Niccolò Machiavelli on Reading as a Cure for Boredom
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) offered ruthless advice in his timeless classic The Prince, which was inspired on Xenophon’s Cyrus The Great: The Arts of Leadership and War. Based on force and …
Literature
Rudyard Kipling: How To Be A Man
Some more timeless wisdom from Rudyard Kipling: If … If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But …
“We get to think the world is progressing when it is only repeating itself.”
If we pay no attention to words whatever, we may become like the isolated gentleman who invents a new perpetual-motion machine on old lines in ignorance of all previous plans, and then is surprised …
My Symphony
My Symphony To live content with small means; To seek elegance rather than luxury, And refinement rather than fashion; To be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; To study hard, think …
Toni Morrison — Good, but never simple
Author Toni Morrison illuminates concepts of virtue, and its opposite: “Expressions of goodness are never trivial in my work, are never incidental in my writing. In fact, I want them to have …
What’s on Malcolm Gladwell’s Bookshelf
What we’re reading says a lot about who we are – or who we want to be. In a new feature in the Globe and Mail, Jane Mount asks 100 writers, artists, and foodies to describe the books that …
The Top Non-Fiction Books of 2012
Not my list but that of Publishers Weekly. Some interesting stuff made the cut. I picked up a few for stocking stuffers. My Cross to Bear — Gregg Allman, with Alan Light Like an old bluesman riffing …
Kurt Vonnegut: How To Write With Style
Kurt Vonnegut on writing with style. Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you …
Scientism
William Deresiewicz with an insightful article in The American Scholar arguing that we’ve fallen into the trap of scientism: the belief that science is the only valid form of knowledge. Reading …
Kurt Vonnegut at the Writers’ Workshop
Suzanne McConnell writes an essay on what Kurt Vonnegut was like as a teacher at the Writers’ Workshop: He told us in workshop classes, “You’re in the entertainment business.” He impressed this …
The evolutionary function of religion
Excerpts from Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal on the evolutionary function of religion. In his trailblazing book Darwin’s Cathedral, the biologist David Sloan Wilson proposes that …
“stories equip us with a mental file of dilemmas we might one day face”
From Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal: In his groundbreaking book How the Mind Works, Pinker argues that stories equip us with a mental file of dilemmas we might one day face, along …
On Reading and Books
On Reading and Books — an essay by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), who influenced some of the most prominent minds in the world. Ignorance is degrading only when it is found in …
David Foster Wallace: The Paradox of Plagiarism
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) remains one of the most revered authors of our time. His timeless collection of wisdom includes everything from his famous commencement speech This is Water to his …
Why Read the Classics?
Italo Calvino argues that we should dedicate part of our adult life to re-reading the classics that shaped us as children. In fact, reading in youth can be rather unfruitful, owing to impatience, …
Susan Sontag: The Function of Common Sense
I made it through Susan Sontag’s recently released notebooks: As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980. “As Consciousness” is the second of three …