sotto.org

Johnathan Franzen on yak.

A letter to my son Kai, as part of a culmination project for the Mountain School.

Kai,

There is never really enough time to say everything, only moments and fragments in the soft haze of memory that allow us to make sense of it all. I write this letter at a time in my life where you [...]

Question: I need 100 ways to say “I love you” to my girlfriend. We made a bet last night that I couldn’t come up with 100 and I can’t lose! Help me pa-pa-pa-pa-please non-expert. —Rod
Answer: Here’s the way to say “I love you”: rarely. To say it a hundred ways is to cheapen a pure [...]

What is hard work?

A question I ask myself time and again. You can add Facebook to that as well.

“3QuarksDaily has a mashup moment with Poetry Daily”:http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/07/among-the-inert.html
Being inert love rarely bonds, requiring the meeting of two specific individuals, their union instigated by a certain kind of conversation and formalized, typically in the sterility of a bedroom, though there are no shortage of alternate venues.

“Another thought provoking digby post”:http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/its-not-freedom-by-digby-rick-perlstein.html:
By methodically undermining the public’s will and ability to underwrite the public good, systematically accelerating economic inequality, and making turning oneself into a commodity - “selling out” - the only possible route for young people who wish a reasonably secure middle class existence, conservatives killed liberty.

Spot on on the conditions. But my reaction was the complete opposite.

Relevance, an issue near and dear to my heart.

Excellent forest for the trees essay on the American state of fear.

Cf. the O’Reilly Web 2.0 kerfuffle.

“Why do you work so hard?”:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2005/07/08/notes070805.DTL&nl=fix Or how difficult it is to follow our bliss.
There remains this enormous and wicked sociocultural myth. It is this: Hard work is all there is.
Call it “the cafe question.” Any given weekday you can stroll by any given coffee shop in the city and see dozens of people milling [...]

Too precious and WTF not to post.

An incredibly poignant “story”:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/3/4/151715/5913 about survivors of the Holocaust, serendipity and their children and grandchildren who vow to never forget. Amazing and beautiful.

Straight from the source

The Relationship Revolution, an essay written in 2001, loses none of its insight 3 years later.
bq(blockquote).. In truth, we are not at the beginning, middle or end of an Information Age. Those images, those metaphors, conceal rather than reveal what’s really going on here. While it is true that digital technologies have completely transformed [...]

David Brin makes the case for Pax Americana sans the jingoistic triumphalism.