And television is worse. You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end.
— Gilead: A Novel Marilynne Robinson
Some passive learning (attending lectures, reading assignments) is probably unavoidable. But I usually recommend trying to compress this as much as possible, to get to doing the real work of learning – practice – as quickly as possible.
…
Faster feedback is faster learning.
— Scott Young 7 Must-know strategies to learn anything faster
It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men. So they get themselves drawn into situations that are harmful to them. I have seen this happen many, many times. I have always had trouble finding a way to caution against it. Since it is, in a word, Christlike.
— Gilead: A Novel Marilynne Robinson
Sin is always very sinful, but in our prosperity we are not so aware of it. The dust of the world fills our eyes that we cannot see it clearly. God frequently uses affliction to teach his children the great evil that is sin.
— Thomas Case Select Works, A Treaty of Afflictions
The Open Book is rentable for 28 pounds (about $37) a night.
“I remember thinking to myself, I can’t be the only person who would love to run a bookshop by the sea,” [Jessica] Fox told me. The store was an almost instant success. For many visitors, running the shop is the fulfillment of a lifelong fantasy.
— Dwight Garner “A Critic Sells Books Down by the Seashore” The New York Times
Children seem to think every pleasant thing has to be a surprise.
Gilead: A Novel Marilynne Robinson
Starbucks
Regular latte (30RMB)
Meh. It does the job, but not enough to warrant the major investment.
Pairs well with Corporate tax evasion (several million RMB).
Time Out Beijing
For me, however, the belief in the meaning of making dollars crumbled; the proposition that the more money you earn, the better the life you are leading was refuted by too much hard evidence to the contrary. And without that belief, I lost the need to make huge sums of money. The funny thing is that I was largely unaware how heavily influenced I was by the money belief until it had vanished.
— Michael Lewis Liar’s Poker
Some days, on a crosstown bus or a stalled train or a jam-packed platform, with your nose pressed into a stranger’s sweat-beaded neck and the appointed hour of your business lunch, your second date, your big job interview long past, it can feel like the system is in a death spiral.
Train delays now occur roughly seventy thousand times a month, up from twenty-eight thousand in 2012. The system’s on-time rate, already among the nation’s worst, fell to fifty-eight per cent in January, down from ninety a decade ago.
— William Finnegan “Can Andy Byford Save the Subways?” The New Yorker
But millions of the phony profiles pose specifically as actors, singers, politicians and other well-known figures to broadcast falsehoods, cheat people out of money — or worse.
— Jack Nicas “Oprah, Is That You? On Social Media, the Answer Is Often No.” The New York Times
The Metal Detector 