flâneur

Alicia Guo

193 followers · 57 following · 10242 views

on the atlas — 260

highlights — 621

  • David Gross writes that “over time moral philosophy shed divine law but tried to keep the virtues. In doing so, it found that this foundation had been pulled out from under them. If moderns continue to talk about virtues in terms of “should” and “ought” without the Christian appendages that those terms could successfully attach to, they’re talking empty nonsense.” As Gross puts it, the question becomes: is there a way to get to moral oughts without divine law?
    Beyond optimization - by Foresight Institute and Ava
  • how is it possible to consent to an experience which has the potential to change what you like and value, thus contradicting the original basis of consent? The ability to consent to renewal of oneself is as futile as it is tantalising, precisely due to the mystery of its outcome.
    Yearnslop is the perversion of everything good about Love
  • Towels feel unappreciated for their
    Cephalopoet
  • You must imagine yourself happy in any number of worlds. There is nothing “higher status” than excelling joyfully at what you do.
    The Old World Is Dying: Advice for 2026 graduates
  • The people who will win are those who can remake themselves again and again: to summit one peak, descend it, and then hike up the next. Know your fallback plans
    The Old World Is Dying: Advice for 2026 graduates
  • I would especially LOVE your input
    Process Note - by Alicia - Upcycled Words
  • When you become a parent, you meet your child. And then you meet your child again. And again, every day after that. You will never stop meeting your child. That is one reason to become a parent: To have a child is to fall in love with a thousand beautiful strangers.
    On Being a Dad - Derek Thompson
  • If you set out to describe a person, you do not begin by listing all the things they do alone, when no one is looking. You describe what that person is like in relation to you, or to someone you know.
    On Being a Dad - Derek Thompson
  • Just because she is she, and I am I, what Johanna values is valuable to me. I might never love gardening the way she does, but to completely shrug it off (or worse, to lose interest in her because she no longer is into the same things as I) would feel like a failure to love. This is what I felt, and I think it is true.
    Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
  • But with your children, the value, to a large extent, flows in the other direction: you might hate soccer, but if your daughter loves it, you will assign it value and will go out of your way to drive her to soccer training and might even watch the World Cup together. Your love of your child is not motivated by something else you value; it is unconditional.
    Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
  • All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind – the culture – has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world’s work. With these we try to save our very lives.
    Total Eclipse - Annie Dillard
  • Giving atten tion to what is working, to what has potential allows a student to continue thinking about that. Spending too much time on what doesn't work leaves the student likely to do the same - a state of mind less likely to generate strong work
    Observations on forms and patterns of critique
  • Gifted teachers can deliver information about the failure of some aspect of a piec e and still leave us excited about continuing our work. We receive the criticism folded up within the strong sense that they wish for us to be successful
    Observations on forms and patterns of critique
  • A mind practiced in finding the flaws in others work will have a hard time not turning on its own creative work. To make a creative response is respecting someone else’s work through close observation of what that work does and of how it is structured.
    Observations on forms and patterns of critique
  • Importing this editing approach into a writing p rogram highlights the failures of a work, but without the larger context of established worthiness. A work has barely emerged and already it is taken apart. This may not be the best way to develop writers.
    Observations on forms and patterns of critique
  • t also guarantees that every student leaves the room having j ust failed. This does something to the student.
    Observations on forms and patterns of critique
  • You should walk away from getting a crit feeling empowered and excited to make the work better, not defeated and miserable from the experience.
    How To Crit / The Purpose of Critique
  • But an idea I enjoy playing with is that a story is a premise that makes you strongly desire to know what happens next, and which continues until that feeling is satisfied23.
    Developing creative identity
  • writing is a mutable, extensible tool that can be used to gradually expand the ways we make sense of the world.
    Developing creative identity
  • Some of the most important works in the history of science and philosophy were in the form of poetry!
    Developing creative identity
  • begins with a fundamental question – how buildings learn – that is not usually taken seriously by architects. And he takes it tremendously seriously,
    Developing creative identity
  • but you look at me like an emergency
    'Trying to Talk to a Man,' Adrienne Rich – @asuddenline on Tumblr
  • The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote that in modern life, there is always a suspicion … that one is living a lie or a mistake; that something crucially important has been overlooked, missed, neglected, left untried and unexplored; that a vital obligation to one’s own authentic self has not been met, or that some chances of unknown happiness completely different from any happiness experienced before have not been taken up in time and are bound to be lost forever.
    Why Happy People Cheat - The Atlantic
