The act of making your log-file public requires a rigor that keeping personal notes does not. Writing for a notional audience — particularly an audience of strangers — demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself. I am much better at kidding myself my ability to interpret my notes at a later date than I am at convincing myself that anyone else will be able to make heads or tails of them. Writing for an audience keeps me honest.

There’s a version of the “why writers should blog” story that is tawdry and mercenary: “Blog,” the story goes, “and you will build a brand and a platform that you can use to promote your work.” Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is bullshit, and that one is no exception.

Sidney Redlitch: Ring the bell, close the book, quench the candle. That's how they used to excorcise them.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who once championed the fall of Roe v. Wade and said, “Pregnancy is not a life-threatening illness,” is now avoiding the topic amid a battle to keep his seat.

Everything Is A Conspiracy Theory When You Don’t Bother To Educate Yourself

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” ― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

That's a Royale with keys.

To write is to learn.1

Engagingwith the slip box should feel exciting, not anxiety-producing.

“e mind is for having ideas,not holding them.”7 Taken from David Allen’s seminal text on productivity,Getting ings Done, this idea, above all others, binds lawyers to Luddites,helping thousands who struggle to put ideas into action.

Soderbeck tells us about a recent job that took 40 hours to complete. He ended up charging the customer just $50.

"Business went right to nothing, hardly," he remembers. "As soon as that computer hit the price of under $2,000, that was the end of the typewriter business—80% of the business was gone in three years. When I started there was 27 little shops like this in the Twin Cities, and there was 47 before that."

The Abbreviations and Marks needbe clear only to tJic Writer himself.

s we have often said before, paper is so cheap thatthere is no need for such economy.

Interest is required especially in the Beginning,

as Vigour, but the two generally go hand in hand.

whether you are Writing or Speaking, the generalprinciple to remember is that you must appeal, innearly everything you say, to the very stupidest peoplepossible.

whoever it may be, if he does his workwelly then that work will look very easy.

the sound of progress right 1:39 there

On October 20, 1949 the Hollywood columnist Erskine Johnson published the tale. This is the earliest instance located by QI:[1] 1949 October 20, Dunkirk Evening Observer, In Hollywood by Erskine Johnson, Page 22, Column 5, Dunkirk, New York. (NewspaperArchive) Groucho Marx’s letter of resignation to the Friars’ Club: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”

“He was the first person I knew who had his own personal copying machine,” she said. “He was terrified of losing things, so he often made a lot of copies.”

Also, have to say I love that green colour with the white topped keys, and I see you have both the upper case comma and the mighty uppercase period! Always feels better to end a sentence with an upper case period!

A book is a complete discrete object, cut to fit and shaped for engaging reading, but thousands upon thousands of loose pages in their archival boxes constitute something else: a relay baton handed off to the future.

I suggest to Caro that it’s become one of those things young New Yorkers do, or at least say they do, on the path to becoming a serious adult: Get a Met membership, figure out where Film Forum is, buy (and maybe even finish) The Power Broker.

This particular shed was a floor sample, bought because he wanted it delivered right away. The business’s owner demurred. “So I said the following thing, which is always the magic words with people who work: ‘I can’t lose the days.’ She gets up, sort of pads back around the corner, and I hear her calling someone … and she comes back and she says, ‘You can have it tomorrow.’”

Well, I pawned my Smith CoronaAnd I went to meet my manHe hangs out down on Alvarado StreetBy the Pioneer Chicken stand

Michael: Pam, I have ideas on a daily basis. I know I do. I have a clear memory of telling people my ideas. Um, is there any chance you wrote any of my ideas down? In a folder? A "Michael-idea" folder?Pam: Sorry.Michael: That's unfortunate. How 'bout the suggestion box? There's tons of ideas in there.

“Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs. I swear I checked this three times. Even I couldn’t believe it. What’s the score? Democrats 50, Republicans 1,” Clinton told the audience at the United Center in Chicago.

