Bulletin Board
- Beware, today is the Viking apocalypse (not the NFL team, where the apocalypse has been ongoing)
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- I Pledge Allegiance To The Pledge Of Allegiance (“Much as I love the words, meanings and traditions of our Pledge of Allegiance, I think reciting it at a time and place chosen by others is coercive and goes against the grain of the Pledge’s ultimate assertion, that we live in a nation that is committed to ‘liberty and justice for all.'”)
- In Praise of Disregard (“Rather than a simple and passive acceptance of the things you cannot control, I favor an acceptance and then a subsequent, symbolic deletion of those things.”)
- You’re making your depression worse: Self-help is bringing us down (“Ultimately, the strong cultural imperative toward being happy bumps us up against a wall: our mood system is not configured to deliver an end state of durable euphoria.”)
Arrest of the Week
- A Texas police detective was charged with assault after, among other things, farting in the face of a dispatcher
Bookish Linkage
- Does reading literature make you more moral?
- The ways of a binge reader
- Books get harsher reviews after winning a literary award
- The fate of villains from childrens’ books if they were put on trial
- Bookish Lists: five top books on visiting Mars and five worst books ever written by great authors
Nonbookish Linkage
- Americans tend to express regret, not remorse
- A look at a photographer’s work from Pine Ridge
- How the humanities changed the world
- Is it time to forget the Miracle on Ice?
Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.
Robert J. Sawyer, Calculating God
