Questions NOV 2

WGU -p.165

1. Kant's definition of maturity is what?

2. Education, travel, and work share what common purpose, ideally?

3. You're not grown-up if you've not rejected what? 

4. Why should languages and music be learned as early as possible?

5. What is the message of Rousseau's Emile?

6. What does it mean to love a book?

7. The internet, says Nick Carr, is a machine geared for what?

8. If you don't travel you're likely to suppose what?

9. What did Rousseau say about those who do not walk?

10. What is travel's greatest gift?

Discussion Questions

• What are some other signs of being grown-up, besides the ability to think for yourself? 123
• Are you good at accepting compromise? Are the adults in your life? 124
• Have you "sifted through your parents' choices about everything"? 125
• Do you "love the world enough to assume responsibility for it?" 126
• Has your educational experience so far broken or furthered your "urge to explore the world"? Do you still "desire to learn"? 127
• Should corporations like Coca-Cola be allowed to have "pouring rights" in public schools? 132
• "You must take your education into your own hands as soon as possible." Did you? How? 140
• Should the age of legal maturity be raised to match the age of brain maturity? 140
• "Minds need at least as much exercise as bodies..." 141 Do you get enough of both forms of exercise? Too much of one or the other? Do you subscribe to Mens sana in corpore sano?
• Do you love books and reading? 143 
• Do you agree with Mark Twain?: "A person who won't read has no advantage over a person who can't."
• Are you willing to go a month without internet? Or even a day? 148
• Were Augustine and Rousseau right about travel? 150-51
• Does group travel "preclude real encounters" with a place? 158
• Do you hope to live and work one day in another culture for at least a year? Do you think it will contribute to your maturity? 162-3

LAST CALL: MIDTERM REPORT PRESENTATIONS

 We'll conclude any remaining midterm presentations on TUESDAY, OCT 31. 

Final presentations begin THURSDAY.

Happy Halloween: seize the day

And bring treats to share with the class, for an extra base on the scorecard.

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"Do not underestimate the power of costume" 

==

Today is Halloween, or All Hallows’ Eve, a day in which the dead are traditionally believed to walk among the living. Communities all across the country throw Halloween parties and parades, but Salem, Massachusetts, goes all out. It started with “Haunted Happenings” in the 1980s, a celebration that took place over a single weekend. But more and more happenings were added to the events calendar every year, until they filled the entire month of October, and now a quarter of a million tourists flock to Salem to celebrate the monthlong Festival of the Dead. There’s a psychic fair and witchcraft expo every day. Psychic mediums deliver messages from departed loved ones — or an expert can teach you how to communicate with the dead on your own. Witch doctors and hoodoo practitioners explain the art of graveyard conjuring. There are séances and cemetery tours. You can solemnly honor your lost loved ones at the Dumb Supper, a feast with the dead. And the whole thing culminates with The Official Salem Witches’ Halloween Ball at the historic Hawthorne Hotel.

Salem has had a complicated relationship with witches ever since the infamous witch trials of 1692. Over the course of a year, nearly 200 residents of Essex County were falsely accused of witchcraft; 19 people were hanged and one man was tortured to death. For generations after the trials, the residents of Salem Town and Salem Village just wanted to put the tragedy behind them — so much so that Salem Village changed its name to Danvers. But some modern-day pagans and Wicca practitioners have turned Salem into a pilgrimage site, so the city ironically, and somewhat uneasily, has made witchcraft part of its marketing strategy. Author J.W. Ocker wrote about this phenomenon in A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts (2016). He says: “The Witches, capital W, religious Witches, they balk a little bit at the Halloween witch, because it’s ugly and it’s a stereotype, and it has all these historical associations with it. Then there are people like the historians who balk at the religious witches, who kind of co-opt the cause of the accused witches by saying that they were almost martyrs for the cause. Then there’s the city trying to make everyone happy.” WA

The best is yet to be

...said Robert Browning. Never think your best years are behind you.

An old post:

“Becoming adult” is our next chapter in Why Grow Up…

Stephen Law tweets: “I’m 60. Yet I don’t feel that I am a ‘grown up’, and feel I would be fraud if a pretended to be one (I do know how to *act* like a ‘grown up’).”

To which I say: just wait four years.

