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Me: OMG! What’s that word that describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want to use?

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stoweboyd:

“Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.”

— | Zygmunt Bauman

(Source: mythologyofblue)

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stoweboyd:

“Literature has neglected the old and their emotions. The novelists never told us that in love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience.”

— | Isaac Bashevis Singer, cited by Susan Gubar in Why Have Writers Neglected Elderly Lovers?

(Source: stoweboyd)

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19fig:

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky   (via thetrendingproject)

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ceaserlacan:

““I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.” ~ Daphne du Maurier”

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ceaserlacan:

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"The true work of improving things is in the little achievements of the day and thats what you need to enjoy to stick in that field… The people that are the most giving, hardworking, are capable of making this world better usually don’t have the ego and ambition to be a leader, they don’t see any interest in superficial rewards, they don’t care if their name ever appeared in the press. They actually enjoy the process of helping others, they are in the moment"

— An excerpt from a conversation in the movie “Before Sunset” 

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(Source: 19fig, via hippyness)

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To regard the economy as an end or as the measure of success is merely to reduce students, teachers, researchers, and all they know or learn to merchandise. It reduces knowledge to ‘property’ and education to training for the 'job market’.

Wendell Berry, On the soil and health (2006)

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No economy, industrial or otherwise, can supply an appropriate aim or standard. Any economy must be either true or false to the world and to our life in it. If it is to be true, then it must be made true, according to a standard that is not economic.

Wendell Berry, On the soil and health (2006)

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At present our universities are not simply growing and expanding, according to the principle of ‘growth’ universal in industrial societies, but they are at the same time disintegrating. They are a hodge-podge of unrelated parts. There is no unifying aim and no common critical standard that can serve equally well all the diverse parts or departments. The fashion now is to think of universities as industries or businesses. University presidents, evidently thinking of themselves as CEOs, talk of 'business plans’ and 'return on investment’, as if the industrial economy could provide an aim and a critical standard appropriate to education or to research.

Wendell Berry (2006)

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thelifeisabsurd:

If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment … all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.


Fyodor Dostoyevsky / House of the dead

(via ceaserlacan)

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robertreich:

THE NEXT CRASH


Sorry to deliver the news, but it’s time to worry about the next crash.

The combination of stagnant wages with most economic gains going to the top is once again endangering the economy. 

Most Americans are still living in the shadow of the Great Recession that started in December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009. More have jobs, to be sure. But they haven’t seen any rise in their wages, adjusted for inflation.

Many are worse off due to the escalating costs of housing, healthcare, and education. And the value of whatever assets they own is less than in 2007.Which suggests we’re careening toward the same sort of crash we had then, and possibly as bad as 1929.

Clear away the financial rubble from those two former crashes and you’d see they both followed upon widening imbalances between the capacity of most people to buy, and what they as workers could produce. Each of these imbalances finally tipped the economy over.

The same imbalance has been growing again. The richest 1 percent of Americans now takes home about 20 percent of total income, and owns over 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.

These are close to the peaks of 1928 and 2007.

The underlying problem isn’t that Americans have been living beyond their means. It’s that their means haven’t been keeping up with the growing economy. Most gains have gone to the top.

But the rich only spend a small fraction of what they earn. The economy depends on the spending of middle and working class families.

By the first quarter of this year, household debt was at an all-time high of $13.2 trillion. Almost 80 percent of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck.

It was similar in the years leading up to the crash of 2007. Between 1983 and 2007, household debt soared while most economic gains went to the top. If the majority of households had taken home a larger share, they wouldn’t have needed to go so deeply into debt.

Similarly, between 1913 and 1928, the ratio of personal debt to the total national economy nearly doubled. After the 1929 crash, the government invented new ways to boost wages – Social Security, unemployment insurance, overtime pay, a minimum wage, the requirement that employers bargain with labor unions, and, finally, a full-employment program called World War II.

After the 2007 crash, the government bailed out the banks and pumped enough money into the economy to contain the slide. But apart from the Affordable Care Act, nothing was done to address the underlying problem of stagnant wages.

Trump and his Republican enablers are now reversing regulations put in place to stop Wall Street’s excessively risky lending.

But Trump’s real contributions to the next crash are his sabotage of the Affordable Care Act, rollback of overtime pay, burdens on labor organizing, tax reductions for corporations and the wealthy but not for most workers, cuts in programs for the poor, and proposed cuts in Medicare and Medicaid – all of which put more stress on the paychecks of most Americans.

Ten years after the start of the Great Recession, it’s important to understand that the real root of the collapse wasn’t a banking crisis. It was the growing imbalance between consumer spending and total output – brought on by stagnant wages and widening inequality.

That imbalance is back. Watch your wallets.

(Source: robertreich)

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In a conversation you always expect a reply. And if you honor the other party to the conversation, if you honor the otherness of the other party, you understand that you must not expect always to receive a reply that you foresee or a reply that you will like. A conversation is immitigably two-sided and always to some degree mysterious; it requires faith.

Wendell Berry, in “Nature as Measure” (1989)

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mesogeios:

“If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers … becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. And I sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don’t have that in their lives make it through the day.”

David Foster Wallace

Books have accompanied me in my journey and have changed my course. Books have grounded me and lifted me up. Books have helped me hold myself together when hard winds have blown; winds that not only put off the lights but, winds that blow away the roofs and tear into our very being.

—rawjeev