Join 📚 Jim's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Jim's read, .
If we have any hope of resuscitating fields like English and history, we must rescue the humanities from the utilitarian appraisals that both their champions and their critics subject them to. We need to recognize that the conservatives are right, albeit not in the way they think: The humanities *are* useless in many senses of the term. But that doesn’t mean they’re without value.
The Humanities Have Sown the Seeds of Their Own Destruction - The Atlantic
Tyler Austin Harper
Pascal would also tell us that the stakes are high, quite high. “The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries,” he writes. “For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves, and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without this we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.”
Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet
The Convivial Society
Hygiene turned from being a virtue into a professionally organized ritual at the altar of a science.
Tools for Conviviality
Ivan Illich
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise