drmstream[writing]

Each place you go, don’t look for the thing that is dif­fer­ent. Look for the thing that is the same. That is your start­ing point, the anchor. I can share the expe­ri­ence. We aren’t alone. But we can’t find each other inside all the noise. We have to look out into the quiet, strip the […]

Do you have things that you think you remem­ber, that you should remem­ber, but that you don’t really know? When you open your­self to these images, they hang imma­te­r­ial and allur­ing. Sci­ence has taught us that when we imag­ine remem­ber or dream of doing some­thing, or see­ing a thing or hear­ing a sound, mir­ror neurons […]

Art can­not shake off its mag­i­cal ante­cedants, nor can it be sealed off from tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion. The Dialec­tic of Enlight­en­ment, Horkheimer & Adorno

Some pho­tographs do us the favor of stop­ping us in a place. Look into this old barn. You couldn’t stand in front of it long enough in real life. Your legs would start to hurt, your mind would walk away, you would have places to go. It isn’t that your life is too hur­ried or that […]

In fact you develop your own unique voice by immers­ing your­self in the work of oth­ers. Intro­spec­tion is unbe­liev­ably over­rated. Projects and plans come from con­ver­sa­tions with other thinkers, not through con­tem­pla­tion of your own spe­cial snowflake­dom. Some­one really smart writes some­thing. Your read­ing and note tak­ing is your response.Yes: read­ing is a way of […]

Eru­dite and thickly-written essay in The Chron­i­cle Of Higher Edu­ca­tion by David Barash speak­ing to the need of “a gen­eral the­ory of indi­vid­u­al­ity.” It’s back to the the­ory of self for us. In part, the resis­tance encoun­tered by human socio­bi­ol­ogy, Dar­win­ian psy­chol­ogy, evo­lu­tion­ary psychology—call it what you will—may reflect that none of the “ulti­mate” inter­pre­ta­tions thus […]

Being good at being a human is like get­ting cer­ti­fied to fly with instru­ments:  it takes hours of train­ing and we rarely get it right the first time. In a blog post last fall, anthro­pol­o­gist Melvin Kon­ner wrote his excite­ment about the new sci­ence devel­op­ing that would influ­ence the study of the human con­di­tion. He framed […]

A Japan­ese poet once wrote that there is no util­ity in metaphor, that in the mod­ern world the only valu­able expres­sion is of words that are spe­cific to one thing. This is lan­guage as the table of exis­ten­tial ele­ments: when used pre­cisely, words make an objec­tive real­ity that we can use to breach the gaps between […]

Fre­quent and sub­stan­tial con­ver­sa­tions with oth­ers cre­ates a sense of well-being, accord­ing to a psy­chol­ogy study reported in Sci­ence Daily this morn­ing. Greater well-being was related to spend­ing less time alone and more time talk­ing to oth­ers: The hap­pi­est par­tic­i­pants spent 25% less time alone and 70% more time talk­ing than the unhap­pi­est par­tic­i­pants. In […]

You are read­ing this on a device pow­ered by a micro-processor, ren­dered by photo-electric diodes, built from bits and bytes. You are pro­cess­ing the sig­ni­fier of each let­ter in its encoded mean­ing through each word, and cumu­la­tively, through the com­bi­na­tion of words that appear on the screen. The con­tract between you and I is that […]