Teach the Children About the Cycles
.
…… —on a poem by Gary Snyder in which Snyder is
……… visited by Lew Welsh
Dead Lew comes to Gary in a poem
and tells the thing that must be taught,
he says,
……….. Teach the children about the cycles.
The life cycles. He may as well have said
the universe is a breathing spinning top,
the children should know this,
a cliché is its essence,
what goes around comes around believe it or not;
and
……….. All other cycles, he says,
so as to bring the truth of all turbulence
out and set it on a table turning
to make the why of their dizziness understandable
and clear. Because, Lew goes on to say,
It’s what it’s all about but it’s been forgot,
which keeps us in our fears and burnings
and our fables while at the center,
at its hub, everything is still. This is
what they should be learning
Jim Culleny
3/6/18

I just read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations for the first time. Not every word. It’s over a thousand pages, and there are long “Digressions” (Smith’s term) on matters such as the history of the value of silver, or banking in Amsterdam, which I simply passed over. I was mainly interested in what Smith has to say about work, so I also merely skimmed some other sections that seemed to have little relevance to my research. Time and again, though, I found myself getting sucked into chapters unrelated to my concerns simply because the topics discussed are so interesting, and what Smith has to say is so thought-provoking. Reading the book is also made easier both by Smith’s admirably lucid writing and by the brief summaries of the main claims being made that he inserts throughout at the left-hand margin.


About 75 percent of Americans
Pinker does get a lot of press, though most-covered doesn’t always mean most-loved. While Enlightenment Now received ecstatic blurbs — Bill Gates called it his “favorite book of all time” — other assessments were less kind. A New York Times reviewer panned it as “disdainful and condescending — sympathetic to humanity in the abstract but impervious to the suffering of actual human beings.” The dismissive term
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I approached
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Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘
On a warm summer evening, a visitor to 1920s Göttingen, Germany, might have heard the hubbub of a party from an apartment on Friedländer Way. A glimpse through the window would reveal a gathering of scholars. The wine would be flowing and the air buzzing with conversations centered on mathematical problems of the day. The eavesdropper might eventually pick up a woman’s laugh cutting through the din: the hostess, Emmy Noether, a creative genius of mathematics.
I’ve of course been following the recent public debate about whether to build a circular collider to succeed the LHC—notably including
I