Notes

Incredibly accurate description of the writing life by Heather Havrilevsky. Today, I woke up at 4 a.m. because one of my dogs was making a strange gulping sound. I sat for several minutes listening closely, wide awake, wondering if she wasn’t developing esophageal cancer or some other gruesome ailme

Not to complain, but the children have been obnoxious, I’m not sleeping enough, car alarms keep going off in the neighborhood, the track workers have been jackhammering all morning, and the house is its usual mess. Sometimes it’s not all sunshine and roses here in the suburbs. from Facebook via IFTT

“The problem is, maximizing interruptions in the name of business creates a tragedy of the commons, ruining global attention spans and causing billions of unnecessary interruptions each day.” —Tristan Harris, in an illuminating essay on how the techniques of attentional misdirection deployed by tech

Vox just dropped a 12-minute master class on prosody featuring some amazing rap lyrics. Rhyme, beats, metrical motives … this really covers some ground. Super cool.

As a horse when he has run, a dog when he has tracked the game, a bee when it has made the honey, so a man when he has done a good act, does not call out for others to come and see, but he goes on to another act, as a vine goes on […]

Few men have souls so dead that they will not bother to look up when they hear the barking of wild Geese. –Roger Tory Peterson (for “men,” modern readers may wish to substitute “people”)

Comedian Samantha Bee has a late-night talk show that starts this week. From a recent New York Times story on the show: “The ‘Full Frontal’ producers used a blind submissions process to hire new writers, meaning they did not know the names or backgrounds of the people whose material they were readin

You will be no swimmer till you can place some confidence in the power of the water to support you. —Benjamin Franklin (via 10 Mile Swim)

“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.”  —Woodrow Wilson (via pangeaseed)

“Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” — Oliver Sacks, quoted by Michiko Kakutani, in the NYT today (via Steve Silberman)