The process of self-diminishment

“Still, accomplishment is unreliable. ‘Succeeding,’ whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that ‘succeeding’ will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

So, quick, end-of-speech advice: Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf — seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things — travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes…– but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial. That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality — your soul, if you will — is as bright and shining as any that has ever been.”

—George Saunders

Mo Data, Mo Problems

I love this.

“The first thing to note is that although big data is very good at detecting correlations, especially subtle correlations that an analysis of smaller data sets might miss, it never tells us which correlations are meaningful. A big data analysis might reveal, for instance, that from 2006 to 2011 the United States murder rate was well correlated with the market share of Internet Explorer: Both went down sharply. But it’s hard to imagine there is any causal relationship between the two. Likewise, from 1998 to 2007 the number of new cases of autism diagnosed was extremely well correlated with sales of organic food (both went up sharply), but identifying the correlation won’t by itself tell us whether diet has anything to do with autism.”

NYTimes Trend Story: Amazon Book Editors Love Bookstores

“Maybe it’s an effect of living your life online — that you also want these physical things,” he said.

As a former Amazon book editor, married to another Amazon book editor, I can verify: We love books. Made of paper. On shelves all over our house.

What we’ve lost are the unbeautiful books—the trade paper sci-if, the cheap vacation reads, the business guides, the junky nonfiction. Those are consumed by us, in lines or on airplanes, and are one less thing to sell at Powell’s. But the beautiful books and the practical books—ones we visit over and over—remain in our lives.

Funny to think that this is a surprise to the New York Times—that you can love the digital and the tangible all at once.

“

Consider the archetypal monuments of certain cities, the buildings that seem to give clues to their souls. Think of the association of Paris with Notre Dame Cathedral or the Eiffel Tower, of London with Big Ben, of New York with the Empire State Building. Amsterdam, at first blush, has no such monument.



People come to Amsterdam to see hundreds of far less extravagant buildings that line its canals: individual homes.



Paris’ grandiosity is to Amsterdam’s canal house cityscape what mythological figures are to ordinary people. Amsterdam relates to who we are today: it is, in a sense, where we began, as modern people who consider individual human beings to be more important than institutions.

”
— Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City