A Momentary Taste of Being

Stranger than Science Fiction There's a good deal of truth in what is said in the article.  Every day it seems, I open my eyes to something more surreal than Dali, Magritte, or Tanguy would ever have imagined.

Do those not holding to a faith exhibit great brand loyalty? Interesting and amusing. via BooksInq.

Is Literary Culture Shutting Down?

from Hamlet's Blackberry William Powers Ultimately, human experience is not about what happens to most people, it's about what happens to each of us, hour by hour and moment by moment. Rather than using the general as a route to the particular, sometimes we need to take exactly the opposite approach. This is especially true when the question is the quality of our lives. In recent years, there's been a tremendous fascination with crowd thinking and behavior. The digital crowd not only has power, we're told, it also has wisdom. Watching the crowd can certainly tell you which way popular tastes are heading and who's buying which products at any given moment. This isn't wisdom at all, however, but what's commonly known as "smarts," that canny ability to read the landscape that serves one well in stock picking, gambling and other short-term pursuits. Every crowd is just a collection of individual selves, and to understand what's happening to th...