A Box Full of Darkness: Talking with Adrienne Brodeur
Adrienne Brodeur discusses her new memoir, WILD GAME.
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Posts Tagged: happiness
Sound Takes: Schmilco
For a band wreathed with as many indictments as laurels, as many charges of settling into post-avant-garde “dad-rock” as praise for their artistry, it’s no surprise that Wilco’s always been preoccupied with getting reborn.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Valuation Methods
In some of my fantasies, I make a pitch for art or for truth, defend them like commodities.
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The Saturday Rumpus Review: Little Minnie at the Movies
Being a teenager sucks. It’s not pretty or nice or sweet or kind.
...moreWilla Cather on Happiness
I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. Brain Pickings shares with us a beautiful little vignette from Willa Cather’s masterpiece, My Ántonia, describing happiness in a perfect and simple way: with a character […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Song in the Subjunctive
Perhaps the city looked more poignantly lovely because I was conscious of its tragic history.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Are you a science dummy? Do you need to be happy? There is an app for that. The science of your face. Algorithms don’t know best. The history of Silicon Valley.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Amanda Marcotte isn’t listening to you on Twitter anymore. You can run, you can hide, but you can’t escape the modern office. Unfettered access to technology isn’t always good for students. Do you have the right to be forgotten? All of this technology and no one is happier.
...moreHappiness is Overrated
Critical theorist Mari Ruti writes about how humans may not be built for happiness: “If all of that isn’t enough to make you suspicious of the cultural injunction to be happy, consider this basic psychoanalytic insight: Human beings may not be designed for happy, balanced lives. The irony of happiness is that it’s precisely when […]
...moreGratitude
Even without a government shutdown, writers are not usually known to be a happy bunch. “Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy,” author Connie Willis once said. It is often necessary for writers to dwell in certain worlds and mindsets in order to get their message onto the page. Some might call it a […]
...moreFinding Quiet
“So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to […]
...moreWho and What is Happy?
Science and philosophy are the academic parents of the social sciences, which is interesting considering the current obsession with happiness. There’s always an updated study on what (or what doesn’t) make human beings happy, from the psychological/sociological perspective, always backed up with empirical evidence. Often this mass of data is broken down for mass consumption […]
...moreBooks and Happiness
A study published in this month’s Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine suggests that bookish teens tend to be less depressed than those who immerse themselves in the trendy deluge of mainstream media. The act of reading requires creativity and mental engagement that may be harder for depressed people to handle, rather than mindlessly listening […]
...moreTandem Reading: J.G. Ballard and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder
Remainder by Tom McCarthy can only lazily be compared to Kafka or Murakami, Ionesco or Calvino. Really, there is an English dryness about it that is more like Graham Greene having a surrealist fit. Or Iris Murdoch as edited by Raymond Carver. But the most apt comparison might be to J.G. Ballard.
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