die hartseer wat nooit huil word nie

 Anneliese Burgess, in ’n Slordige muisvoël met geel oë in die tyd van Groot Moeilikheid, Binne+Land, Jun 2026

Excerpt

Hulle was altyd swart, sommige dae duideliker gevorm as ander. As ek wakker word in die oggend. As ek wakker lê in die nag. Dáár iewers, op ’n telefoondraad in my kop. Altyd. Daar. Oomblikke van verontrusting afgewissel met ’n metastatiese onafwendbaarheid in my murg.

Branders. In en uit. En op die draai van elke gety, die hartseer wat nooit huil word nie. 

. . .  .

Ek leer dat voëls, as wesens wat tussn die aarde en die lug beweeg, gereeld as simbole verskyn.

Woorde is miskien te presies en daarom praat die psige in argetipes wat ouer is as taal. In jungiaanse sielkunde is hulle skade-simbole soos die verstand neig na natuurbeelde wanneer die onderbewuste iets probeer sigbaar maak. In amper elke mitologie ter wêreld dra voëls boodskappe tussen wêrelde: tussen die lewendes en die dooies, tussen die aarde en iets groters as die aarde. 

. . . . 

In argetipiese sielkunde word beelde nie weggeredeneer of na vaste betekenisse vertaal nie. Hulle moet gevolg, versorg en toegelaat word om hul diepte te openbaar. 'n Beeld is nie bloot 'n prentjie in die kop nie, maar 'n manier van ervaar en 'n manier van ken.

She goes on to quote Emily Dickinson

"Hope” is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul 

 

Understanding climate change is different from understanding the laws of physics, because nothing we do will alter the laws of physics, but many things we do could change the climate

 --- Chris Brink, in The Idea of Academic Responsibility (forthcoming), quoted by Nina Overton in Oor universiteite, voetbalklubs en ubuntu, Binne+Land, Jun 2026

Quote

Understanding climate change is different from understanding the laws of physics, because nothing we do will alter the laws of physics, but many things we do could change the climate. The contrast with 'objective', then ... is not 'subjective' but 'participatory’.

The past is a lighthouse, not a port

 --- Russian proverb quoted by Laura Spinney in Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (2025 : 275)

Happiness is vastly overrated. We wanna do something worth the doing.

 --- Rebecca Newberger in conversation with David Edwards about Mattering, Philosophy Bites podcast, June 2026

Four major strategies:

1. Socializers
2. Transcenders 
3. Heroic strivers
4. Competitive mattering

Cf. recent book, Competitive mattering

From the transcript

Host 1 [David Edwards]: And in your own case, you said that you abandoned transcendental mattering and you took up learning mattering. The idea that the more that you learn, the better, and perhaps you can even contribute to the corpus of knowledge. And you’ve never had any doubts about that, so you remain that this is a legitimate way of mattering.

Guest [Rebecca Newberger]: It seems worthwhile to me. I’ve certainly had doubts that I had anything to contribute, you know, and that’s another way that our mattering projects can fail us. They can fail us personally. They can make us feel like failures constantly. And I’ve often thought that that was true of my mattering project.

Guest: But of just trying to at least learn everything and trying to fit it together coherently even without making any contribution, that seems to me worthwhile. Knowledge seems to me of value. You know, justice, knowledge, compassion, beauty. These are things that are worthwhile if your mattering project is to either cultivate the appreciation of these things or maybe even to add to them. That’s a good thing.

Guest: And it might lead to a tremendous amount of frustration and disappointment. I mean, look at Wittgenstein’s life. The heartache, the misery that he went through, even though he contributed a great deal. And then he says at the end of his life, Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life. Because he was doing what he thought mattered and struggling and and that’s what we’re really after.

Guest: We’re not after happiness. Happiness is vastly overrated. We wanna do something worth the doing. We don’t wanna waste our lives.

Power is actually value neutral. It just makes us more of what we already are.

 --- Sally Adee, in a New Scientist review of Poisonous People by Leanne ten Brinke, March 2026

Excerpt

Ten Brinke doesn’t promise low-effort approaches to rooting out liars. “If lying were so easy and straightforward to detect, there would be little point in doing it,” she reminds us.

But it can be done if you pay attention. If a minority of “bad apples”, as she calls them, ruin the barrel, the rest of us have some choice in whether or not to let the rot set in. Indeed, ten Brinke hints there may be some personality types within the 80 per cent who can not only stop the rot, but reverse it. These people pair dark traits with qualities that we don’t normally associate with them, like empathy and conscientiousness.