A student asked the other day, in response to my approving citation of Susan Neiman’s statement that it’s a mistake to think the best years are between 16 and 26 (or 18 and 28?): What is the best? Sixty-four, I said. Next year I’ll say sixty-five. When I stop updating my answer, you’ll know my time is past. Not dead yet.

But while I’m here, I’ll still keep on trying to think for myself. That’s Kant’s definition of maturity. Are we there yet?

Education, travel, and work at their best all “undercut the dogmatism of the worldviews into which we are born.” That’s the project of a lifetime. Not learning, not going, not finding something valuable to do with your time all block it. Sadly, many are blocked early and never get going. Many get stuck replicating the choices and limited opportunities demonstrated by their parents. But “if you don’t reject any of their choices you are not grown-up.” And if you won the parent-lottery, you’ll find plenty of their choices to have been spot-on. Not all, though.

Learn some languages and learn to love music early on, is something I wish the adults in my life had been more insistent about. They gave me a good model of fluent English, and bought me a piano and lessons. But I wanted to play ball during lesson-time. Coulda done both, with the right cajoling… 11.1.21

A merrier world

https://www.threads.net/@philosophors/post/CzD1e5ItJiI/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

The most valuable lesson

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cy52uWXNDHn/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

Questions Oct 31

  WGU -p.122

1. "The miracle that saves the world," said Hannah Arendt, is ____.

2. For Kant the most important fact about us is what?

3. What is "the metaphysical wound at the heart of the universe"? 

4. How did David Hume dispel "this philosophical melancholy and delirium"? 

5. What did Kant say we must take seriously, in order to grow up?

6. What must reason find intolerable about the world?

Discussion Questions

• Is Hannah Arendt's emphasis on natality as important as mortality, in defining the human condition? Would it still be, if we ever achieved natural immortality? 80-81
• Is the US still a proud nation of immigrants, or more like those European nations "struggling with what they regard as the problem of immigration? 81
• Are there ways other than travel to "experience the world as babies do" etc.? 83
• Did your upbringing make it easier or harder for you to trust? 86
• "Once you start asking why, there's no natural place to stop." 88 So why do so many people stop, or else never start?
• How long would we have to live, to see this as Leibniz's "best possible world" 89
• Was Hume right about reason being slave to the passions? 93
• Was Thrasymachus right about justice? 94
• Do you agree with the cliche about socialism? 100
• Is Hume's strategy for dispelling melancholy good? 104
• Has the gap between ought and is narrowed in the world, historically?107
• Was Nietzsche right about stoicism? 113
• Is it childish to expect the world to make sense? 114
• How can philosophy help us grow up? 119
• Do we have a right to happiness? 122

NYTimes: From Serial Productions: The Kids of Rutherford County

In our back yard... 

In April 2016, 11 Black schoolchildren, some as young as 8 years old, were arrested in Rutherford County, Tenn. The reason? They didn’t stop a fight between some other kids. What happened in the wake of those arrests would expose a juvenile justice system that was playing by its own rules. For over a decade, this county had arrested and illegally jailed hundreds, maybe thousands, of children. It would take years, but eventually one lawyer, a former juvenile delinquent himself, asked: Why? The answer would lead back to a powerful judge, the jailer she appointed and a county that treated this astronomical number of arrests as normal. From Serial Productions and The New York Times, “The Kids of Rutherford County” is a four-part narrative series reported and hosted by Meribah Knight, a Peabody-award winning reporter based in the South. In the podcast, Knight explores the world of one county’s juvenile court — a court shrouded in confidentiality and privacy, which in turn allowed something secretive and illegal to grow. How did this happen? What does it take to stop it? And will the people in charge face any consequences? 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/podcasts/serial-kids-rutherford-county.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
From Serial Productions: The Kids of Rutherford County

Enlightened wave

We're all part of something so much larger...

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Life is hard, but also good

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Pizza Party

 

Philosophy & Religious Studies Department “Open House” 

with FREE Pizza 

Thursday, November 2nd, 2023 

4:30 pm – 5:30 pm 

JUB 202

HCR on NRA

Yet another predictably enervating mass shooting in America, in yet another undeserving "special place." History judges.

