Wow! Sherry Turkle and Jaron Lanier appear in different reports on one hour of the PBS NewsHour. Marvin Minsky, too.

"Henry David Thoreau wrote books that not many people read when they were published. … But a South African lawyer of Indian descent named Mohandas Gandhi read Thoreau on civil disobedience and found ideas that helped him fight discrimination in Africa and then liberate his own country from British rule. Martin Luther King studied Thoreau and Gandhi and put their ideas to work in the United States, while in 1952 the African National Congress and the young Nelson Mandela were collaborating with the South African Indian Congress on civil disobedience campaigns. You wish you could write Thoreau a letter about all this. He had no way of knowing that what he planted would still be bearing fruit 151 years after his death. But the past doesn’t need us. The past guides us; the future needs us."

— Rebecca Solnit, “The Future Needs Us.”

The trouble with Twitter isn’t that it’s full of inanity and self-promoting jerks. The trouble is that it’s a solution to a problem that shouldn’t be solved. Eighty percent of the battle of writing involves keeping yourself in that cave: waiting out the loneliness and opacity and emptiness and frustration and bad sentences and dead ends and despair until the damn thing resolves into words. That kind of patience, a steady turning away from everything but the mind and the topic at hand, can only be accomplished by cultivating the habit of attention and a tolerance for solitude.

How Twitter Hijacked My Mind – fantastic meditation by New York Magazinebook critic Kathryn Schulz; bonus points for the Bukowski reference. 

“You don’t measure love in time. You measure love in transformation. Sometimes the longest connections yield very little growth, while the briefest of encounters change everything. The heart doesn’t wear a watch - it’s timeless. It doesn’t care how long you know someone. It doesn’t care if you had a 40 year anniversary if there is no juice in the connection. What the heart cares about is resonance. Resonance that opens it, resonance that enlivens it, resonance that calls it home. And when it finds it, the transformation begins…” 

Jeff Brown (via cosmofilius)

Via Utne Reader

From a letter in 1863, Mark Twain on New Year's resolutions: pic.twitter.com/WrBvAKUpHf

— Letters of Note (@LettersOfNote) December 31, 2013