Their mere existence explodes another uncritically accepted axiom among the 80 per cent, that “absolute power corrupts absolutely”. In fact, this only holds true for the worst among us, says ten Brinke. Taking responsibility for your barrel of apples may require being more disciplined and honest about your own character. But there are rewards. Power is actually value neutral. It just makes us more of what we already are.

Reporting is the act of taking private knowledge and making it public

 --- Jasmine Sun, in The independent writer’s advantage in the age of AI, Jun 2026

Subtitle

Jasmine Sun on why secrets, live presence, and a distinct voice matter more than ever in an AI-saturated world, and what independent creators need to build careers that machines can't replace

Excerpt

I’m going to introduce four ideas, or provocations, that have shaped the way that I think about AI and my own media career.

One: The value of summary will go down, and the value of secrets will go up.

Reporting is the act of taking private knowledge and making it public. The things that people have not said, things in whisper networks, the tacit knowledge, the open secrets that have never been put in the public domain—the journalist manages to pluck them out and make them public. When you persuade a source to tell you about some corporate malfeasance, or you venture to a remote town that few people have ever written about, or you sneak your way into a tiny underground party and talk about all the people who are there, you are working in a space where there is no training data.

the arc of AI bends toward demoralization

 --- L.M. Sacasas, in Do Not Resign From Life, The Convivial Society: Vol. 7, No. 3 (2026)

Excerpt

Oddly enough, it turns out that loudly and frequently touting your product as a potential threat of world-historical proportions to human well-being was a bad marketing strategy. Human beings, after all, have no particular obligation to cheerfully cooperate with our own purported immiseration.

This purported immiseration would have both economic and psycho-social dimensions, but it is with the latter that I am mostly concerned right now. My working thesis about the generalized impact of “AI” as it is currently deployed can be summed up in the observation that the arc of AI bends toward demoralization. . . .

I believe that one dimension of this sadness or demoralization can be attributed to the simple fact that we are increasingly invited to outsource a class of activities that grant us a measure of satisfaction, accomplishment, and purpose. But it is not only the case that we outsource these activities and thus fail to reap their existential rewards, it is also true, as Marc Watkins recently noted, that the demoralization can set in as a function of AI’s ambient presence in a social ecosystem, such as, in Watkins’ case, the university, where he suggests “the true crisis here is purpose.”

of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful and varied

 --- Henry Beston in The Outermost House (1929), quoted by Anneliese Burgess in Wat die water aan ons doen, Binne+Land, May 2026

Quote

The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful and varied.

Another roof, another proof

 --- Mathematician Paul Erdős, quoted passim, I couldn't track down a source. 

In this case, I saw it in Ben Cohen's WSJ story on the AI solution to an Erdős problem

So imagine how unimaginable it was 80 years ago, when the unit distance problem was posed by Paul Erdős, known as the most prolific mathematician in history. He was also known as an eccentric, nomadic genius who lived out of a suitcase, worked around the clock and traveled all over the world, true to his personal motto: “Another roof, another proof.”

All writing is autobiography. Everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it

 --- J.M. Coetzee, in an interview with David Attwell, Doubling the Point (1994), quoted by Piet Croucamp in Die subversiewe J.M. Coetzee + niemandsland + die veldsoirée in Nxuba, Binne+Land, May 2026

Source

Ek stel in elk geval nié werklik belang om my eie storie te skryf nie. "All writing is autobiography. Everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it," sê Coetzee aan Attwell. Wanneer jy die storie van jou lewe vertel, verlaat jy jou op ’n reservoir van herinneringe, "selecting those bits of narrative that get to a plausible truth". Is daar dan geen niemandsland tussen ’n geleefde ervaring en fiksie nie?

In Negotiating with the Dead (2002) beweer Margaret Atwood met ’n ongeoorloofde veralgemening: "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." Alexander Strachan is soort van met haar eens. Ek onthou hy het lank gelede iewers gesê die hele skryfproses is minder romanties as wat die meeste mense sal wil glo; " ... eintlik sit jy maar op jou alie en werk jou gat af". Dalk haal ek hom ook verkeerd aan; die punt is egter weer eens geldig, dog ontmoedigend. Dalk praat hulle nie van dieselfde "difficult" nie. 

 

As subject, use either a trip or the arrival of a stranger (some disruption of order, the usual novel beginning)

 --- John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, quoted by Piet Croucamp in Die subversiewe J.M. Coetzee + niemandsland + die veldsoirée in Nxuba, Binne+Land, May 2026

Source

Die Amerikaanse romanskrywer John Gardner, in sy boek The Art of Fiction, bepeins dieselfde vrae as waaroor ek dit hier het en kom tot die slotsom dat alle intriges tot twee argetipes gereduseer kan word: "As subject, use either a trip or the arrival of a stranger (some disruption of order, the usual novel beginning)." In een of ander volksmond is dié wenk later aan Leo Tolstoy toegeskryf en herverpak tot: "All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town."