This has been an ongoing "philosophers stone" in the repair community for a long time. Hard platens are the result of the rubber losing its moisture, there's virtually no way to fix that long term. Brake fluid, rubber renew, even the wintergreen oil trick only temporarily soften platens/feeds. They will absolutely go back to their former state after a time. (1-2 months) You can sand the exterior and clean with organic solvents to restore grip and improve the original platen, but recovery is really the only long term fix. *There's a ton of back and forth about the sanding method, particularly from the old timers being salty about it. But I have seen HUNDREDS of old platens in machines that have absolutely been sanded by repair folks back in the day, so there's definitely value in the process.

CHINESE AMBASSADOR Exactly. But you have always taught us that liberty is the same thing as capitalism, as if life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness cannot be crushed by greed. Your American dream is financial, not ethical.

“There is a tide in the affairs of menWhich, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;Omitted, all the voyage of their lifeIs bound in shallows and in miseries.On such a full sea are we now afloat;And we must take the current when it serves,Or lose our ventures.” ― William Shakespeare , Julius Caesar

For twenty ve years, my relationship to writing was equal parts loveand loathing.

The typewriter is a Corona made in 1926.  I came across it in a yard sale and, having no real use for an old typewriter, I bought it anyway!

“Man is a Tool-using Animal (Handthierendes Thier). Weakin himself, and of small stature, he stands on a basis, at mostfor the flattest-soled, of some half square-foot, insecurelyenough; has to straddle out his legs, lest the very windsupplant him. Feeblest of bipeds! Three quintals are acrushing load for him; the Steer of the meadow tosses himaloft, like a waste rag. Nevertheless he can use Tools, candevise Tools: with these the granite mountain melts intolight dust before him; he kneads glowing iron, as if it weresoft paste; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire hisunwearying steeds. Nowhere do you find him without Tools;without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.”

Eric Liu, “democracy works only if enough people believe it works.”

nostalgia and history are not interchangeable.

Glenn Horowitz, a rare-book dealer who handled the auction for Mr. McCarthy, told The New York Times earlier this week: “When I grasped that some of the most complex, almost otherworldly fiction of the postwar era was composed on such a simple, functional, frail-looking machine, it conferred a sort of talismanic quality to Cormac’s typewriter. It’s as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife.”

Remember, a writer writes, always.

The trees with deep roots are the ones that grow tall. — Frédéric Mistral

"The factory cannot only look at the profit index. It must distribute wealth, culture, services, democracy. I think factory for man, not man for factory, right? The divisions between capital and labour, industry and agriculture, production and culture must be overcome. Sometimes, when I work late I see the lights of the workers working double shifts, the clerks, the engineers, and I feel like going to pay my respects." —Adriano Olivetti

he redefines collec-tivism as the handmaiden of individ-ualism;

The keys beingattached to the type bars and working inunison with the carriage movement enabledus for the first time to test the work ofprinting words and sentences. We werethen in the midst of an exciting politicalcampaign, and it was then for the first timethat the well known sentence was inaugu-rated,—"*Now is the time for all good mento come to the aid of the party;” also theopening sentence of the Declaration of In-dependence, ““When in the course of humanevents,” etc., which sentences were repeat-ed many times in order to test the speed ofthe machine.

I have been describing the actions of themachine in some of its worst moods. Butdon’t imagine for a moment that this was acontinuous affair. There were times wheneverything worked beautifully, and _ thespeed that could be gotten out of it at suchtimes was something marvelous, especiallywhen we got onto that familiar centence,“Now is the time for all good men to cometo the aid of the party.”

As a ‘form of inquiry’, Samuel wrote in the LRB of 14 June 1990, history is a ‘journey into the unknown’.

The social investigator Charles Booth thought they were ‘lenient judges of the frailties that are not sins, and of the disorder that is not crime’.

Each thought or reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was attributed and subheaded under a theme. Then the notes were filed in groups. Scholarly prestidigitation allowed the pages to be constantly reshuffled so that new combinations of ideas appeared, presuppositions might be overturned and surprising connections thereby generated ... All that was needed was reams of rough paper, scissors and a pot of glue, phalanxes of lever-arch files, and a hole-puncher.

Someone whose true identity is a gamer doesn’t have difficulty trolling people online, having a doomer mindset, and ruining their health in front of a screen for 8-10 hours a day.

Heraclitus (“?? ????? ??? ??? ????? ?????,” goes a line attributed to him, “Everything flows, nothing stands still.”

