thinking about virtuosity, that point of indeterminacy where the line between effort and effortlessness breaks down. what is shared and what is one's own. precocious children and how effort itself comes hard to them (us). help is always necessary and impossible. you have to want to rule the world before you can serve it. neuroses and how the ego ( Read more... )

and energy. and patience. and, uh, stuff like that.

-- the whole thing with daschle bothers me. it's weird. i mean, i think it was the "right" result, in a nontrivial sense. i just don't like the way it happened, which makes it hard for me to feel right about it. i guess ( Read more... )

this will be completely incomprehensible and improperly justified (if at all). you have been warned.

so i have an extreme--admittedly irrationally disproportionate--dislike for steven pinker. dr. pinker has an article in a semi-recent nytimes magazine--again ever-so-imaginatively titled "my genome, my self" (srsly, nyt editors, have you no shame ( Read more... )