[Stanford students] arrive with extraordinary academic preparation but very little practice sitting with discomfort and engaging respectfully across difference

--- Shashank V. Joshi, Stanford, senior associate vice provost for academic well-being in the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, quoted in Faculty Senate votes to extend COLLEGE, Stanford Report, May 2026

Excerpt

. . . Stanford students are “brilliant, but they are also brittle at times.”

“They arrive with extraordinary academic preparation but very little practice sitting with discomfort and engaging respectfully across difference,” Joshi explained. “COLLEGE 101: Why College? is not a soft course for our students. The well-being framework that we start with in that first quarter is a clinical intervention at scale, in my opinion. It gives students language, community, and tools before the weight of Stanford fully lands on them.”

If you can substitute "hungry ghost trapped in a jar" for "AI" in a sentence it's probably a valid use case for LLMs

 --- hikikomorphism on Bluesky

Post

If you can substitute "hungry ghost trapped in a jar" for "AI" in a sentence it's probably a valid use case for LLMs. Take "I have a bunch of hungry ghosts in jars, they mainly write SQL queries for me". Sure. Reasonable use case. 

"My girlfriend is a hungry ghost I trapped in a jar"? No. Deranged.

AI is our generation's radium

 --- Nick Pettigrew on Bluesky via New Scientist's Feedback column, 25 Feb 2025

Post:

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

Two different characters are presented to our emulation; the one, of proud ambition and ostentatious avidity; the other, of humble modesty and equitable justice

 --- Adam Smith, from Paragraph I.III.29 in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, quoted by Russ Roberts in the EconTalk podcast, Adam Smith's Warning About Wealth, Fame, and Status (with Ross Levine), at 52:07 in 

To deserve, to acquire, and to enjoy the respect and admiration of mankind, are the great objects of ambition and emulation. Two different roads are presented to us, equally leading to the attainment of this so much desired object; the one, by the study of wisdom and the practice of virtue; the other, by the acquisition of wealth and greatness. Two different characters are presented to our emulation; the one, of proud ambition and ostentatious avidity; the other, of humble modesty and equitable justice. Two different models, two different pictures, are held out to us, according to which we may fashion our own character and behaviour; the one more gaudy and glittering in its colouring; the other more correct and more exquisitely beautiful in its outline: the one forcing itself upon the notice of every wandering eye; the other, attracting the attention of scarce any body but the most studious and careful observer. They are the wise and the virtuous chiefly, a select, though, I am afraid, but a small party, who are the real and steady admirers of wisdom and virtue. The great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshippers, and, what may seem more extraordinary, most frequently the disinterested admirers and worshippers, of wealth and greatness.

. . . you will stop. You will have no choice! You will have few obligations. . . . . As a result, perhaps for the first time, you will be alone with your thoughts.

 --- Sara Bronin, from a Bon Voyage speech to Rhodes scholars (2024?), The American Oxonian, Fall 2025, Volume CXII, Number 3

In context

Maybe best of all, I was able to hear my own voice for the first time [in Oxford]. When I was in undergrad, like you, I never stopped working: at a university of 48,000 people, chairing the student Senate, writing and organizing, working like a manic [sic] as an architecture student with endless studios. And I wasn't doing it for the Rhodes Scholarship: I'd never heard of it. 

At Oxford, you will stop. You will have no choice! You will have few obligations. You satisfy them by showing up to tutorials or class, and to High Table the one time each year you're invited. As a result, perhaps for the first time, you will be alone with your thoughts. Listen to them. There's a chance you will hear something you never heard before. . . .

Reflection, 4/26/2026: I don't think I've ever stopped, in this sense of having few obligations. I don't think I've ever been alone with my thoughts other than during meditation retreats, which don't seem to count here. (On retreat, I felt a strong obligation to work hard and make the most of the time alone.) Perhaps being old is the time to stop.

Help us [think] they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence

 --- Norbert Wiener, "God and Golem, Inc.," 1964, quoted by Etymonline

The future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it

 --- Robert Frost, quoted by Anneliese Burgess in Skuld, skaamte en die krag van 'n geheime innerlike lewe, March 2026

No war is over until the enemy says it’s over

 --- Jim Mattis, quoted by Ned Temko in What constitutes victory in an ‘asymmetric’ war with Iran?, CS Monitor, March 2026

In context

Mr. Trump reminded his social media followers this week that he was “President of the United States of America, by far the Most Powerful Country Anywhere in the World” – hardly the words of a leader reluctant to “finish the job.”