To Martin a liberal education meant “the kind of education which setsthe mind free from the servitude of the crowd and from vulgar self-interests.”

In his 1926 work, The Meaning of a Liberal Education, heargued that education’s task is to “reorient the individual, to enablehim to take a richer and more significant view of his experiences, toplace him above and not within the system of his beliefs and ideals.”

(Habermas called books “the bourgeois means of educationpar excellence”).19

I don't collect them. They follow me home in small groups of 2 or 3...

However, the two additions I’ve made to the collection (what is the collective noun? A carriage of typewriters, perhaps?), have both been a bit special in their own way and both have taught me something new.

“I’m actually not surprised,” Mr. Caro said, when told of the typewriter renaissance. The tangible pleasures of typewriters are something he’s known about for decades. “One reason I type is it simply makes me feel closer to my words,” Mr. Caro said. “It’s like being a cabinetmaker. It’s like laying down the planks. This is the way it’s supposed to feel.”

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”

Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith used a version of this quote by 1949. In April of that year the influential and widely syndicated newspaper columnist Walter Winchell wrote. Boldface has been added to excerpts:[1]1949 April 06, Naugatuck Daily News, Walter Winchell In New York, Page 4, Column 5, Naugatuck, Connecticut. (NewspaperArchive) Red Smith was asked if turning out a daily column wasn’t quite a chore. …”Why, no,” dead-panned Red. “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”

¹¹ For you al-ways have the poor with you, but you will notalways have me.

“When I was 9 or 10,” he told The Times in 2017, “my grandmother gave me a six-volume collection of books by Robert Louis Stevenson, which inspired me to start writing stories that began with scintillating sentences like this one: ‘In the year of our Lord 1751, I found myself staggering around blindly in a raging snowstorm, trying to make my way back to my ancestral home.’”

He eschewed computers, often writing by fountain pen in his beloved notebooks.“Keyboards have always intimidated me,” he told The Paris Review in 2003.“A pen is a much more primitive instrument,” he said. “You feel that the words are coming out of your body, and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.”He would then turn to his vintage Olympia typewriter to type his handwritten manuscripts. He immortalized the trusty machine in his 2002 book “The Story of My Typewriter,” with illustrations by the painter Sam Messer.

“I’ve always wanted to write what to me is beautiful, true, and good, but I’m also interested in inventing new ways to tell stories. I wanted to turn everything inside out.”

“The crux of the issue is we’re thinking about the focus on encampment closure without access to housing,” said Charley Willison, a Cornell professor who has studied the influence of police on cities’ homelessness policies.

Saul Alinsky writes that “the action is in the reaction.”

Typewriters make me a more fo-cused and disciplined writer. Theydon’t forgive. It’s like fi ring a gunwith every stroke. You can’t retractthe bullet. If you misspell, the type-writer won’t correct it for you. Youhave to plow on.

They also last so long. Andy Rooney, whose typewriter I have, wrote a piece about his typewriter. He said he had six computers, and they’re obsolete on purpose. He said, “I’ve had one typewriter and I put another ribbon in and it’s good for another 25 years.”

I laughed in your face and said"You're not Dylan Thomas, I'm not Patti Smith

You left your typewriter at my apartmentStraight from the tortured poets departmentI think some things I never sayLike, "Who uses typewriters anyway?"

Forrester: No thinking - that comes later. You must write your first draft with your heart. You rewrite with your head. The first key to writing is... to write, not to think!

Wood was quoted in this period as stating, "All the good ideas I've ever had came to me while I was milking a cow."[1]

It's like re-suming an interrupted conversationwith the advantage of being able topick up where you left off.And that is exactly what readinga book should be: a conversation be-tween you and the author.

Full owner-ship comes only when you have madeit a part of yourself, and the best wayto make yourself a part of it is bywriting in it.

When people ask Ruefle why she wastes time with the erasures, she has one of the greatest responses I’ve ever heard: “Because it’s fun and I love it. That’s why.”

Make those judgments for your communities, instance by instance, not by network or software. Those sledgehammers are too big and unweildy.

Old graybeards like me still cling to the web, idolizing Yahoo Pipes and posting faux thinkpieces to our tiny blogs.

he province of archeology, a fictional archeologist once said, is the search for facts, not truth.

