“A stranger hurrying as fast as he could over the icy sidewalks looked in. He saw a circle of singing people bathed in the clean white light from a tree, and his heart did a somersault, and the image stayed with him; it merged with him even as he came home to his own children, […]
“Hunger is the best seasoning.” ––The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, loc. 939 “We don’t have much time. Because our mind predisposes us to think of trends as linear, we often fail to grasp the urgency of the situation. The demand we place on the planet grows, like our economies, not linearly […]
“Our way of conducting business has outgrown our planet. Our organizations contribute on a massive scale to depleting natural resources, destroying ecosystems, changing the climate, exhausting water reserves and precious topsoils. We are playing a game a brinksmanship with the future, betting that more technology will heal the scars modernity has inflicted on the planet. […]
Two hundred or so pages in, I had high hopes for David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. The novel grabbed me right from the start, showing all the signs of another brilliant yarn from one of the UK’s most talented living authors. Mitchell has a unique gift for inhabiting the minds of different narrators, and for […]
“Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the […]
Joseph J. Romm’s Language Intelligence gives a brief survey of Western rhetoric, tossing classic figures like Jesus and Shakespeare together with contemporaries like George W. Bush and Lady Gaga. The book is designed to help writers “become more persuasive, more memorable, and harder to manipulate” (vii). While I think Romm achieves this to an extent, […]
Bernie Sanders’s bid for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination has been an inspiration to progressives across America. As the only genuine alternative to the pseudo-liberal policies of Hillary Clinton, Bernie speaks openly about the scourge of socioeconomic inequality, big money’s influence in politics, the threat of climate change, the excesses of Wall Street, corporate oligarchy, racial […]
“We are the fat. You and I are the fat in the fire. We haven’t got the chance of a snowball in hell.” ––Ulysses, by James Joyce, pg. 132 “Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop […]
“Life is so uncertain: you never know what could happen. One way to deal with that is to keep your pajamas washed.” ––1Q84, by Haruki Murakami, pg. 474 “What would the new countervailing power seek to accomplish? As a first step, it would reform the nation’s system of campaign finance in order to get […]
This is my fiftieth journal, which feels like an appropriate time to reflect on the origins of the words&dirt blog. When I began this project more than two years ago, I wanted to develop ideas about a way of life that was experimental for me. I wanted to step outside the traditional channels of education […]