But unless he can virtually eliminate Iran’s missile and drone capacity, he’ll have to reckon with another reality of war – summed up by Jim Mattis, Mr. Trump’s defense secretary during his first term in office.

“No war is over,” he said, “until the enemy says it’s over.”

“We may think it over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote.”

quantum mechanics [is] a theory that predicts very well and explains very badly

 --- Nick Ormrod, quoted in A new understanding of causality could fix quantum theory’s fatal flaw by  Ciarán Gilligan-Lee in New Scientist, November 2025

In context

The upshot is that the observer who performs the measurement is all-important. The gnawing problem is that it isn’t at all clear what qualifies as an observer. With no precise definition, quantum theory offers no answer to the key question of how and why the world we see – where particles have definite properties – emerges from the quantum fog.

That’s why many physicists view quantum theory as it is typically understood to be deeply unsatisfying. “The current situation with quantum mechanics is that it’s a theory that predicts very well and explains very badly,” says Nick Ormrod at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. We can’t just fall back on the phrase “because we measure it”, he says, particularly as many suspect that the vagueness of quantum theory is a big part of why physicists struggle to apply it in contexts where no observers are present, such as the very early universe or the fabric of space-time.

We never left religion. Instead, we found new gods.

 --- Joel Halldorf,  Professor of Church History at University College Stockholm, Not So Secular Sweden, Comment magazine, January 2026, via Anneliese Burgess in Binne+Land

Excerpt

A global Ipsos study registered the change already in 2023: In highly secular societies, zoomers tend to be more religious than their boomer parents. Nowhere, the study concluded, was that pattern clearer than in Sweden, once the poster child of secularism. 

Why is this happening? To understand what is going on, we must, I believe, rethink secularism. 

Human history has never seen a society void of religion. Spirituality is, together with music, one of the few human universals. The secular twentieth century did not change this. We never left religion. Instead, we found new gods. 

change the question from, "Is it good?" to "Is this good for me?"

 --- Samuel Mead, https://www.instagram.com/samuelmeadarts/, Instagram post, 13 February 2026

Voice over transcript (punctuation added)

When you are making creative work, see if you can change the question from, "Is it good?" to "Is this good for me?" Those last two words added on to the end make a lot of difference because whether or not this particular artwork is good is irrelevant to me in comparison to "Was it good for me that I did all these drawings?"  Is it good for me that I am going to turn the page now and do this? Yeah, this is good for me. This is definitely good for me. You can feel how it is helping me every time I do it, you know. So change that question, the question of, "Is this good?" It's a boring question. It's just such a limiting, closed question. It's just, it's not helpful. But this, what I'm doing, this is helpful for me. Helping me to become a better person. Really helping me to understand myself more. Helping me to deal with my emotions. Helping me to understand more about myself, about reality, about life

Science discovers, art digests

 --- Brian Eno, What art does, an unfinished theory (2025: 111)

Excerpt

Politics all too often makes the individual feel left outside without agency or power. We will only succeed when we empower all sorts of people – not just the experts and professionals – all over the world, to have the confidence to imagine new futures. Just as we need science to tell us how the changing world is, we need art to help find out how we feel about it. We need those feelings to guide our decisions and values. Science discovers, art digests.

An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have . . . . art is what you can get away with

 --- Andy Warhol

From Goodreads, no citation

An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

Andy Warhol Foundation, no citation

art is what you can get away with

You are always at the mercy of your stupidest competitors

 --- Craig McCaw, quoted by Tren Griffin, in The 1990s Telecom Bubble. What Can We Learn?, November 2017

In context

The $14 billion dollar acquisition of MFS by WorldCom [in August 1996] kickstarted the great CLEC explosion. What was a modest cream skimming business for MFS became a gold rush. Scores of other CLECs were created in just a few years. A partial list of CLECs would include Allegiance, Covad, Northstar, Teligent, Electric Lightwave, ICG Communications, Intermedia Communications, 360networks, Broadwing, Global Crossing and Level 3. The telecommunications business empire of Craig McCaw was no exception creating a company called NextLink (later renamed XO Communications). The problem NextLink and others CLECs faced was overcapacity. Craig McCaw said to me often during this period: “You are always at the mercy of your stupidest competitors.” And in this case there were scores of competitors.

our savagery has perhaps increased in meanness and fury; it stands out ever more terribly against a modern background

 Guy Davenport, from The Geography of the Imagination: 40 Essays (2024:98), in the essay “Prehistoric Eyes”

