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"we like the idea of freedom and admire those who feel free, but at the same time we are afraid of freedom, and tend at times to be drawn towards being controlled."
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"if there is a beautiful view, don't spoil it by building huge windows that keep incessantly at it."
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"A Plum Night in Jerusalem, 3 AM" by Nicholas Samaras
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Real Artists Ship
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Stools under an overpass
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"As dark as it was in winter so it is now light."
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"Who was pressuring us? No one. Where were we going? Nowhere."
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"it has taken me all my life / to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels"
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Basho and the boy by the river
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"Agree to let yourself be seized, carried away, no longer seeing what is around you" - Pontalis
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making everything a chase for an unlimited good
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"you have to empty your mind.. After you do something it is done and that’s that"
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Two Albums
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The Weather Station - Came So Easy
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Otherwise by Jane Kenyon
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"I supervised an analyst who was able to report to me, without notes, the complete "text" of the sessions. I never had the slightest image of his patient, who to me remained a dead letter."
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"It does us good not to be able to explain, either to ourselves or to others, what we enjoy or love; it expands our capacity for experience."
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“I have only kept images which entrall me, without my knowing why"
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"My moon has no flag"
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"My cousin Gene (he's really only a second cousin) has a shoe he picked up at Dachau."
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Jesús Fernández-Villaverde on Capitalism, Modernity and their conflation
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"The square root of the number of people in a domain does 50% of the work."
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A Story About the Body - Bob Hass
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"By the time they have been through the ordeal, they really are not concerned about how other people evaluate their performance."
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"The tall and quiet woman"
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“I’m eighteen. — I still admire Banville’s poetry. | Last year I was only seventeen! | Am I progressing?”
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"The prose poem is not a real poem, of course."
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"Not knowing is nearest"
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"If only I could see you again, hungry" - Poem by Kevin Young
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"There is something men and women living in houses dont understand." - Robert Bly Poem
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Mark Wunderlich - On Mary Ruefle
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"What we seek in art is meaning. The meaningful carries an obligation.
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No Nonsense Know How
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"To have come this far is no small achievement: what you have done already is a glorious thing." Cavafy and Ruefle
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"A poet ...would have to pretend he possesses more self knowledge than poets are allowed to have."
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"A work is finished when we can no longer improve it"
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“You can’t convince someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.” - Kevin Kelly and Jonathan Swift
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"Though I'd have preferred to have gone off to bed" Poem by Akazome Emon
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All Shall Be Restored - Kay Ryan
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Nora Brown - Am I Born To Die Song
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"Everyone has a high tolerance for pain until pain comes along"
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"Do not spend $1.00 on two scallion pancakes" Joshua Beckman
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Milosz - 'Ashamed to remember the customs of our homes'
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The Wrapped Reichstag took 24(!) years to bring into the world
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“Inability to tolerate empty space limits the amount of space available”
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The poet's task is to create the tree from which such a fruit would fall.
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"If you have an idea for a poem, an exact grid of intent, you are on the wrong path"
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'there are three ways to finish any piece of writing...'
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My Turn to Confess - by Simic
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The Absentee Landlord by Charles Simic
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He who would flee from bad taste is riding for a fall.
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“I can’t write about him, I can only walk the fields and climb the ditches after him.”
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“What is this experimental poetry and can my mama come?"
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“I come to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”
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Dave Chapelle
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Carl Dennis - New Sabbatarians Poem
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"O God our loving Father, Help us to keep in mind the real causes of war...and to drive them from this ship"
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At the top, a patch of blue sky. Beneath, whitish mist.
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“I suppose if I had lost the war I would have been tried as a war criminal.”
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a bunch of bad things happened... and people turn to worse ideas
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Haul Out Documentary
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Stubborn Attachments
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Easter in the Cancer Ward - Poem by Nicholas Samaras
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Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde - The Demographic Future of Humanity
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Now that we have invoked the ancient names day after day, we can no longer hold off the forces they contain.
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Review of Khirbet Khizeh in the NYRB
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"nonfiction novella" on marginalisism.
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Camus: They must be realistic and yet cannot be.
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The gift and the obligation to return it
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Gift - Czesław Miłosz
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Self-knowledge is a decoy - Adam Phillips
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where does durable advantage reconcentrate?
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Weil believed that European writers would never again produce a work of genius until “they learn that there is no refuge from fate."
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"First, train in the preliminaries'
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People fall in love at the moments in their lives when they are most terrorized by possibilities.
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אלי, אלי, שלא יגמר לעולם
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"This is just a book pulled out of my story."
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"A dog has eaten Yannai's bread"
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Late Fragment by Raymond Carver
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"Imitating something greater than yourself, beyond the circles of rivalry"
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"Poets are literalists of the imagination"
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"There is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write"
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Eula Biss on Monopoly
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"Always ask is X a placebo or the real thing."
