interiors

Unwilling to pass around a question on Facebook, I decided to answer the question privately, "What are the ten most important books I've read?". As a teen... To Kill a Mockingbird Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings A Clockwork Orange Beyond Freedom and Dignity Siddhartha I'm OK - You're OK / Games People Play The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge Anthem / The Fountainhead Johnny Got His Gun Fahrenheit 451 As an adult... The Story of English Ender's Game Collected Fictions (Borges) The Economics of Innocent Fraud Mercier and Camier Debt: The First 5,000 Years Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust How to Read and Why Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison The Affluent Society The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better Literary Occasions: Essays As I Lay Dying

A response to an article in the NY Times, analyzing the phrase Is That Even a Thing? : I would think that asking whether something is a 'thing' reflects, not an inability to define, an inarticulateness, but a basic function of what humans do intellectually, validate and classify. Making new classifications, defining and naming cultural changes, particularly assigning significance to new phenomena and checking validity, seems an important activity of what defines the thinking classes. It is asking whether something is worthy of being defined, of being recognized, or is simply part of the junk mill that has grown with the internet.

Responding to an article The Atlantic,  Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think : First, I am not a major success, but I am looked on others in my family as successful, partially because they know how troubled I was in my youth. Fortune, for me, is a mixture of good and bad, a series of events that changed my life, and along with my intelligence and newfound drive, enabled me to succeed. The complexity of my story, or at least how I tell it, exemplifies the complexity of success. Immediate events, when I was 26 Deciding to quit in series, two horrible, low-end jobs, and the realization that I needed to change my life A struggle to deal with insomnia, which lead to me finding fitness, then vegetarianism, and deciding to go back to school Fitness helped phenomenally me with my horrible insomnia and dysphoria, leaving me mood-free for over 2 years, and to this day has kept me emotionally stable My grandmother dying, leaving me a small amount of money, enough to finish sch...

Responding to the NYT article Hunter S. Thompson Would No Longer Recognize San Francisco : Not that NYC ever had a heart, other than for business, although it has been a cultural center, but fighting each other does not win this 'war'. On some level, I would be part of the barbarian invasion, in that I work for financial firms using technology, have a high income, and am relatively immune to the invasion of the 'plutocrats'. I work for them. That said, the problem is not so much an us against them, but as us against an electorate that has allowed money to gain disordinate power, to control and ruin the lives of most people. San Francisco might be the poster child for this inequality, but it is happening everywhere. Bernie Sanders is a step in the right direction; I don't wholly agree with him, but we need something more. Our country needs to move in a better direction, one in which people's lives matter, where a higher quality of life matters, where our li...

Responding to a NYT article by Russ Douthat : Sure, blame the victim, and accuse Obama for the rise of a racist, xenophobic right-wing populace. Hard to see how he actually created this problem. It is like saying gays and lesbians caused hate crimes. Trump's followers are disenfranchised and authoritarian in ideology, and although the extremism of Trump's followers is a reaction to Obama's race and calm, Obama did not cause their extremism. In fact, the Republicans themselves do that. The GOP is to blame for the ongoing economic crisis impacting much of our country, and that, along with Republicans' racist and hostile rhetoric, drives Trump's followers.

Responding to the NYT article Is the Era of Big-Program Liberalism Over? : Being concerned about the welfare of people, I see big government programs as the only viable alternative. Ceding control to the wealthy and corporations, essentially what the anti-government focus of Republicans has done, has only led to decreases in the quality of life for most Americans. For some of us, the favored few, the educated, those with technical skills, the wealthy, life has improved under corporatization and increasing plutocracy, as we've accumulated much of the prosperity of the last few decades. Universal programs are the only real, time-proven, option.

Dr. Sacks preferred to be an alien in New York rather than in California, he told The Calgary Herald. “Living there was too easy and too sweet,” he said. “I needed ugly and violent, ferocious and challenging. ... There is a tremendous richness of life here, Tourette’s visibly present on the streets.” Good or bad, New York.