"…Maine governor Janet Mills has personal ties to Lewiston, where she worked, met her late husband, and sent their daughters to school. "Lewiston is a special place," she wrote today. "It is a closeknit community with a long history of hard work, of persistence, of faith, of opening its big heart to people everywhere.
"I love this place, just as I love our whole state with my entire heart. I am so deeply saddened. This city did not deserve this terrible assault on its citizens, on its peace of mind, on its sense of security. No city does. No state. No people."

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/october-26-2023?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Growing up takes courage

And luck—the luck of a wise and timely uncle-figure, portly or otherwise, who'll teach you something about meliorism in the real world. Susan Neiman is herself such a (non-portly) figure in "Why Grow Up…"—

"Growing up is more a matter of courage than knowledge: all the information in the world is no substitute for the guts to use your own judgement. And judgement can be learned–principally through the experience of watching others use it well–but it cannot be taught. Judgement is important because none of the answers to the questions that really move us can be found by following a rule. Courage is not only required to learn how to trust your own judgement rather than relying on your state's, your neighbour's or your favourite movie star's. (Of course, your state, your neighbour or your favourite movie star may often be right, and good judgement requires you to recognize that.) Even more important, courage is required to live with the rift that will run through our lives, however good they may be: ideals of reason tell us how the world should be; experience tells us that it rarely is. Growing up requires confronting the gap between the two–without giving up on either one.

Most of us are tempted to give up on one or the other. People who stick to the dogmas of childhood can spend whole lifetimes denying that the world does not conform to beliefs they hold dear. While examples of these abound–certain preachers and politicians come to mind–in our day it's more common to meet people who are stuck in the mire of adolescence. The world turns out not to reflect the ideas and ideals they had for it? All the worse for ideals. Maintaining ideals in a world that seems to have no use for them becomes a source of disappointment, even shame. Far better to jettison them entirely than to suffer the memory of hope defeated; far braver to face the depth of the rot of reality than to cling to what turned out to be illusion.

Such a standpoint is less brave than you think, for it demands absolutely nothing but an air of urbanity. Far more courage is needed to acknowledge that both ideals and experience make equal claims on us. Growing up is a matter of respecting those claims and meeting them as best you can, knowing you will never succeed entirely but refusing to succumb to dogma or despair. If you live long enough, each will probably tempt you. Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way that it should be, while never losing sight of the way that it is, is what being a grown-up comes to. If you happen to have a portly uncle who taught you that, you are very lucky."

— Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age by Susan Neiman
https://a.co/3JsvawU

"Savor every second"

Well, maybe not every...

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Questions Oct 26

NOTE: I'm just noticing that the Why Grow Up questions posted earlier, for today and last time, were out of sequence... Sorry for the confusion. The following are the correct questions.

WGU

1. After Plato, the next philosopher to turn his attention to the details of child-rearing was who?

2. What's the first step of human reason, according to Kant?

3. If we have hope for moral progress, what do we want for the next generation?

4. What was Orwell's nightmare?

5. What "perfidious reversal leaves us permanently confused"?

6. What are you committed to, if you're committed to Enlightenment?

7. What is freedom, according to Rousseau and Kant?

8. What's the key to whether or not we grow up?

Discussion Questions
WGU

• Should philosophers pay more attention to child-rearing and parenting? 36
• What do you think Cicero meant by saying that philosophy is learning to die?
• Do you feel fully empowered to "choose your life's journey"? If not, what obstacles prevent that? 37
• In what ways do you think your parents' occupations influence the number of choices you'll be able to make in your life?
• If you've read 1984 and Brave New World, which do you find the more "seductive dystopia"? 39
• Are we confused about toys and dreams? 40
• Do others make the most important decisions for you? 41
• Do you "make a regular appointment with your body"? 42
• Do you trust anyone over 30? 45
• Is it "reasonable to expect justice and joy"? 49
• Are you "committed to Enlightenment"? 51
• Do the passions for glory and luxury make us wicked and miserable? 53
• What does it mean to say there are no atheists in foxholes? Is it true? 54
• Was Rousseau right about inequality and private property? 55
• Should philosophy be taught to children, so as to become thinking adults? 57
• Should children "yield to the commands of other people"? 61
• Should parents "let the child wail"?
• Are Rousseau and Kant right about the true definition of freedom? 62
• Is Rousseau right about desire? 65
• Did Rousseau's abandonment of his children discredit his thoughts on child-rearing? 69 Or show him to be a hypocrite for saying no task in the world is more important than raising a child properly? 72

