Get out of the conceptual rut that a good life looks one way and a disappointing one looks another.
openmindedness
Charles Murray on the New American Divide – WSJ.com
Places to live in which the people around you have no problems that need cooperative solutions tend to be sterile. America outside the enclaves of the new upper class is still a wonderful place, filled with smart, interesting, entertaining people. If you’re not part of that America, you’ve stripped yourself of much of what makes being American special.
Movies saved my life: A young New Yorker meets foreigners in film—By Tom Engelhardt (Harper’s Magazine)
Unlike most of my peers in the 1950s and early 1960s, I advanced with the U.S. Marines and the Russians, bombed Tokyo and witnessed Hiroshima after it was atomized. I took out Panzers, but for two hours one afternoon was a German boy willing to die as American tanks bore down on him. They confirmed in me a sense that the world was not as we were told, and that ours was not necessarily the most exceptional way of life.
Whatever the subject, a real critic is a cultural critic, always: if your judgment doesn’t bring in more of the world than it shuts out, you shouldn’t start.
Odds are good that you primarily know one sort of person: highly educated, high-achieving, extremely cerebral, etc. Odds are also good that you give too much weight to feedback and ideas from this sort of person, while discounting arguments and complaints from people who don’t know the right way to persuade you. Try to keep that in mind.
Ezra Klein – Common mistakes made by economists. (via) I’ve come across a lot of good posts about arguments and opinions.
Intel Visual Life – The Sartorialist. (via)
It seems odd, but it’s almost like going out there and letting yourself fall in love a little bit every day, letting yourself be seduced a little bit every day.
I also like his idea of the internet as a “digital park bench”, where you can see the entire world passing through your neighborhood.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
