Welcome to Friday,
Here are five things I thought worth sharing this week.
Ignore what they say, watch what they do; Sam Altman edition. At some point, we have to deal with what actually exists and stop relying on one man’s vision of the future as collateral for the problems his work is currently creating.
What Victor Hugo told himself in 1848.
Tracing the origins and expansion of the essay genre, from Montaigne to Hazlitt and Orwell to Gore Vidal.
Why have novelists stopped writing about the economy?
“There are few other libraries in the world where you might open a drawer of photographs marked Gestures, to find thematic folders labelled Fleeing, Flying, Falling, along with Denudation of breast, Grasping the victim’s head, and Garment raised to eyes (Grief). Warburg’s unusual system might not have caught on elsewhere, but it still provides a powerful way for artists, writers and researchers to make unexpected connections and pursue fertile tangents – preceding our world of swiping through hashtags, links and recommended feeds by a century.” “The world’s weirdest library,” the Wartburg Institute, sounds delightfully strange.
Currently reading: The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel
Have a great weekend.
Image: Scene in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Williamson, John. American. circa 1880.
