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.”