flâneur

Siddhartha Srivastava

1 followers · 949 views

on the atlas — 71

highlights — 11

  • Every relationship that fails is the result of either too much intensity and not enough openness or too much passivity and not enough contact. The work of being in a relationship is to navigate the gulf between what we want and what our partner wants. To mediate degrees of closeness and separation. To reach out and make contact. Equally, to open our hearts and let be. A relationship lives and dies by this tenuous balance.
    love, conflict, and opening up your heart in relationships
  • Love is more like a basketball than a crystal vase. This was the insight in a Modern Love essay by Thomas Hooven. A vase looks beautiful and perfect on the outside but breaks when dropped. When you drop a basketball, it bounces back. If you view conflict as a destructive force, you’ll try to avoid it at all costs. But that’s just deferring the problem until it erupts later, with catastrophic consequences, reaffirming your belief that conflict is destructive. When handled well, conflict makes a relationship more resilient.
    love, conflict, and opening up your heart in relationships
  • The second Ulrich, “the less visible of the two”, is “searching for a magic formula, a possible handle to grasp, the real mind of the mind, the missing piece,”
    The torture of an unphilosophical life - UnHerd
  • Thinking hard makes sense if you want answers; it makes less sense if the highest reward you anticipate from your intellectual efforts is surprise. The difference between a philosophical life and an essayistic one is that the former aims at knowledge, while the latter aims at novelty. The characteristic positive response to an essay is: “I hadn’t thought about it that way before”; the essayist’s chief enemy is boredom. Ulrich “always did something other than what he was interested in doing” to ensure his unpredictability, even to himself. The essayist is a responsive, reactive creature, always…
    The torture of an unphilosophical life - UnHerd
  • Essayism is a mode of living whose characteristic expression is a stretch of novel and insightful reflection, “explor[ing] a thing from many sides without encompassing it”. The essayist lives a life of thoughtful observations. Ulrich lives that life, and so does Musil, who is much more interested in filling his novel with thoughtful observations than with any of the usual contrivances of plot or character development.
    The torture of an unphilosophical life - UnHerd
  • I don’t think you have to strain or lie or tie yourself into moral knots to justify being angry at child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. I think this is natural because there’s a part of you - the best part - which cares about suffering and injustice wherever in the world it happens, even in foreign countries, even to poor people who you’ll never meet. I think the straining and lying and knots come in when you try to deny that part and say “Oh, no, who, me? I definitely don’t care about the suffering of the world at all” while hastily burying your heart bursting with wisdom and compassion fo…
    Everyone's A Based Post-Christian Vitalist Until The Grooming Gangs Show Up
  • Also, Jake is poly, and I sometimes wonder if poly people are the only ones qualified to give dating advice: if you’re monogamous, you either met your future spouse quickly (in which case you have no experience), dated for years without meeting your spouse (in which case you can’t be very good), or aren’t looking for a committed relationship at all (which is just pickup artistry, and follows very different dynamics). Poly people are the only ones who can break out of this trilemma!
    Links For January 2025 - by Scott Alexander
  • The reason I’m pressing you on this, Thomas, is that it bears on the future of the left. It seems to me that one of the greatest political vulnerabilities of social democratic parties is that they have allowed the right to monopolize some of the most potent political sentiments, namely patriotism, community and belonging. Immigration is an issue that forces us to ask questions about the moral significance of national borders and, by implication, about the moral significance of nations as communities of mutual dependence and responsibility. My sense is that the future of a left politics will de…
    Opinion | Two of the World’s Leading Thinkers on How the Left Went Astray - The New York Times
  • But Sullivan also has more high-minded reservations. “I think it’s really important that people have access to good information,” she says, adding, “There’s a lot of bad free information.” Hard-earned, fact-checked info that demands deeper investment from reporters and publishers, she notes, “is mostly behind a paywall, and the complete disinformation, propaganda, etc. is free for you to participate in at will, so that’s a big-picture worry I have.” She isn’t the only one worried: For the same reason, Richard Stengel argued in The Atlantic this past spring that publications should put their el…
    How Bad Is Bypassing Paywalls? - The Ringer
  • If the military knew what it was that attacked them, they didn’t say. It was easy to keep secrets in the north. Or it was until 2025, when President Trump, who never had any patience for subtext, decided to get rid of the useful fiction in which Greenland was still an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, and half a million American settlers spread out over the ice.
    There’s someone on the ice - by Sam Kriss
  • Annette Rodriguez was a graduate fellow at the center toward the end of this period. She told me about a Native scholar who gave a job talk wearing a three-piece suit with a distinctively patterned tie. Someone asked him about the pattern, expecting that the design had come from his tribal community. The scholar said it was from Barneys. “He wasn’t going to fuel the fantasies of the white imagination of what an authentic Native person was,” Rodriguez said. “Liz was very happy to do that.”
    A Professor Claimed to Be Native American. Did She Know She Wasn’t? | The New Yorker