  • If you can train yourself to ask “is there a better way to do this?” at random intervals ten times a day, you will become unstoppable.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • Being able to live in the “world as it is,” rather than getting permanently fixated on the “world as it should be,” is a superpower.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • Service is the only thing that makes anything feel better in a real, lasting way. This is because acts of service provide a temporary respite from the inherent cognitive dissonance of living selfishly.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • Writing defensively is a loser’s game. It lets people who won’t like your writing anyway win in advance.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • The most dangerous people have an exquisitely tuned sense of just how much they can get away with when it comes to how they treat different people, so pay special attention when others have sharply diverging experiences of someone’s character. Lots of variance in opinion about whether an idea is good means there’s a good chance the idea is good; lots of variance in opinion about whether a person is good is a warning sign.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • Increasingly, it’s to borrow a particular author’s judgment and worldview.
    32 notes on AI & writing - by Jasmine Sun - @jasmine
  • I also remember how I was always surprised about what Ana had photographed because, sometimes, while I was running from event to event, I would spot a beautiful scene, wishing someone would photograph it and, the next day, when I would see the photos from the previous day, Ana always had captured the exact scene.
    How I Met Ana - by Kristoffer - Naive Weekly
  • What kind of life do you want to build?
    why are we lying to young people about work? - by Maalvika
  • The weaker a city’s broader civic infrastructure, the more vulnerable that city is to the flimflam man
    Marry Your City - by Daniel Golliher - Maximum New York
  • Don’t you want to love the place where you live that much?
    Marry Your City - by Daniel Golliher - Maximum New York
  • These same people want to live in a place and consume it, but leave as soon as it becomes an imposition on them. They want to enjoy the fruits of someone else’s civic effort, but never apply their own. They want to retain optionality, and so forgo the real benefits of stable commitment
    Marry Your City - by Daniel Golliher - Maximum New York
  • Being rootless is a fine life stage, and for very few a way of life, but for many it can become a pathology.
    Marry Your City - by Daniel Golliher - Maximum New York
  • During this period of time I would often wake up in the middle of the night and scream silently. I couldn’t understand why we were unhappy when we were so happy.
    no exit - by Ava - bookbear express
  • This is the paradox of love: we believe we have to be good to deserve it, but being loved can make us good. Being loved by S made me want to be better. I wanted to live up to his kindness, to become the competent, communicative, well-adjusted girl he saw me as. And when I looked at S, I also saw a version of him that he struggled to believe in. We saw the best in each other, and belief itself was enough to make us want to live it.
    no exit - by Ava - bookbear express
  • But S saw something in me I did not see in myself. In seeing it, he made it possible for me to become it.
    no exit - by Ava - bookbear express
  • He taught me that it was possible for me to be known, that I was ordinary and had ordinary needs in the best possible way.
    no exit - by Ava - bookbear express
  • Governance that asks too much of community members will keep them from participating, while asking too little of them might lead them to take the community for granted. How we design the experience of governance will shape the flows of power. Suggest changes Comment
    Notes on Governance Experience Design | Crowdwrite
  • The imperfect, handmade character of websites has been sanded away in favor of efficiency
    Making Space for a Handmade Web | Figma Blog
  • How one moves from “do you like beer” to “do you see what I see?”
    request for social technologies - by Anson Yu
  • There are only two things: love and work. Why don’t we teach love? For a big part of my life, relationship norms were peeled from sub-reddit AMAs and fictional stories, before learning trial by fire.
    request for social technologies - by Anson Yu
  • my 'how to make friendships' tip of the week is to look for shiny people. if they don't shine like a diamond, then don't be their friend. if they're not quite there, take a shining cloth and rub their forehead a little bit. that'll do the trick.
    every substack girl's writing
  • He called it “undiscovered public knowledge.” Swanson showed that standing problems in medical research may be significantly addressed, perhaps even solved, simply by systematically surveying the scientific literature. Left to its own devices, research tends to become more specialized and abstracted from the real-world problems that motivated it and to which it remains relevant. This suggests that such a problem may be tackled effectively not by commissioning more research but by assuming that most or all of the solution can already be found in various scientific journals, waiting to be assemb…
    The Ecstasy of Influence, by Jonathan Lethem
  • Art that matters to us — which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience — is received as a gift is received. Even if we’ve paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us that has nothing to do with the price. The daily commerce of our lives proceeds at its own constant level, but a gift conveys an uncommodifiable surplus of inspiration.
    The Ecstasy of Influence, by Jonathan Lethem
  • The cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange is that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, whereas the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection.
    The Ecstasy of Influence, by Jonathan Lethem
  • In this regard, few of us question the contemporary construction of copyright. It is taken as a law, both in the sense of a universally recognizable moral absolute, like the law against murder, and as naturally inherent in our world, like the law of gravity. In fact, it is neither. Rather, copyright is an ongoing social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in its every incarnation.
    The Ecstasy of Influence, by Jonathan Lethem
  • I’m not alone in having been born backward into an incoherent realm of texts, products, and images, the commercial and cultural environment with which we’ve both supplemented and blotted out our natural world.
    The Ecstasy of Influence, by Jonathan Lethem
  • Heidegger believed that art had the great potential to reveal the “thingness” of objects.
    The Ecstasy of Influence, by Jonathan Lethem