Mar17

FL

1. What percentage of evangelicals believe "Jesus will return no later than he year 2050"?

2. Who's "the most prominent blame-the-victims horror-storyteller"?

3. How many Americans say they believe in the devil  or demonic possession?

4. How many people in the U.K. said they have no religion?

5. What's the latest scholarly consensus about America's exceptional religiosity?

Lyceum Nov 17

                                              Eric Weber

University of Kentucky

Freedom in Education:

A Philosophical Critique of Current

Conflicts in Educational Policy

Parents and guardians are naturally concerned about what their children are taught in schools.  Some lament what they feel is a lack of control over curricula and what are thought to be forces or  agendas that they believe are not in kids’ best interests. The arguments advanced in recent  conflicts take two main forms. The first, advanced in similar fashion on opposing sides of issues  concerning gender and early education, takes the form of arguments to “protect” children. The  second, typically arising in discourse about desire for exclusion or selection of curricular messages  or content, typically focuses on parents’ rights, in particular, to freedom of choice, whether  regarding selection of schools, book banning, or inclusion or exclusion of desired or undesirable  subject matters from curricula. In this talk, Dr. Weber will defend the importance of students’ and  teachers’ freedom and challenge the overreach of dominant parental views that seek to silence the  lived experiences and concerns of marginalized groups. 

Friday, November 17, 2023

at 5:00 pm,

COE, Room 164

An Informal Reception to Follow

Questions Oct 24

1. What did John Rawls call the thought experiment he believed would yield fair and just principles, and what was its primary device?

2. Under what circumstances would Rawls' theory permit huge inequalities of wealth between people?

3. What was the Imitation Game, and who devised a thought experiment to oppose it?

4. What, according to Searle, is involved in truly understanding something?

5. How do some philosophers think we might use computers to achieve immortality?

6. What does Peter Singer say we should sacrifice, to help stranger

7. Why did Singer first become famous?

8. How does Singer represent the best tradition in philosophy?

WGU

1. Being grown-up is widely considered to be what? Do you agree?

2. Is Leibniz's optimism more likely to appeal to a small child? Why? 3

3. What was Kant's definition of Enlightenment? 5

4. What do Susan Neiman's children say she can't understand? Do you agree? 9

5. Why is judgement important? Is this a surprising thing to hear from a Kantian? 11

6. Being a grown-up comes to what? 12

7. What did Paul Goodman say about growing up? Are his observations are still relevant? 19

8. Why (in Neiman's opinion) should you not think this is the best time of your life, if you're a young college student? 20

9. What did Samoan children have that ours lack? 27 Can we fix that?

10. What is philosophy's greatest task? 31

==

NOTE: The following are the wrong questions for today, we'll get to them later. Sorry for the confusion.]

1. After Plato, the next philosopher to turn his attention to the details of child-rearing was who?

2. What's the first step of human reason, according to Kant?

3. If we have hope for moral progress, what do we want for the next generation?

4. What was Orwell's nightmare?

5. What "perfidious reversal leaves us permanently confused"?

6. What are you committed to, if you're committed to Enlightenment?

7. What is freedom, according to Rousseau and Kant?

8. What's the key to whether or not we grow up?

==

Discussion Questions
WGU

• Should philosophers pay more attention to child-rearing and parenting? 36
• What do you think Cicero meant by saying that philosophy is learning to die?
• Do you feel fully empowered to "choose your life's journey"? If not, what obstacles prevent that? 37
• In what ways do you think your parents' occupations influence the number of choices you'll be able to make in your life?
• If you've read 1984 and Brave New World, which do you find the more "seductive dystopia"? 39
• Are we confused about toys and dreams? 40
• Do others make the most important decisions for you? 41
• Do you "make a regular appointment with your body"? 42
• Do you trust anyone over 30? 45
• Is it "reasonable to expect justice and joy"? 49
• Are you "committed to Enlightenment"? 51
• Do the passions for glory and luxury make us wicked and miserable? 53
• What does it mean to say there are no atheists in foxholes? Is it true? 54
• Was Rousseau right about inequality and private property? 55
• Should philosophy be taught to children, so as to become thinking adults? 57
• Should children "yield to the commands of other people"? 61
• Should parents "let the child wail"?
• Are Rousseau and Kant right about the true definition of freedom? 62
• Is Rousseau right about desire? 65
• Did Rousseau's abandonment of his children discredit his thoughts on child-rearing? 69 Or show him to be a hypocrite for saying no task in the world is more important than raising a child properly? 72

Mar17

Southern Festival of Books

Hadn't been to this annual highlight of autumn in Nashville since pre-pandemic, so I went to the wrong venue, the old one on Legislative Plaza. Fortunately I made it to the big tent at the Bicentennial Mall in time to catch Margaret Renkl. The weather couldn't have been finer. The whole experience was a delight...

