Contributor Posts

"Graves only children’s book — a wondrous and subversive story about the magic of reading; written in 1962 when he was sixty seven and illustrated by Maurice Sendak" of sixty four". Read more

"The first thing to remember is that the great philosophers were only human. Then you can start disagreeing with them."...... Keeping in mind that "each giant of philosophy was a human being trying to figure out life by doing just what you do: reading, thinking, observing, writing"....  Read more

Clear are the memories,
in the back of my head.
Not fear, which is projected
with many words of dread.
Gone from her mind,
is what I see now,
no longer the one.
I loved her completely,
as I will continue to say,
for no matter her memory,
mine is here to stay.

Few artists have articulated the dance between this “divine discontent” and creative fulfillment more memorably than the poet, novelist, essayist, and diarist May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995). In her Journal of a Solitude (public library), Sarton records and reflects on her interior life in the course of one year, her sixtieth, with remarkable candor and courage. Out of these twelve private months arises the eternity of the human experience with its varied universal capacities for astonishment and sorrow, hollowing despair and creative vitality.

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"Americans see value in higher education ...... Most say a college degree is important, if not essential, in helping a young person succeed in the world......  While fewer than half of today’s young adults are enrolled in a two-year or four-year college, the share has risen steadily over the past several decades....... Even so, there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction – even suspicion – among the public about the role colleges play in society, .... And these views are increasingly linked to partisanship....Read the full article 

....."Taking the work and the knowledge and the discoveries of those that came before you. And, in your life time, you are going to move it forward in ways no one could have imagine. And you’re not going to get all the way. And that’s OK. Because without your effort, humanity is never going to get there...."Read more

 In his book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death" : Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business Postman argued that by expressing ideas through visual imagery, television reduces politics, news, history and other serious topics to entertainment. He worried that culture would decline if the people became an audience and their public business a "vaudeville act". Read the excerpt of the book's forward

Neil Postman (1931 - 2003) was an American critic educator and Author. In addition to Amusing ourselves to Death, Postman wrote several other books as well as magazine and newspaper articles regarding technology and education. His other books include Conscientious Objections (1988), Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992), The Disappearance of Childhood (1982) and The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995).

His interests were were very diverse. He wrote on the disappearance of childhood, reforming public education, postmodernism, semantics, inguistics, and technopolies.

Sources: Wikipedia, NeilPostman.org

There is a myth we live with, the myth of finding the meaning of life — as if meaning were an undiscovered law of physics. But unlike the laws of physics — which predate us and will postdate us and made us — meaning only exists in this brief interlude of consciousness between chaos and chaos, the interlude we call life....... Read more 

"We Are Made of Music, We Are Made of Time: Violinist Natalie Hodges on the Poetic Science of Sound and Feeling".  Read more

"Trees, hummingbirds, snails, Stoicism, storytelling, Orwell’s roses, the crucible of consciousness, the end of the universe, and more trees" . Read more

To reach for the stars,
you're best to aim high,
for your goal in life,
is to give it a try.