Just another writer
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121.6 WOL Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
I’ve found myself skeptical of the whole field of evolutionary psychology. There might someday be a scientific basis for evolutionary psychology, but right now it has all the scientific sophistication of mythology and, from a structural standpoint, that is precisely what it is, an attempt to formulate a narrative to support an existing reality. Given…
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110 VOS What Number is God?
I had high hopes for this book. The premise is a good one: applying the ideas of metamathematics to philosophy and religion in a hopes of providing a new framework for considering these ideas. Sarah Voss’s project is, in effect, one of attempting to conceive a new metaphysics on a mathematical basis. Unfortunately, it seems…
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100 PHI Socrates Café
I took a single philosophy course over the entirety of my education: It was a basic 101 class and the only reading that I recall were The Republic by Plato and Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes. The latter has left a nagging hole in my conception of the universe that continues to linger. I was…
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Beautiful sentences
Jack glanced up at her blandly, not quite smiling, touching his fingertips together as if there were no such thing in the world as a hint. Marilynne Robinson, Home.
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Beautiful sentences
I didn’t want to go home. My wife was different than she used to be, and we had a six-month-old baby I was afraid of, a little son. Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son
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Beautiful sentences
When the pie was done and the roast was in the oven and the biscuits were made and set aside and the old man had nodded off in the warmth of the kitchen, Jack went upstairs and Glory sat down to read for a while. Marilynne Robinson, Home.
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098.3 KAT Literary Hoaxes: An Eye Opening History of Famous Frauds
This seems like it should be a fascinating area to write about: From the fabricated Shakespeare documents that took in Charles and Mary Lamb in the 19th century to James Frey’s “memoir” in the twenty-first century, there’s a lot to write about. As it turns out, though, most of the stories aren’t that interesting. JT…
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2014 in reading
I set out this year to make my reading a bit more diverse. I fell a tad short of my goal for women writers making only 39.6% when I was aiming for 40% but had 13.5% non-white. I ended up choosing my next book to read 10.8% of the time in pursuit of these numbers.…