joshuago’s writing Bookmarks

The Internet highly values people who know things and can find things out, who can distinguish between what's important and what's not, and who can communicate succinctly and effectively. But it abhors the absence of voice.

Exploration of the question of how much weight we should ascribe to originality when there is obvious benefit in sharing, reintroduction, and remixing of ideas.

The hard part of writing isn’t the writing; it’s the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?

Journalism is not a particularly esteemed profession, but its capacity to bear witness remains one of its more redeeming attributes. In the field during a natural disaster of this scale, you do feel at times ghoulish and intrusive upon both the grief of survivors and in relation to the more directly useful efforts of rescuers and humanitarian relief workers. And yet all of those classes of participants in the crisis will recognize, most of the time, that journalism helpfully amplifies their own condition or potential.

How it happened and what can be done to reverse it. There are several causes, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself.

The ohs? The double-ohs? The zeros? The zips? The nadas? The naughties? As the reassuringly comprehensible nineties were drawing to a close, all these were suggested as possible designations for the coming era.

The most important thing is to have good examples on which to hang the abstract ideas. If the example takes too long to explain or is too much tied to a particular application, I might lose the interest or attention of too many readers. Thus I spend a great deal of time trying to find examples that are simultaneously easy to grasp and quite instructive.

A good writer can make you care about anything.

Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves.

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