Excerpt

Man, it would seem, does not evolve; he accumulates. His fund of advantages over nature and over the savage within is rich indeed, but nothing of the old Adam has been lost; our savagery has perhaps increased in meanness and fury; it stands out ever more terribly against a modern background.

there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and that someone is always going to sit on it

 --- Paul Kingsnorth, in AI Demonic: A Spiritual Exploration of AI, From the Nov/Dec, 2023 issue of Touchstone

Excerpt

For the last two years, I have found myself writing a lot about God; more than I had intended. I have claimed several times that there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and that someone is always going to sit on it. Humans are fundamentally religious animals. We are drawn towards transcendence whether we like it or not. But here in the West, we have dethroned our old god, and now we can barely look at him.

So, who sits on our throne now?

the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive

 Ecclesiastes 4:1 to 4:3. Links to BibleHub parallel translations.

New International Version:

Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun: I saw the tears of the oppressed-- and they have no comforter; power was on the side of their oppressors-- and they have no comforter.

And I declared that the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive.

But better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.

And I saw that all toil and all achievement spring from one person's envy of another. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

no major, forward-looking future visions have taken root in our collective imagination since smartphones

 --- Sarah Housley, in an opinion piece for New Scientist, We have run out of new visions of the future. This needs to change, Sep 2025

In context

The dominant images of the future that we are presented with at the moment all have long histories to them. They include space colonisation, dystopian artificial intelligence and a longing to bring back the past – but a past that never was. This makes sense given the climate anxiety and dread about the future felt by many people. The future has started to feel like it is closing off rather than opening out.

...

It’s not that absolutely no new future visions have emerged this century – think of solarpunk, for instance, a movement based on climate hope that developed online in the 2000s on Tumblr and on blogs. But it is notable that no major, forward-looking future visions have taken root in our collective imagination since smartphones came to dominate our way of communicating.

A nightmare is a failed dream, a dream that, by not “handling” anxiety, has failed in its role as the guardian of sleep

 --- Irving Yalom, quoted by Anneliese Burgess in Oor die lewe se dwarswinde, Binne+Land, 9 November 2025

Burgess writes

Ek vind Irvin Yalom se benadering tot drome verfrissend prakties en menslik. Hier is wat ek meen hy oor my droom sou gesê het. Eerstens dat die inhoud van die droom nie 'n kode is wat ontsyfer moet nie, maar eerder 'n uitnodiging tot 'n gesprek met myself.

Daardie kloppende hart is die wysheid van die liggaam wat aandring op aandag. Vir hom is tydsberekening nooit toevallig nie. Die feit dat ek droom van iets wat terugkeer na aanleiding van 'n foto uit die Kamdeboo presies 'n jaar gelede, sê iets oor waar ek nou in die lewe is.

Vir Yalom is 'n droom 'n daad van kreatiwiteit; die psige se poging om 'n storie te vertel wat miskien nog te moeilik of pynlik is om andersins sinvol verwoord te word. Yalom moedig ons aan om self betekenis uit ons drome te te skep – nie deur 'n universele droomwoordeboek te raadpleeg nie, maar uit ons kennis van onsself. 'n Groot aspek van sy denke is "eksistensiële angs" – hoe ons beïnvloed word deur ons bewustheid van ons sterflikheid, en die sterflikheid van verhoudings. Verwerping, wat in daardie droom 'n dwarswind was, raak aan 'n universele menslike vrees vir alleenheid en die dood van verbintenisse wat vir ons sin gee.

the purpose of planning is to develop the planner, not to develop the plan

 --- Angus Fletcher, in conversation with Russ Roberts about his book, Primal Intelligence, EconTalk, Nov 3, 2025,  11:25

Russ Roberts: But, say a little bit about this idea of why it's worthwhile to plan, even though the plan is smashed as soon as your helicopter lands, because then most people would say, 'Well, then that was obviously a mistake. Why would you plan if it's not going to work out?'

Angus Fletcher: So, no plan survives contact with the enemy, which is why centralized planning is always a mistake. Which is why you always have to decentralize planning to the people on the ground, who are able to more rapidly adapt and evolve as the situation itself evolves.

The reason you plan is to become a better planner. So, this is a core thing that kind of goes to the book. It actually comes from Dwight Eisenhower, and Dwight Eisenhower says that basically what you do before any military operation is you make a plan for everything you can imagine happening. You think, 'What if my enemy does this? What if my enemy does this other thing? What if I have this unexpected breakthrough? What if I have this unexpected challenge?' You make plans, you make plans, you make plans, you make plans, you make plans; and then the moment the battle starts, you throw out all the plans, and you just focus on what's happening now.