Rousseau got this right

"It is difficult to live nobly when..."

https://www.instagram.com/p/CyvtIULgO_N/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igshid=M2M0Y2JmOTAyOA==

Life After “Calvin and Hobbes”

The semi-reclusive cartoonist who said "the days are just packed" (and "treasure" is all around us if we just know where to look) ended his enchanting strip after just a decade— unlike his hero Charles Schulz, who drew Charlie Brown 'til he died. 

Did Bill Watterson "grow up"? And does growing up have to be seen as "always a loss"? Questions we're about to address in class  with Susan Neiman's "Why Grow Up…" She insists that maturity is enlightenment, if we just know how to approach it.

Anyway, it's always a pleasure to revisit that little boy and his more mature sidekick, who could care less if people called them "a pair of pathetic peripatetics" and who understood the importance of embracing change in all the seasons of life.

"Growing up is always a loss—a loss of an enchanted way of seeing, at the very least—and for some people growing up is more of a loss than for others. Perhaps part of what drove Watterson, "Ahab-like" by his own telling, back to the drawing board with his boy and his tiger day after day was a subconscious commitment to staying a child. Maybe he chose to stop publishing because, in some way, for whatever reasons, he became O.K. with growing up."

Life After "Calvin and Hobbes"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/30/the-mysteries-bill-watterson-book-review

Betraying higher education

"What we do [in the liberal arts] is empower [students] to think about themselves not just as someone who needs a job, but someone who wants to contribute to society," said Ann Kennedy, a gender studies professor at the University of Maine at Farmington whose position was eliminated. "The lesson of the liberal arts is that we can all contribute. And that may not be in your job, it may be in other ways."

West Virginia University Is Everything That's Wrong With Higher Education Today
https://newrepublic.com/article/176202/west-virginia-university-higher-education-enrollment-cliff-cuts

Which “triad” are you?

https://www.instagram.com/p/CytkkOtt6_B/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

Nine!

Light is life. I'm grateful for it. And I still sleep way below average.

"It was on this day in 1879 that the inventor Thomas Edison finally struck upon the idea for a workable electric light…
One of the effects of the invention of the electric light is that people sleep less than they once did. Before 1910, people slept an average of nine hours a night; since then, it's about seven and a half. Sleep researchers have shown in the laboratory that if people are deprived of electric light, they will go back to the nine-hour-a-night schedule."

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-saturday-da8?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

What would John Rawls say?

John Dewey

"It's the birthday of John Dewey, born in Burlington, Vermont (1859). Regarded as the father of progressive education, his best-known innovation was what he called "learning by directed living," which combined learning with concrete activity. He wrote Democracy and Education (1916), and he founded the New School for Social Research. He was a shy, scholarly youth; a friend said that ideas were like living objects to him, and the only things he was really interested in. When he was hired to teach at the University of Michigan at the age of 25, he constituted the entire philosophy department.

He spent most of his career thinking and writing about education. He said that schools were useless unless they taught students how to live as members of a community; that they wouldn't succeed in teaching children anything unless they were receptive to what children were ready to learn; and that they wouldn't get anywhere unless they treated children as individuals. He once gave a speech at Michigan in which he said there was so much knowledge at universities because the freshmen brought everything they knew to college with them, and the seniors never took anything away."

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-friday-october-7dd?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

RS colloquium Oct 26

 The Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies is hosting its Religious Studies Colloquium on Thursday, October 26, 2023. The featured speaker is Dr. Anand Taneja, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University, and author of the critically acclaimed book Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Stanford University Press, 2017). In his talk, ‘Jinnealogy: Poetry, and Inter-Species Intimacy: More-than-Human Memory and Muslim Ecological Thought,’ Dr. Taneja will discuss the role of religious imagination and religious practice in remapping the relationship between human communities as well as the relationship between humans and other species. Please join us on October 26 in the Student Union (Room 220), from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. This event is free and open to the public. Boxed lunch will be provided on a first-come, first-served basis.

