Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson. “Copyright is a hot-button topic these days. Does information want to be free…or just reasonably priced? I discussed copyright at some length 25 years ago—a year before the first TCP/IP wide area network in the world went operational—two years before the first Macintosh went on sale!—in the following story. It won the 1983 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.” Interesting short story and to think this was written so long ago and still relevant.
Ask Yourself Which Books You Truly Love by Salman Rushdie. “Many of Aesop’s little morality tales about the victory of dogged slowness (the tortoise) over arrogant speed (the hare), or the foolishness of crying “wolf ” when there is no wolf, or of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, seem positively soppy when compared to this Quentin Tarantino-like savagery. So much for the cliché of the peaceful, mystical East.”
Stab a Book, the Book Won’t Die, by Carig Mod. Reading, books, contracts, attention monsters. Nice framing.
Stoicism As Symptom – “Stoicism is a symptom of a malaise, a problem in the modern world, rather than any kind of solution to its ills. (…) to opt out is a self indulgence the world cannot afford.” Some interesting discussionsions in the comments as well.
The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning and review of America Against America. Very interesting read on the work of “arguably the single most influential “public intellectual” alive today”.
The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time by Richard Fisher. 4/5 Very interesting ideas, fluent read. A much needed book in this “time-blinkered” world.