And so, to your point, why do you spend time planning? Well, the purpose of planning is to develop the planner, not to develop the plan. In other words, it's to make you better able at inventing new courses of action on the fly. 

in the midst of this world | we stroll along the roof of hell | gawking at flowers

 --- Kobayashi Issa, trans. Sam Hamill, quoted in Joel Pulliam, 45. Tokyo Cemetaries

In full

世の中は地獄の上の花見哉 (Google Translate)

in the midst of this world

we stroll along the roof of hell

gawking at flowers

Goodhart’s law: the notion that, once you start using a given measure as a target, it stops being a useful measure

 --- via Feedback, New Scientist, April 2025:

Feedback is irresistibly reminded of Goodhart’s law: the notion that, once you start using a given measure as a target, it stops being a useful measure. In this case, everyone is trying to make videos that get hundreds of millions of hits, so there are loads of videos with hundreds of millions of hits. It isn’t at all clear that any of those videos are, in any meaningful sense, good or useful. But they sure do hoover up advertising money that could otherwise be used to support popular science magazines.

From Wikipedia

Goodhart's law is an adage that has been stated as, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who is credited with expressing the core idea of the adage in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom:

Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

Goodhart, Charles (1975). "Problems of Monetary Management: The UK Experience". In Courakis, Anthony S. (ed.). Inflation, Depression, and Economic Policy in the West. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books (published 1981). p. 116. ISBN 0-389-20144-8.

In the sublime war of man against Reality man has but one weapon, the imagination

 --- Benjamin de Casseres, according to QuoteInvestigator. Often misattributed to various people, including Lewis Carroll and Jules de Gaultier,

From an essay by Benjamin de Casseres about the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in The Poetry Journal, 1916:

In the sublime war of man against Reality man has but one weapon, the imagination. The ethereal imagination is the highest form of the evolution of the transfiguring and sublimating power of images. It marks the boundary line between the mystery of matter and the mystery of spirit. It is the fine volatilized plasma of an esoteric dimension, of a world where the truths hinted at by the x-ray and radium are true for the human mind and body.

When the politicians become historians, that becomes propaganda and not history

 --- Amir Khosru Mahmud Chowduhury, a former lawmaker from the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, quoted in Students toppled a dictator. Now they must help remake Bangladesh, CS Monitor, May 2025

Excerpt

“When the politicians become historians, that becomes propaganda and not history,” says Amir Khosru Mahmud Chowduhury, a former lawmaker from the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party. “That is what Sheikh Hasina started to do. And all her deeds and misdeeds, the symbol used was her father. So when she came down, the symbol came down with it.”

Speak to one person like it's the last time

 --- @thestoicmanual, post on X, quoted by Anneliese Burgess, "'n Week van wolke, ...," Binne+Land, 28 Jun 2025

A beautiful life isn't complicated. It's intentional. Spend on quality items. On people who matter to you. Be alone often. Text slower. Eat slower. Think slower. Notice the wind. The trees. The flowers. Fold your clothes with care. Speak to one person like it's the last time. That's wealth. That's presence. That's enough.

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.

 --- Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) American politician and author, Godkin Lecture, Harvard (1985) (Source via Wist)

Politics is the art of living together & of being ‘just’ to one another—not of imposing a way of life, but of organizing a common life.

 --- English philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901-90), quoted by Joseph Epstein in The Unbearable Ubiquity of Trump, WSJ, 5 Sep 2025

From Epstein's piece

Unless you have actual skin in the game, politics is a spectator sport that can soon grow dreary and wearying. The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901-90) felt that “politics is an uninteresting form of activity to anyone who has no desire to rule others.” He also believed that “politics are an inferior form of human activity,” and that politics “were nothing more than a struggle for power.” In his “Notebooks: 1922-86,” Oakeshott wrote: “A general interest and preoccupation with politics is the surest sign of a general decay in a society.” We in the U.S. have over the past decade been living with this political preoccupation.

What offended Oakeshott about politics was its rivaling claimants’ promises of perfection, the arguments coming down to dueling virtues, “with one side intent on crushing the other.” Politics provides promises about the future. Oakeshott preferred life in the present. For him the role of government should be “to keep its subjects at peace with one another in the activities in which they have chosen to seek their happiness.” He added: “Politics is the art of living together & of being ‘just’ to one another—not of imposing a way of life, but of organizing a common life.” Our two political parties, of course, hold with none of this, each asserting that it and it alone knows the road to perfection, holds the key to the good life.

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete

 --- attrib. to the Buddha by Jack Kornfield, cited to p. 28 in Kornfield's Buddha’s Little Instruction Book by Fake Buddha Quotes, via Anneliese Burgess in Klein glasies, aalwyne en egskeiding.