 

More information about Dr. Taneja is available here: https://as.vanderbilt.edu/asianstudies/people/taneja.php.

Petition · Establish a Polling Place on Campus for Murfreesboro, TN · Change.org

https://www.change.org/p/establish-a-polling-place-on-campus-for-murfreesboro-tn

Take a hike

 

 

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Questions Oct 19

Wittgenstein, Arendt, Popper & Kuhn, Foot & Thomson-LH 34-37, FL 27-28, WGU Introduction-p.35...  [But first catch up on the Existentialists etc.]

1. What was the main message of Wittgenstein's Tractatus?

2. What did the later Wittgenstein (of Philosophical Investigations) mean by "language games," what did he think was the way to solve philosophical problems, and what kind of language did he think we can't have?

3. Who was Adolf Eichmann, and what did Arendt learn about him at his trial?

4. What was Arendt's descriptive phrase for what she saw as Eichmann's ordinariness?

5. Both Popper and Kuhn changed the way people understood science. What did Popper say about the method for checking a hypothesis and what name did Kuhn give to major breaks in the history of science? 

6. What is the Law of Double Effect? Many people who disagree with its principle--and with Thomson's violinist thought experiment--think that whatever our intentions we shouldn't play who?

WGU

1. Being grown-up is widely considered to be what? Do you agree?

2. Is Leibniz's optimism more likely to appeal to a small child? Why? 3

3. What was Kant's definition of Enlightenment? 5

4. What do Susan Neiman's children say she can't understand? Do you agree? 9

5. Why is judgement important? Is this a surprising thing to hear from a Kantian? 11

6. Being a grown-up comes to what? 12

7. What did Paul Goodman say about growing up? Are his observations are still relevant? 19

8. Why (in Neiman's opinion) should you not think this is the best time of your life, if you're a young college student? 20

9. What did Samoan children have that ours lack? 27 Can we fix that?

10. What is philosophy's greatest task? 31

Discussion Questions:

• Was Wittgenstein's main message in the Tractatus correct? 203
• What are some of the "language games" you play? (What are some different things you use language for?) 204
• Can there be a "private language"? 206
• "Eichmann wasn't responsible..." 208 Agree?
• Are unthinking people as dangerous as evil sadists? 211
• Is "the banality of evil" an apt phrase for our time? 212
• Was Popper right about falsifiability? 218
• Was Kuhn right about paradigms? 220
• How would you respond it you woke up with a violinist plugged into your kidneys? Is this a good analogy for unwanted or unintended pregnancy? 226

FL

• Pro wrestling is obviously staged. Why is it so popular?
• What do Burning Man attendees and other adults who like to play dress-up tell us about the state of adulthood in contemporary America? 245
• What do you think of Fantasy sports? 248
• Was Michael Jackson a tragic figure? 250
• Is pornography "normal"? 251

How to prepare for an exam: RELAX, says WJ

 Don't stress, don't pull an all-nighter, do listen to the audio review, revisit the relevant texts, get some fresh air, get some rest. 

"If you want really to do your best in an examination, fling away the book the day before, say to yourself, “I won’t waste another minute on this miserable thing, and I don’t care an iota whether I succeed or not.” Say this sincerely, and feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep, and I am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the method permanently." William James, “Gospel of Relaxation" 

It’s Eleanor’s birthday

Talk more, worry less: a timely message for our anxious age…

"We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk."

And,

"You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-wednesday-bb7?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Charles Feeney, Who Made a Fortune and Then Gave It Away, Dies at 92

"…Unlike philanthropists whose names are publicized, celebrated at banquets and emblazoned on building facades and museum wings, Mr. Feeney gave anonymously to universities, medical institutions, scientific endeavors, human rights groups, peace initiatives and scores of causes intended to improve lives in the United States, Vietnam, South Africa, Australia, Israel, Jordan and other lands…"

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/business/charles-f-feeney-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Charles Feeney, Who Made a Fortune and Then Gave It Away, Dies at 92