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The purpose of being a serious writer is not to express oneself, and it is not to make something beautiful, though one might do those things anyway. Those things are beside the point. The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair. If you keep that in mind always, the wish to make something beautiful or smart looks slight and vain in comparison. If people read your work and, as a result, choose life, then you are doing your job.

Sarah Manguso (via austinkleon)

#writing

"In short, Douglass called on free people, black and white, as well as enslaved people to defy state and federal laws that protected slavery."

"I didn’t write my books for posterity (not that posterity would have cared): I wrote them for myself. Which doesn’t mean I didn’t hunger for readers and fame. I never could have endured so much hard, solitary labor without the prospect of an audience. But this graveyard of dead books doesn’t unnerve me. It reminds me that I had a deeper motive, one that only the approach of old age and death has unlocked. I wrote to answer questions I had — the motive of all art, whatever its ostensible subject. There were things I urgently needed to know. " James Atlas

#writing #James atlas

"It’s the simple, inspiring idea that when members of different groups — even groups that historically dislike one another — interact in meaningful ways, trust and compassion bloom naturally as a result, and prejudice falls by the wayside."

#psychology #immigrants #prejudice

"We need to understand how refugees are different so that we don’t erase the specificity of their experience."

#books #reading #short stories #refugees

'In his recent letter, he explained for the first time his decision to say something publicly. “Despite my preference to stay out of the media,” he wrote, “I’ve taken the view that each of us can be bystanders, or we can be upstanders. I choose upstander.”'

"We remember our history, and we remember that the borders of this country closed to us in 1924 with very catastrophic consequences during the Holocaust,” Rabbi Jacobs said. “We know that some of the language that’s being used now to stop Muslims from coming in is the same language that was used to stop Jewish refugees from coming."

#trump #muslim ban

wilwheaton

Trump’s tweets attacking the judiciary go well beyond conventional criticism of judicial opinions on the substance or of “unelected judges” who are said to be overstepping their power. The description of the judge who first blocked his ban as a “so-called judge” directly targeted the judiciary’s institutional legitimacy. And it’s not hard to imagine where Trump’s explicit claim that any terrorist attack should be blamed on the judiciary will take him next, if such an attack does occur. Trump recently claimed that “any negative polls are fake news,” particularly those from major networks like CNN, NBC and ABC. He added: “Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.” In other words, any poll that finds that Trump or his policies are unpopular is suspect or invented by definition. Multiple polls have shown that majorities reject his travel ban and his border wall, and global protests have broken out against the ban in particular. In other words, the public backlash to the first two major efforts to translate Trumpism into policy reality has been severe. In response, Trump is explicitly telling his supporters that any empirical evidence of that backlash must be discounted as fake news — particularly if the polls in question come from major news organizations, who are thus being cast as deliberate deceivers of Real Americans. You cannot divorce that last point from the larger context here: Trump and Sean Spicer spent days attacking the news media for accurately reporting on his shriveled inauguration crowds, and Stephen Bannon has claimed that Trump’s “populist nation-state policies are supported by the vast and overwhelming majority of Americans” — in other words, that a vast silent majority is rooting for Trumpism to succeed. But that’s just nonsense. The effort to falsely inflate impressions of popular support for Trump — and for policies that in reality are deeply controversial and divisive and are being rejected by majorities — is concerted and deliberate. And the unabashed use of obvious and demonstrable lies to carry out this deception campaign is remarkably brazen. Trump is now claiming that the media is covering up terrorist attacks, saying that “ISIS is on a campaign of genocide, committing atrocities across the world,” and that “in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it.” The larger context here is crucial, too: The media has in fact been invaluable in rooting out the dangerously incompetent process that led to the creation of this ban, as well as the ugly, discriminatory ideological underpinnings of the idea. In response, Trump, once again, is moving to obliterate the very possibility of shared agreement on the legitimate institutional role of the news media in informing the citizenry — right when it is playing that role to great effect by shedding light on the truth about his latest and most visible exercise of executive power, thus demonstrating that it can function as a check on him.

Trump is now attacking all the institutions that could limit his power.

This is not what a president in a democracy (or, pedants, representative republic) does. This is what an autocrat who hopes to be a dictator does.

Congress is doing fuckall to stop this madman and his puppet master, Steve Bannon. We have to keep calling, keep marching, and when we have a chance, defeat these cowards in the next election. This means we start working now, and we don’t stop until they are gone. We will lose more battles than we win, but the ones we win will be fundamental to protecting our country.

(via wilwheaton)

I love librarians. "Helping students become smarter evaluators of the information that floods into their lives has become increasingly necessary in an era in which fake news is a constant."

#librarians #fake news

Those trying to get motivated attempt to change how they feel in order to change what they do. Those with superior strategies change what they do FIRST, which is the end goal anyway, and are given the bonus of generating more motivation. The greatest motivator, in fact, is employing a successful strategy. People think they need motivation to reach success, but in reality, they need success to generate motivation.

[Stephen Guise](http://stephenguise.com/motivation-strategy-perspective/)

#productivity

The Read List: Fiction Unboxed by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant

Why yes! I am determined to keep my Read List up-to-date (once this post publishes, I’ll be two for two – yay!).

So I just finished Fiction Unboxed by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant. I’d missed all the hoopla around the Kickstarter that began this project a couple of years ago, so I’m glad I discovered it the other day when I was bored and clicking around Amazon.

As I always do when I’m…

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robertogreco

I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.

Octavia Butler (See also “This is how I read” and “the tyranny of belief in linear time.” (via robertogreco)

The Read List: Summer at Castle Stone, by Lynn Marie Hulsman

Have you ever had those reading moments when you know you really need something light and funny? That’s how Summer at Castle Stone, by Lynn Marie Hulsman fell into my Read List. Something about the synopsis caught my eye, and next thing you know I had it on my ereader.

This summer, lose your heart in Ireland…

Shayla Sheridan’s a New York native born into big city luxury, but she’s never really…

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It’s easy to get lost in the result instead of enjoying the process. As we go through life, it can be easy to hyper-focus on the final product—what we’ll get when we finish, at the end of the line. Sometimes that can look like a promotion at work, college graduation, or perhaps a really great loaf of bread. That product, though, is *such a small portion of our lives*–and just like the bread, it is often temporary in nature. Learning to love the process makes the final product that much more rewarding. Once the product is made, we move back to the process yet again.

Five Things I Learned from Sourdough Bread

#process

joehillsthrills-deactivated2019

ABC bookstore in Amsterdam offers book blind dates. Other bookshops should act now to steal this idea.

One of Asimov’s best methods to keep the work flowing was to have more than one project going at a time. If he got writers’ block or got bored with one project, he simply switched to another project, a tactic which kept him from stopping work to agonize and procrastinate. By the time he came back to the first project, he found the writing flowed easily once again.

What Can We Learn From the Prolific Mr. Asimov?

#writing productivity #writing #Isaac Asimov

The results also indicate that “emotion has a huge effect on the way our brains can be creative,” McPherson says. Positive emotion, for instance, seems to be related to a deeper state of creative flow.

Mapping Creativity in the Brain

#creativity

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