From Burgess

Kornfield praat oor die harde innerlike stem – wat hy die "innerlike kritikus" of "regter" noem. Dié stem spruit dikwels uit ons kinderjare se kondisionering. Ek is geneig om genadeloos krities teenoor myself te wees oor my mislukkings, struikelings, swakhede en brouwerk, en daar is báie daarvan.

Kornfield sê selfdeernis (ek sukkel met die selfhelptaal😁) is 'n "revolusionêre daad" in Westerse kultuur, waar ons geleer word dat streng wees met jouself die pad na verbetering is. Hy daag dit uit en sê innerlike groei is makliker wanneer ons ook sagter met onsself omgaan.

each thing, as far as it lies in itself, strives to persevere in its being

 --- Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, part 3, prop. 6, quoted in Wikipedia/conatus

Excerpt from the R. H. M. Elwes translation on Gutenberg.org

VI. Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being.

>>>>>Proof--Individual things are modes whereby the  attributes of God are expressed in a given determinate manner  (I. xxv.Cor.); that is, (I. xxxiv.), they are things which express  in a given determinate manner the power of God, whereby  God is and acts; now no thing contains in itself anything  whereby it can be destroyed, or which can take away its  existence (III. iv.); but contrariwise it is opposed to all that  could take away its existence (III. v.).  Therefore, in so far as  it can, and in so far as it is in itself, it endeavours to persist  in its own being.  Q.E.D. 

Your greatest obstacle is not being copied; it’s being ignored

 --- Will Parker Anderson, in How much content should you give away?, Writers Circle on Substack, 9 august 2025

Excerpt

Your greatest obstacle is not being copied; it’s being ignored. I don’t know any writers whose ideas were stolen before they could publish them (though I know this happens on rare occasions), but I know thousands who keep their ideas to themselves, thinking one day their moment will come.

Meanwhile, their ideas collect digital dust … unseen, unread, unknown.

Every time you share a piece of content (a note or post on Substack, an email newsletter, a chapter excerpt), think of it as a piece of kindling. The more fuel you provide, the higher the chance it will spark a reaction in your readers. 

like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls

--- (ascr. to) Anthropologist Matt Cartmill, e.g. by Quodid

Full quote

As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life — so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.

autumnal recrudescence of the amatory urge

 --- Via Mark Crawford, 7 Aug 2025: when juvenile birds start singing again in the fall. Mating is tied to day length, and so it feels like spring. The adults are wise to this, and don't sing.

From Christine Elder

"The theory about autumnal recrudescence is this: Some sex hormones are triggered to be released based on the hours of daylight, and certain hormones “inspire” a bird to sing. At some point, when the daylight hours of autumn match those of just the right time in spring, those hormones are re-triggered and drive some birds to sing for a short period in the fall."

Perhaps also applicable to old farts who buy a fast red car and go courting young women. 

Mark also shared another lovely phrase on this call: life is a “sexually transmitted terminal disease”

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

 --- poet Mary Oliver, from "Sometimes" quoted Geraldine Brooks in Memorial Days, mentioned in Karen Campbell's review, A novelist embraces solitude and nature as antidotes to loss, CSMonitor, 4 Feb 2025

Excerpt from the poem (italics in original)

4.

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

Another wonderful excerpt from the same poem

I don’t know what God is.

I don’t know what death is.

But I believe they have between them

    some fervent and necessary arrangement.

Systemic reforms without credible individual sanctions breed cynicism, while charging officers without structural reform guarantees a revolving door of future cases

--- Thaddeus Johnson, a former police officer and now a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, quoted in Henry Gass & Patrik Jonsson, What the sentence in Breonna Taylor’s death says about police reform under Trump, CS Monitor, 22 July 2025

Excerpt

Ultimately, experts say, successful police reform needs to marry individual accountability with systemic improvements.

“If you only pursue one track, the other falters. Systemic reforms without credible individual sanctions breed cynicism, while charging officers without structural reform guarantees a revolving door of future cases,” says Thaddeus Johnson, a former police officer and now a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice.

 I was struck by the quote's with debates around ogregore versus  individual agency. Our tendency is to prefer either/or solutions, and so often it’s both/and. With agency, it’s not whether corporate behavior is either collective or dictated by leadership. It’s both.

