Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart
It would not be an overstatement to
say that the Internet has changed our lives and work. But this process of
change has just begun. The confluence of the cloud—the ultimate computing
utility—with the connectivity provided by mobile devices and the ubiquity of
them will deliver radical change in many
places. Recently, I sat in a three-day conference on innovation in education.
The most inspiring presentation described how children in undeveloped countries
now access textbooks that sit in the cloud through their cellphones—the most
common form of mobile device. Education in these countries now looks more
advanced than in so-called developed countries
In recent decades, neuroscientists
have discovered that the human brain is even more malleable than was previously
believed, possessing a capacity now known as “neuroplasticity.” In other words,
life experience allows the brain to rewire its neural pathways and synapses.
The question “What does it mean to
be human?” is no longer an exercise for just philosophers and theologians; it
is now a bioethics and engineering issue.
It took human civilization tens of
thousands of years to get to five exabytes of information. Now, according to
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, we create another five exabytes every two
days.
only connect
Facts change all the time. Smoking
has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. Meat used to be good for you, then
bad to eat, then good again; now it’s a matter of opinion. The age at which
women are told to get mammograms has increased. We used to think that the Earth
was the center of the
universe, and our planet has since been demoted. I have no idea any longer
whether red wine is good for me.
When you go down the road of
disorders conferring advantages, of clouds, silver linings, and psychological
consolation prizes, it’s difficult to conceive of a condition that doesn’t pay
off—at least in some form or another. Obsessive-compulsive? You’re never going
to leave the gas on. Paranoid? You’ll never fall afoul of the small print. In
fact, fear and sadness—anxiety and depression—constitute two of the five basic
emotions
that are found universally across
cultures, and that, as such, virtually all of us experience at some point in
our lives. But there’s one group of people who are the exception to the rule,
who don’t experience either—even under the most difficult and trying of circumstances.
Psychopaths.
To a psychopath, you see, there are
no such things as clouds.
I’ve met psychopaths who, far from
devouring society from within, serve, through nerveless poise and hard-as-nails
decision making, to protect and enrich it instead: surgeons, soldiers, spies,
entrepreneurs—dare I say, even lawyers.
Don’t get too cocky. No matter how good you
are. Don’t let them see you coming,” counseled Al Pacino as the head attorney
of a top law firm in the film The Devil’s
Advocate. “That’s the gaff, my friend—make yourself small. Be the hick. The
cripple. The nerd. The leper. The freak. Look at me—I’ve been underestimated
from day one.
The science of optimism, once
scorned as an intellectually suspect province of pep rallies and smiley faces,
is opening a new window on the workings of human consciousness. What it shows
could fuel a revolution in psychology, as the field comes to grips with
accumulating evidence that our brains aren’t just stamped by the past. They are
constantly being shaped by the future.
The future is already here, it’s
just unevenly distributed.
I love originality so much I keep
copying it
This TLS review is an important document for anyone who wants to
understand the poetry emerging in the twenty-first century. Rickward's basic
charge is quite clear: citation,
especially citation that draws on other languages, undermines and destroys the
very essence of poetry, which is (or should be) the expression of personal
emotion—emotion conveyed, of course, in the poem’s own words, invented for this express purpose. The “zigzag of
allusion” thus bodes ill; one’s “magic lantern show”, a term Rickward no doubt
derived from Proust—should not consist of “slides made by others”. A poem, “as
a set of notes” most of them “borrowed” from other texts: such “mere notation”
can only be “the result of an indolence of the imagination”.
Dum Spiro Spero
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