Worthwhile Links: T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare + True Selves + Microgreens
A weekly compendium of good links and other fare.
Worth Reading
T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare:
Shakespeare is “universal” (if you like) because he has more of these tones than anyone else; but they are all out of the one man; one man cannot be more than one man; there might have been six Shakespeares at once without conflicting frontiers; and to say that Shakespeare expressed nearly all human emotions, implying that he left very little for anyone else, is a radical misunderstanding of art and the artist...
Jonathan Ichikawa on bad beliefs:
Here’s what I want to suggest: bad beliefs are only part of the story, and they’re an overemphasized part of it. I use the comparative ‘over’ deliberately — I don’t think bad beliefs are unimportant. They exist, and they are a problem, and epistemologists and agents for social change need to worry about them. But they are overemphasized, in the sense that they get more attention, at the expense of other important issues, than they should. For there is a different problem in the neighbourhood, and it is at least as important. That problem is the problem of bad suspension of belief.
Shayla Love, summarizing the research on 'true selves' for Motherboard:
When people make positive changes in their life, they are more likely to be viewed as revealing what was always deep inside of them. When they make negative changes, they are moving away from their true selves....
Even people who identify as misanthropes, who say that they think people are bad, show the same true self bias in experiments, attributing positive traits to the true self, and negative traits to something else.
Worth Hearing
'The Eternals' was not a great movie. Wasn’t even good. But the soundtrack by Ramin Djawadi is good and worth the listen.
Worth Trying
A favorite discovery of 2021 was microgreens. They taste great, last forever, and may be more nutritious than their grown selves. (Not that nutrition is the best way to think about food.) Even better: my local brand comes from a futuristic vertical farm.
