Links to contemporary essays, videos, news items, many written by sociologists, psychologists, neurologists, geneticists and philosophers 🚣🏼♂️🚣🏼♂️☀️🌴🌴🌴
Amazing: a termite track (top) and an ant track (bottom) • each travelling insect is protected by its own column of soldiers, no fights necessary | 📹 via Mehdi Moussaid
Dante Alighieri’s funeral was held in San Francesco Basilica in Ravenna in 1321 • His tomb is located in the annex. The Basilica is built below sea level and at times water floods some areas of it. Fish then swim in, creating a fascinating effect ..
Japan: Intercellular signal transduction during the assembly of slime mould cells • cAMP-sensitive fluorescent probes • signal is transmitted as a spiral wave within the group • amazing • via
@kotapub
Macrophages here are grabbing the broken ends of a blood vessel and sticking them back together | 📷 Liu et al - Immunity 16 | via British Society Immunology
USA: in 1980 Astronaut Buzz Aldrin spoke of the depression he experienced shortly after returning to Earth, after walking on the Moon in 1969.
‘I learned that it was OK to not be perfect all the time.’
BBC Archives
Japan: telepresence robots, draped in caps and gowns, took the place of graduating students at Japan's BBT University commencement • tragic • coronavirus times • via
@zGuz
• April 2020
‘The work of understanding, unlike the urge to know, requires an endless commitment to the activity of thinking;
it requires one to always be ready to begin again.’
In ‘Hannah Arendt’ by
@Samantharhill
📘 2021
‘I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.’
Tom Stoppard
The Real Thing
Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened
@CityLightsBooks
in 1953. In 1956 he decided to publish Ginsberg’s 1956 poem ‘Howl’ and then later challenge its government censorship in court.
📷 c 1957 standing in front of his shop window featuring banned books.
◽️
‘one can never know much about any subject. I would much prefer the following definition: an expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in the subject, and how to avoid them.’
Werner Heisenberg
Being surrounded with unread books may enrich our lives - in the sense that this is a helpful ongoing reminder of all that we do not know ..
The Japanese call the practice tsundoku, believing it provides lasting benefits.
@bigthink
Dec 2022
‘This world is full of conflicts, and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can transcend .. embrace the whole mess .. and that's what I mean by 'Hallelujah’.
Leonard Cohen
Psychotherapy is about slowing things down - so that we may begin to see and understand the patterns that otherwise happen quickly, automatically, without our reflection or awareness.
Jonathan Shedler
Undergoing apoptosis, long mitochondria, red, become circular• then mtDNA, green, escapes (process called mitochondrial herniation) via Kile Lab
@WEHI_research
‘Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well being … I have walked myself into my best thoughts .. I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it ..’
Soren Kierkegaard
✍🏽 to Jette, 1847
‘But physically we are made for travelling on foot, to move at a certain pace, and to see things with intimacy.’
Werner Herzog
In conversation with Paul
@holdengraber
• in
@brickliterary
‘Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anaesthetise themselves.’
Adam Phillips
Penguin Classics editor of Freud
in conversation with Paul
@holdengraber
in the
@parisreview
• Spring 2014
Argentina: 🦅 a cattle rancher saved the life of the Condor in Loncopué after it fell from its nest as a young chick • he cared for the bird, then returned it to the wild • the bird sometimes flies back to visit • hugs ❤️
‘After all these years I have observed that beauty, like happiness, is frequent. A day does not pass when we are not, for an instant, in paradise.’
Jorge Luis Borges
‘Art is the whisper of history heard above the noise of time.’
Julian Barnes
considering creativity in his fictionalised biography of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich
‘It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen .. lightly cope with them’
Aldous Huxley
Quotomania🎙Paul
@holdengraber
‘And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart to get at the things (or the nothings) behind it ..’
Samuel Beckett
To Axel Kaun 1937
🎨 Flora, the ancient Roman goddess of youth, of flowers and of the season of Spring • Roman fresco of Cosiddetta Flora from the Villa di Arianna, in Stabiae near Pompeii, 1st century CE
Know all the theories
Master all the techniques
But as you touch human soul
Be simply another human soul
Carl Jung
(attributed: a popularised version of his original writing in 1928)
‘You came, by chance, into my life of which I was not proud, and from that day something began to change.
I have breathed better, I have hated things less. I have admired more freely what deserved admiration.’
Albert Camus
✍🏽 to Maria Casarès 1949
Neuron migration towards the cortex during brain development • path and speed defined by a radial scaffold of neural stem cells • 🔬📹 from Morgan-Smith et al
@eLife
• 2014
Ancient votive ears were created either as prayers for the healing of a personal ailment, or to act as amplifiers - to help the listening gods hear the prayers of humans | 📷 marble C 4th BCE, Gallery of the Acropolis Slopes, Acropolis, Athens
‘Humanity today is like a waking dreamer; caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world ..
We have created a Star Wars civilization, with stone-age emotions, medieval institutions, and God-like technology.’
Edward O Wilson
The Social Conquest of Earth
‘More than machinery, we need humanity .. More that cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.
Without these qualities: life will be violent, and all will be lost.’
Charlie Chaplin
Final speech in ‘The Great Dictator’, 1940
‘Men believe they are free for the reason that they are aware of their actions, and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.’
Baruch Spinoza
On the Origin and Nature of Affects
Trees can make space for each other at the crowns, yet be so intertwined at the roots that they sometimes die together | C Lariviere | Berlin | April 2020
‘Contradictory thoughts do not try to eliminate one another, but continue side by side, and often combine to form condensation products, as though no contradiction existed.’
Sigmund Freud
The Interpretation of Dreams
‘The task is not to see what has never been seen before, but to think what has never been thought before about what you see every day.’
Erwin Schrödinger
with thanks to
@thePiggsBoson
‘Tenderness .. not simply a need for tenderness, also a need to be tender for the other ... we go back to the root of any relationship, where need and desire meet.’
Roland Barthes
Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain
James Baldwin