Tag: Thinking
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The drama of seeing real thinking
I’ve often felt there can be a drama to seeing people think. In the sense of watching someone think deeply about what they’re saying, struggling with the content of it in the process of sharing it. This is how Rudolf Carnap describes watching Wittgenstein speak during his brief participation in the Vienna Circle: When he […]
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Making time to think
It occurred to me yesterday that I spend less time thinking than I once did. One of the reasons I wanted to leave The Sociological Review and have a period of (sadly self-funded) underemployment was because I’d felt for a year or two that I was as cognitively occupied as I’m capable of being. I keep running […]
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Thinking with your feet
In the last few years, I’ve noticed a pattern when I see photos of myself in front of an audience. I am invariably tilting one foot forward as I talk, as in the attached photo from Andrew Crane. Yet I have no awareness of doing it. Is this some strange adaptation to one leg being […]
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The vulnerability of human experience to abbreviation
This expression used by Alain de Botton in his How Proust Can Change Your Life (pg 42) stood out to me. He uses it in relation to the morning news, reflecting on how reporting inevitably strips away from the reality of what is reported on. This is an example of a broader tendency for human experience to “be […]
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Will I survive a nine mile walk and make it home to Molly?
On September 8th I’m going to walk nine miles from the top of my street in Cambridge to Chittering in Cambridgeshire. Will I survive walking without an experienced navigator or a reliable 3G signal? Will I slip out of exhaustion and fall into the Cam? Will I ever make it home to Molly? The only way […]
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I’m slightly embarrassed to admit how much I think I would enjoy this job
From loc 1171-1189 of Frenemies, Ken Auletta’s new book about the declining fortunes of the advertising industry: Then as vice chair heading Business Innovations, Comstock became the company’s chief futurist, attending digital confabs, planting herself in Silicon Valley, scouting and making it her business to know cutting-edge agencies and entrepreneurs, seeking out partners for unusual ways to […]
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When the populists inspire the ad men
I came across this extract on loc 1342-1360 of Frenemies, Ken Auletta’s new book about the declining fortunes of the advertising industry, detailing an intervention made by thought leader extraordinaire Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategist at Publicis groupe. It was in the context of a meeting between executives from a range of agencies and Bank of America to […]
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The (creepy) spirit of digital capitalism
This is an accusation which Jaron Lanier makes strongly on pg 134 of his recent Ten Reasons To Delete Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Coming from someone who was less of an insider, it might seem like a rather shrill and slightly paranoid reading of the culture of digital elites. However I find it […]
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The disjointed temporality of political life
I’ve long been drawn to accounts of the everyday lives of politicians. This isn’t so much a matter of biographical curiosity, as much as a preoccupation with temporality. It is not that the temporal character of our lives moulds us but rather that the things which do are always inflected through temporality. I’m convinced you […]
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The intellectual sclerosis of the superstar intellectual
There’s a fascinating and honest account in Daniel Drezner’s The Ideas Industry, reflecting on his own growing celebrity and the lethal challenges which have come with it. This is something I’ve often wondered about, particularly in relation to how widely one reads and the circle of people one engages with. From pg 247: Furthermore, there […]
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The claustrophobia of imminence
I woke up with this phrase stuck in my mind recently, after a strange and vivid dream. It involved a landscape somewhere between Deep Space Nine and Snowpiercer, dark corners filled with metallic pools and steam hissing across braying crowds. I can’t remember the narrative of the dream but a crucial idea from it remains […]
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The incredible shrinking scope of the celebrity intellectual
What is it like to be an celebrity intellectual? I thought this was an admirably honest answer by Yuval Noah Harari to the question of how fame has changed his life. It seems obvious he would be far from alone in this experience, suggesting we could reflect on it as symptomatic of knowledge production by celebrity intellectuals […]