… ironically enough, little cause for chagrin: Concerning Developments – Lingua Franca - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education.
… but why privilege writers? The Real Reason Writers Love the Amtrak Residence — It's not just the free train ticket.
Writers are hardly the only people who do work on the train. Why not gives a fare break, too, from time to time?
… the scowl behind the leer: The Dark Psychology of Being a Good Comedian.
Great thinkers have been trying for centuries to figure out the evolutionary purpose of comedy.
They have? Even before Darwin? The difficulty of arriving at an intellectual formulation of humor derives, I think, from how its mystery so nicely corresponds to the mystery of being, leading me to suspect that God is a comedian. Richard Dawkins, for example, may eventually find himself the butt of a grand cosmic joke.
… faith in practice: The Secret Auden.
He was disgusted by his early fame because he saw the mixed motives behind his image of public virtue, the gratification he felt in being idolized and admired. He felt degraded when asked to pronounce on political and moral issues about which, he reminded himself, artists had no special insight. Far from imagining that artists were superior to anyone else, he had seen in himself that artists have their own special temptations toward power and cruelty and their own special skills at masking their impulses from themselves.
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