarre restriction on media coverage of a major event unfolding in America right now; the psychology and spirituality of creativity in art and life; a hopeful statement about the future of books and publishing; a wonderful early…
Top books in my current “to be read” pile
A few days ago SF Signal invited me to participate in one of their Mind Melds, with the topic announced in the form of a question: “What book(s) in your ‘to read’ pile are you most interested in reading? Why?” So I whipped up something and sent it to them, and it was published just…
Writers: Inhabit your delusions, embrace your freakishness
Longreads — my favorite online portal to high-quality longform writing — invited me to be their “featured Longreader” for the June 8 edition of their weekly newsletter. Here’s what I sent them: My favorite longread of the week is A Psychotronic Childhood, by Colson Whitehead, in The New Yorker. Whitehead and I grew up right…
Twitter vs. blogs in an age of cheap language
Here’s a nicely nuanced and truly elegant little meditation on the meanings (note the plural) of Twitter in an age of universally blogified (in the bad sense) writing — with equal attention given to the latter phenomenon. Few things could appear much worse, to the lurker, glimpser, or guesser, than this scrolling suicide note of…
Waking up from the nightmare of economics
If you, like me, are consistently struck these days by a kind of unpleasant, inverted sense of numinous awe at the spectacle of economists still occupying major positions of mainstream power and respect in our culture instead of walking around in hairshirts and beating their breasts with heads bowed in unbearable shame, then Columbia University…
Recommended Reading 12
This week’s links and readings add up to an exceptionally rich and varied smorgasbord. Topics include: planetary environmental Armageddon plus other modes of doom, along with the American psychology of denial regarding the true direness of our present situation; the authentic rise of an American totalitarian state along the lines of Nuremberg; the egregiously overlooked…
Is the spiritual counterculture doomed?
I would love to gainsay the point made by Nicholas Fuller in a recent essay at Evolutionary Landscapes. Sites like Reality Sandwich, and movements like Evolver, and the entire subcultural milieu that they represent, not to mention the general worldview they inhabit and promulgate, are near and dear to me. But damn it, Fuller is…
Google: Not making us stupid, not making us smart
A recently published essay by University of Virginia professor Chad Wellmon in The Hedgehog Review stands as one of the most elegant, incisive, and persuasive entries I’ve yet read in the great debate over the effects of the Internet/digital media revolution on human consciousness and culture. And I’ve read a fair amount of them. Wellmon…