Quotes

The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behavior.

Art is not living. It is a use of living. The artist has the ability to take that living and use it in a certain way, and produce art.

Rather than proposing individual rights of payment or exit, data governance should be envisioned as a project of collective democratic obligation that seeks to secure those of representation instead.

It’s a neural net generated brownie recipe called Chocolate Baked and Serves, and its distinguishing feature is the CUP OF HORSERADISH it contains.

A text should never be read alone ... it is an act in which interpretation forms community"

You must match time’s swiftness with your speed in using it, and you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow…

Art is for realizing dreams

Kirschner and Gerhart developed the idea of interfaces as "constraints that deconstrain": points of fixed functionality that separate modules so that the modules can evolve independently rather than being intertwined.

The pleasure you find in traveling around your room is safe from the restless jealousy of men; it is independent of the fickleness of fortune. After all, is there any person so unhappy, so abandoned, that he doesn’t have a little den into which he can withdraw and hide away from everyone? Nothing more elaborate is needed for the journey.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Last night, I was peeling a cucumber and I was infuriated. Like, why am I peeling this cucumber? Why am I not in a restaurant, where they know how to peel a cucumber, and where I’m not doing it?

I can conceive of no better service in the United States, henceforth, by democrats of thorough and heart-felt faith, than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.

Don’t ask: am I organized enough? Instead, you might ask: Am I shipping work in sufficient quality and quantity to cause the changes I seek to make? If not, what’s stopping me?

An audit trail of their own performance provides an object of study from which students can hone important self-monitoring and other metacognitive strategies

Art is a lie that helps you see the truth

“Writing letters,” Franz Kafka once complained (in a letter) to Milena Jesenská, his Czech translator and the object of his tortured love, “is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing.”

But we have lost the ability to properly disagree. Nearly every political discussion begins and ends as an exercise in cementing or policing group loyalties.

As Bechdel makes self-conscious remarks about what skiing symbolizes within the class system of America, I look back on my own childhood at the foot of a mountain in communist Bulgaria, in a society both classless and crushed. Skiing was just something everyone did, as soon as we could walk. Unlike poetry and the arts, it was one of a handful of truly joyful activities unpoliced by the government, unoppressed by political agendas, perhaps the closest we came to freedom — a kind of subversive freedom of the mind through freedom of the body amid the indomitable grandeur of nature and its supra-human forces.)