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Adam Savage on the Internet: “The internet is far from fulfilling its promise to be the compendium of all human knowledge, it’s more like the outline or the index. But where it shines is in giving people all over the planet the ability to find a peer group of enthusiasts with which to share their…
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I’m reading E.B. White’s Writings from The New Yorker, 1927-1976, edited by Rebecca M. Dale. First, I’ll read the introduction by Dale. Rebecca Dale worked on an independent study project at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1988, where she read all of E.B. White’s New Yorker work. This book is a result of collecting many pieces…
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Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on Why They Wrote Deep Space and Sacred Time: “…we were faced with the universal parental problem of how passively we should admit media fantasies into our family’s cultural life.” At family dinners, they’d find themselves disassembling favorite television shows “to see how they ‘work’ both as pleasure-giving entertainment and…
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I’m digging into Culture Crash, the killing of the creative class, by the late Scott Timberg. One of his early points: We are often caught in the shockwave of current events, if we are so unfortunate to be caught in the wake of their aftermath. This is why I’ve made the conscious choice to remain…
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I never got past more than a few chapters of this book, but the notes I took on the preface (written by Saul Bellow) and the first three or four chapters are extensive enough that it seems worth sharing them. … From the Foreword Written by Saul Bellow: On Academics : “Academics, even those describing…
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I love how Dana envisions the “common reader” — not the “incurious mass audience of the popular media” but rather “the idea of the general reader envisioned by Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf felt the vitality of literature depended — the intelligent, engaged non-specialist.” The first essay is the titular piece. It begins “American poetry…
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On Strawberries: “In material fact, Strawberries belong only to themselves. The exchange relationships we choose determine whether we share them as a common gift or sell them as a private commodity. A great deal rests on that choice. For the greater part of human history, and in places in the world today, common resources were…
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This isn’t Carl Sagan’s best book, but it was his last, and it has plenty of good stuff to say. … Chapter 5 is about “Four Cosmic Questions” 1st cosmic question: “Was there ever life on Mars?” 2nd cosmic question: “Is Titan a laboratory for the origins of life?” 3rd cosmic question: “Is there intelligent…
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Bertrand Russell on Common Words and Proper Names: “Common words, even proper names, are usually really descriptions. That is to say, the thought in the mind of a person using a proper name correctly can generally only be expressed explicitly if we replace the proper name by a description.” See, there really is something in…
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With “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Neil Postman has written the kind of book where every couple sentences you stop and think. I could literally study this book one or two sentences at a time. These are the kinds of books that I want to write. I’m sure I’ve said this before, but I will say…
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Once in my young adulthood, I managed a list of blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels which covered Magic the Gathering. The list became more work than it was worth, and in 2026, it seems such a list isn’t even worth maintaining. But, it turns out, there are still plenty of blogs when it comes to…
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My first foray into taking a term and adding the current year to it yields some interesting results, although it seems NotebookLM focused on the term “umwelt” instead. Still then, it’s worth looking at what it found for me. The sources it found revolve around an exploration of “the evolving role of the organism as…
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I decided to query NotebookLM with the question “how intellectual joy can be a form of self care.” I got the idea from a Prose and Petticoats video on Emelie Du Chatelet, and it was a comment that Emmelie Arents made as an observation of Emelie’s work. There are a lot of great sources on…
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From Anthony Veasna So, “baby yeah” Brilliant writer who “accidentally” overdosed in 2020. “My friend and I saw each other as hopeless writers, misunderstood prophets, critics of our cultural moment who rejected obvious and reductive politics. We never indulged in ordinary pursuits because we yearned to write masterpieces, timeless works infused with nihilistic joy and…
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An exceptionally interesting passage from “The Gamble” by Liza Mounzer: “…he was a great believer in the future. For himself and the world at large. It was the promised land where everything we’d ever wanted would come to be. It was his favorite tense. When we are; we will; we’ll have; you’ll see. I used…
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“Obviously I don’t know where ideas come from, but I do believe everyone has a unique vision. Given the freedom to create, everybody is creative. All of us have an innate, instinctive desire to change our environment, to put our original stamp on this world, to tell a story never told before. I’m absolutely thrilled…
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Welcome to my digital commonplace book, where I save things that I find interesting, and you might too! Obscure Curiosites has struggled to find an identity, but I think this is its final form. Enjoy the random nonsense that I for some reason thought worth putting up here! All of the previous content, outside of…
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Anna of Wild Geese had a great video on the subject of creative impulsivity. One big thing Anna brought up is this toxic mindset of treating our ideas as scarce resources. We keep the ‘best’ for some other time. Thus, we don’t act on our ideas freely enough. Well, I definitely have zero reason to…
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December 2, 2025 I logged onto my Sublime app today, and in the Staff Picks was this: Warren Buffett said goodbye in his annual letter. This is what he had to say, “One perhaps self-serving observation. I’m happy to say I feel better about the second half of my life than the first. My advice:…
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“For when too large a proportion of the populace is supporting itself by the indirections of trade and business and commerce and art and the million schemes of men in cities, then the complexity of society is likely to become so great as to destroy its equilibrium, and it will always be out of balance…