[Steve Jobs]: If you sort of dig beneath the surface,one of the real successes of the Lisa programwas creating an environment where all these crazy people that could reallybe very, very successful.And I guess that's one of the things that Apple's done best.

Katherine Hayhoe, author of “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World,” serves as Chief Scientist for the Nature Conservancy and is a distinguished professor at Texas Tech. You might expect that she would be considered a legitimate authority on the subject. p span[style*="font-size"] { line-height: 1.6; } But in the Meta-verse, where it seems virtually impossible to connect with a human being associated with the administration of the platform, rules are rules, and it appears they would prefer to suppress anything that might prove problematic for them. p span[style*="font-size"] { line-height: 1.6; } Hayhoe expressed her personal frustration in a recent post on Facebook. p span[style*="font-size"] { line-height: 1.6; } “Since August 2018, Facebook has limited the visibility of my page,” she writes, “labelling it as ‘political’ because I talk about climate change and clean energy. This change drastically reduced my post views from hundreds to just tens, and the page’s growth has been stagnant ever since.” p span[style*="font-size"] { line-height: 1.6; } The implications of such policies for our democracy are alarming. Why should corporate entities be able to dictate what type of speech or content is acceptable?

ur materials naturally fall into two classes,Materials Camples and literature; they represent oneand the same thing— commodities, the one inconcrete form and the other in abstract form. One is thecommodity and the other describes it.

Our individuality is our greatest asset.

Yet it is doubtful whether since theintroduction of the typewriter there has been an invention so beneficialto modern business as the card-index system.

The progress of the card system in England has•undoubtedly been very slow; a fact which may be due primarilyto the constitutional conservatism of English business men, althoughprobably it is partly accounted for by the natural irritation and reaction•caused by the hustling but not always tactful enthusiasm of the manyAmerican salesmen who for several years past have been its principalmissionaries.

The measure of control is also the measure of responsibility. Respon-sibility without control is a hopeless proposition.

System without consistency is an impossibility. 356But let us realise what a difficult matter it is tobe consistent. We are surrounded by changes and inconsistencieseverywhere. Language above all, which we must needs constantlyuse, is not a perfect instrument for giving expression to consistency.We may have our rules all nicely worded and filed in the key cabinet,but if we have not taken the greatest pains in constructing them,if we have not subjected each one to the most searching criticismbefore they are applied, v/e shall find sooner or later that in one

To run a system effectively, we must be prepared 355Servant to uphold it ourselves, we must give the examplein effective work, we must be the first to submitto it although we supply the directing energy to run it. If we thinkourselves above our own system, then it has already ceased to exist.We must bear in mind therefore that any rules we may make, anyinstructions we may give, any supervision we may effect, applyto ourselves equally with others. We may be the masters of thesystem, we are also its servants, but for all that we need not beslaves to it.

‘speak truth to power,’

A NorthCarolina proprietor, John Colleton, observed in Barbados that poor whiteswere called “white slaves” by black slaves; it struck him that the samecontempt for white field hands prevailed in the southern colonies in NorthAmerica.47

Many contemporaries connected slavery to English idleness. WilliamByrd weighed in on the ban against slavery in Georgia in a letter to aGeorgia trustee. He saw how slavery had sparked discontent among poorwhites in Virginia, who routinely refused to “dirty their hands with Labourof any kind,” preferring to steal or starve rather than work in the fields.Slavery ruined the “industry of our White People,” he confessed, for theysaw a “Rank of Poor Creatures below them,” and detested the thought ofwork out of a perverse pride, lest they might “look like slaves.”

He marveled at how the SouthCarolinians deluded themselves in believing they were safe, burdened asthey were with a large slave population—“stupid security,” he called it.