The way we talk about politics shapes the kind of politics we end up with

--- cultural historian Tom Wright talking to David Runciman, The History of Bad Ideas: Charisma, 26 June 2025, at time code 2:40

Excerpt

That's why I'm really interested in [the word charisma]: The way we talk about politics shapes the kind of politics we end up with

This expression is in line with ideas attributed to other thinkers, e.g.,

Benjamin Lee Whorf: "Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about" (attrib. on Goodreads, no pin cite)

Ludwig Wittgenstein: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" (attrib. on AZquotes, EF.com), "If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world" (EF.com).

Julia Penelope: "When we speak, we exercise the power of language to transform reality" (AZquotes ,EF.com). 

Sotheby’s had “no monopoly on amorality, but as in so many other areas, they practised it better than anyone else”

 --- James Stourton, in Rogues & Scholars: A History of the London Art World: 1945-2000, reviewed by Terry Hartle, CS Monitor, March 10, 2025

Excerpt

Stourton is evenhanded, despite having served as a chairman of Sotheby’s. For example, he approvingly quotes a historian who notes that Sotheby’s had “no monopoly on amorality, but as in so many other areas, they practised it better than anyone else.” 

Where the book doesn’t reach, the extremist arrives first

 --- Judge Omar Weslati, quoted in This judge grew up with nothing. Now he makes sure that children have books, Meriem Belhiba, CS Monitor, 10 June 2025

In context

“Where the book doesn’t reach, the extremist arrives first,” Judge Weslati says.

Another quote:

“We never saw this as charity; it’s about cultivation,” he adds. “Planting stories where they hadn’t taken root before.”

especially as a PPE student, my time wasn't about figuring out what others thought but figuring out what I thought and being prepared to defend it

 --- Sarah Stewart Johnson, "Bon Voyage 2024 Speech, Oxford as Chrysalis," The American Oxonian, Winter 2025

A wonderful summary of what I think a humanities education is about.

In context

As an undergraduate at an American University, and, like everyone here, a tenacious sort of undergraduate, I was busy. I was also focused on a lot of intermediate, incremental challenges. . . . 

. . .  As a college student, if I were assigned a chapter in a book, I would basically read that chapter and move on, there were other things always pressing. But at Oxford, with all that time, I realized that I could linger in the library, I could read the rest of an interesting book and also the books alongside it on this shelf. I could spend the whole afternoons walking in Port Meadow thinking about what I what it was I read, talking to friends about ideas, and talking to my tutors. There was no pointless memorizing, no preparation for multiple choice questions... especially as a PPE student, my time wasn't about figuring out what others thought but figuring out what I thought and being prepared to defend it. . . . 

The unrelated excerpt resonated - I was one of those who "disappeared into their studies"

Relationships at Oxford aren't cemented right from the beginning. I'll admit that our Rhodes Class felt a bit like a frat house when we arrived—we only had seven women! And we were divvied out to different colleges, and Rhodes House was not the hub it is today. Some of my classmates ended up spending their time with other Americans, others embraced the UK and never left, some sort of disappeared into their studies. If you'd asked me in 2001, I truly wouldn't have guessed that we'd be as close as we are as a class now.

Ons irrasionele instinkte het 'n verlangse verwantskap met intuïsie, is 'n huisvriend van samesweringsteorieë en het 'n nasaat in subjektiewe moraliteit

 --- Piet Croucamp, in Die ontwrigting + Johannesburg kan mistroostig wees, Binne+Land 3 Jun 2025

Quote in context

Die mens se vermoë om irrasioneel te wees gee ons 'n voorsprong op emosielose kunsmatige intelligensie. Ons irrasionele instinkte het 'n verlangse verwantskap met intuïsie, is 'n huisvriend van samesweringsteorieë en het 'n nasaat in subjektiewe moraliteit. Hoe sal 'n algoritme van veranderlikes, netjies verpak in 'n voorspelbare frekwensie van ongekompliseerde verhoudings, ooit die mens kan verstaan as dit nie in staat is tot die irrasionele nie?

. . . 

Almal betrokke by die vraagstuk van kunsmatige intelligensie en die akademie, herhaal dieselfde veronderstelling dat sinvolle intellektuele opleiding op kritiese denke, kreatiwiteit en insigryke introspeksie moet fokus. "Burnett se argument lees ook maar so," sê ek vir myself toe die Uber voor my nederige kaia in Melville stop. Maar ek weet wragtig nie of dit genoeg gaan wees nie.

Croucamp poses an important challenge, calling into question the regularly rehearsed assumptions that meaningful intellectual education should focus on critical thought, creativity and insightful introspection ("sinvolle intellektuele opleiding op kritiese denke, kreatiwiteit en insigryke introspeksie moet fokus"). I don't have a better answer today, but it's worth being reminded of such rote common sense. It's been rehearsed so often that it resembles whistling past a graveyard.