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Pascal Quignard - A Terrace in Rome
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Labeling meditation Instruction
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'And who is unrestrained?' A quote from Epictetus
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Christoph Schmidt on Hermann Cohen
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Liar - Built to Spill
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Amalgamation Choir - Ksenitia tou Erota (Giorgos Kalogirou)
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Fresh Kevin Kelly - Three Modes of Cognition
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Praise Song by Lucille Clifton
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Poem by Tony Hoagland
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Mark Kissler on Dean Young
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Documentary - Secret Mall Apartment
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Sigrid Nunez - Interlude from her new novel
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Sabrina Orah Mark - stay with the broken glass
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Monica Ferrell poem from her forthcoming collection
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Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work by Edwidge Danticat
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Andrey Tarkovsky on writing plot
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Alexander Chee FTW
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Paris Review Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, The Art of Fiction No. 267
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Mechanism - by A.R. Ammons
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Mark on "So Much Longing in So Little Space"
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Kevin Kelly - How Will the Miracle Happen Today?
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New Movie roundup from the past few months
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"Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live, and as if you were to die tomorrow."
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"Your genius is your error"
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Jack Gilbert Lannan Interview
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Great interview with Tyler Cowen from several years ago
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Me(!) talking to the great Mark Kissler
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"Teach me, masters who by making were remade, your art."
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Interesting Ethan Mollick Essay
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Mark Kissler's New Substack!
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NYRB - Rescuing the Refugees by Maurice Samuels
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Poem - Constellation Route
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Reading and Interview with Solvej Balle
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Podcast with Irving Finkel
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Bart Ehrman on his belief/ lack thereof
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"He said you don't always know if you're repairing something that already exists or creating something new."
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This World - Czesław Miłosz
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A Song on the End of the World - by Czesław Miłosz
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Poem by Matthew Olzmann - Letter to Justin, Age Seven, Regarding Any Possible Mixed-Race Anxieties Which One Might Experience in the Near or Distant Future
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Two great songs
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Richard Siken - poem from his new book
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Lama Zopa Rinpoche on self-cherishing
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Tyler Cowen on AI
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Rinko Kikuchi on Happiness
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A Little Tooth by Tom Lux
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Ithaka - C. P. CAVAFY
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Stephanie Burts LRB on Richard Siken
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Jenny Offill - 'A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics'
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From his essay "Unpacking My Library"
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(Final) Lecture by Bart Earhman
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The Last One - W.S. Merwin
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Sentimental Value - Joachim Trier
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George Saunders NYT
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Roland Barthes on the dream of enclosed spaces
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Alain Bertaud on Cities, Markets, and People
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Tyler Cowen interviewed by Liv Boeree
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Writing Advice from Sharon Olds
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"All we have is our history and it does not belong to us.”
-
Essay from the end of Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders
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Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Song
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Czeslaw Milosz - One More Contradiction
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Jesse Schell on Game Design
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New Benjamin Labatut interview
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Matthew Olzmann Poem
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Solvej Balle Volume II
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If This Is the Business, What’s the Hard Part? by Emily Kerr-Finell
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"Well yeah, obviously that would work." by Emily Kerr-Finell
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Sabrina Orah Mark
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Derek Sivers: Actions, not words, reveal our real values
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Om Sahana Vavatu
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Larry Legend Dailies
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Annie Ernaux on Grocery stores and so much more
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Milkman by Anna Burns
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Summer of our Discontent - Thomas Chatterton Williams
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Joseph Henrich on mentalizing and God
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Notes from Adam Phillips talk
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Sabrina Orah Mark story "Are you my mother?"
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From Rambam - Laws Concerning Character Traits
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No fixing, no advising, no saving
-
Quote from the Urbi et Orbi 2020, Pope Francis
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Freud letter to Goetz Excerpt
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Neither despairing nor defensive
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Tyler Cowen on compound personal growth
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On making something of oneself - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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Attention and Will - Simone Weil
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Two more by Kay Ryan
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New book forthcoming from Craig Morgan Teicher
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new Julian lage
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Ted Chiang and others on AI in writing
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We are making images for others that we ourselves can't see.
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Sturgeon's Law
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List of Cognitive Biases
-
Kay Ryan - The Long Up
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Fintan O'Toole on the use of poetry in post Troubles Northern Ireland
-
Quote from a meditation teacher many years ago
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Poem by Charles Simic
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'Everyman is convinced of the one thing he happened by chance to learn.'
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Music for Furniture
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"Perfect joy is to be without joy. Perfect praise is to be without praise."
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Big Thief 'Not'
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Finally poem Rae Armantrout
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Phillips on frustration and addiction
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“greed is despair about pleasure“
-
Aristotle
-
Bonny Light Horseman
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Dean Young Interview
-
Poem by Nico Amador - LARB
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Russell Edson on the prose poem
-
Sabrina Orah Mark Quote
-
Larry Legend Ambient tunes
-
Neruda- Oda a la pereza (in English and Spanish)
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Adam Phillips on giving up prologue
-
The computer poetry of J. M. Coetzee
-
Adam Phillips on giving up podcast II
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Perfect Days
-
Essay by Karl Ove Knausgaard on the Digital World
-
Marion Milner
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Amina Cain on writing
-
The Antilibrary - Umberto Eco + Nassim Nicholas Taleb
-
Adam Phillips on giving up podcast
-
Marion Milner, a life of one’s own
-
Indelicacy by Amina Cain
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Mark Kissler On Attention
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Mandaeans by Eliot Weinberger
-
Ben Lerner on teaching
-
Kevin Kelly on Cognition
-
Thomas Chatterton Williams with Roger Berkowitz
-
Labatut On Fiction - Louisiana Channel