Misc

“It was, she said, a great discovery, albeit my real life.”

If you kill something, look it in the eyes as you do.

Against hitching together your desire to accomplish things and your desire to do good.

In my last post, I wrote about an ethos expressed in A Wizard of Earthsea — an ethos that I find deeply resonant, but that I also think worth some scrutiny. This post attempts some of that scrutiny. Here is an effort to summarize some part of this ethos: turn outwards to the world — […]

Recently I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. The book has a certain kind of ethos, which I found moving and beautiful, but which can seem — to some, and to some parts of me — questionable. In this post, I’m going to try to gesture at that ethos; in the next, I […]

I started reading The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman’s account of the beginning of World War I. One passage in particular struck me. She describes the German general Alfred von Schlieffen, who authored, in 1905 and 1906, the plan that Germany eventually employed in attacking France in 1914, via Belgium on the right wing. Image […]