According to Francis Moore, who visited the settlement in its secondyear of operation, two “peculiar” customs stood out: both alcohol and dark-skinned people were prohibited. “No slavery is allowed, nor negroes,”Moore wrote. As a sanctuary for “free white people,” Georgia “would notpermit slaves, for slaves starve the poor laborer.” Free labor encouragedpoor white men in sober cultivation and steeled them in the event they hadto defend the land from outside aggression. It also promised to cure settlersof that most deadly of English diseases, idleness.41

Likewise, we “trusted the process,” but the process didn’t save Toy Story 2 either. “Trust theProcess” had morphed into “Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us.” It gave ussolace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in theend, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy.

quote from Schopenhauer’s essay, ‘How to think for oneself’, §268:“the most beautiful thought, if not written down, is in danger of being irretrievably forgotten.”It’s from the passage where he observes that Lichtenberg thought for himself in both senses of the phrase, unlike Herder.The original essay, “Selbstdenken” was part of Schopenhauer’s book Parerga und Paralipomena II. Last authorised edition, Erstausgabe Berlin, A. W. Hayn 1851, online textLooks like Povarnin was a Schopenhauer fan!

there’s something really magical about the information density of visuals and graphics, which I would argue is based on the fact that humans are deeply embodied in visual creatures before we were linguistic textural creatures. And so it’s kind of pulling on a much richer, kind of higher bandwidth information channel for us.

scholastic learning would favour externaldemonstration over inner revelation, intellectual agility over endlessmeditation.

‘Blessed Lord, which hast caused al holy Scriptures to bee written forour learnyng; graunte us that we maye in such wise heare them,read, marke, learne, and inwardly digeste them.’2

but they left their own belovedmanuscript unclassied and undescribed, and thus it never attainedthe status of a holding, which it so obviously deserved, and wasinstead tacitly understood to be merely a “nding aid,” a piece offurniture, wholly vulnerable to passing predators, subject tojanitorial, rather than curatorial, jurisdiction—even though thiscatalog was, in truth, the one holding that people who entered thebuilding would be likely to have in common, to know how to usefrom childhood, even to love. A new administrator came by onemorning and noticed that there was some old furniture taking upspace that could be devoted to bound volumes of Technicalities, TheElectronic Library, and the Journal of Library Automation. The cardcatalog, for want of having been cataloged itself, was thrown into adumpster.

Together, over the years, they achieved what one of their earlymasters, Charles Ammi Cutter, called a “syndetic” structure—that is,a system of referential links—of remarkable coherency andresolution.

Virginia Woolf described her childhood at 22 Hyde Park Gate: ‘Ourduties were very plain and our pleasures absolutely appropriate.’ Life wasdivided into two spaces – indoors, in a nursery and a book-lined drawingroom, and outdoors, in Kensington Gardens. ‘There were smells and flowersand dead leaves and chestnuts, by which you distinguished the seasons, andeach had innumerable associations, and power to flood the brain in a second.’

a favourite quotation from Auguste Comte, the founder of altruism,‘Man’s only right is to do his duty. The intellect should always be the servantof the heart, and should never be its slave.’

Abba Eban who was an Israeli politician and diplomat. In March 1967 Eban visited Japan, and the New York Times reported on a remark that he made:[1] 1967 March 19, New York Times, “Japan Welcomes Eban Warmly; Her Industry Impresses Israeli” by Robert Trumbull, Page 14, New York. (ProQuest) Commenting that the passage of time offered the best hope of an end to the problems of Israel and her neighbors, he said: “Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.”

As King put it: "Winston Churchill once famously observed that Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else."

Our Western notion of happiness seems to come from the Greeks,who defined it as “the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellencein a life affording them scope.”15

Thoreau also said that we will be “rich in proportion to the numberof things which we can afford to let alone.”

Aristotle opened hisMetaphysics with the simple statement: “All men by nature desire toknow.”

Now, as then, we are creators of new technologies and stars of theimagined future, driven—this time by great financial rewards andglobal competition—despite the clear dangers, hardly evaluating whatit may be like to try to live in a world that is the realistic outcome ofwhat we are creating and imagining.

In November 1945, three months after the atomic bombings,Oppenheimer stood firmly behind the scientific attitude, saying, “It isnot possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge ofthe world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of in-trinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spreadof knowledge and are willing to take the consequences.”

Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has becomeknown as the “gray goo problem.” Though masses of uncon-trolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term “gray goo”emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less in-spiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superiorin an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable.

If, for ex-ample, we were to reengineer ourselves into several separate and unequalspecies using the power of genetic engineering, then we would threatenthe notion of equality that is the very cornerstone of our democracy.

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.