borepop

>No one should just go sit with zero context and no support.

C'mon now. It's not hang-gliding or dropping acid, it's sitting quietly in a room. Not everything in life should be treated as if it's horrendously risky or can't possibly be understood by people exercising common sense.

Nor, in my opinion, do the agglomeration of various meditative practices and teachings, no matter how old and "sacred" they may theoretically be, necessarily have anything all that critical to add to the subjective experience of simply sitting quietly. Just like the practices and teachings that accompany many organized religions, a lot of meditative lingo and theories about meditative "progress" is, IMHO, horseshit peddled by people who have decided to make a living selling said horseshit or have defined themselves by their unquestioning acceptance of said horseshit.

edit: I should add that I can recognize that, as others discuss in this thread, deep meditation over long periods may trigger various psychological issues for some people. However, it's also true that, for example, eating food can be extremely problematic for some people who have serious eating disorders. That doesn't mean that the mere act of eating, which most people manage to do just fine, somehow needs to be guided by some deep tradition, and I don't believe that sitting in meditation needs such guidance in general either. For most people, meditation is a very gentle, mildly restorative practice that aids mood and focus, not some metaphysically shattering cataclysm.

I too thought this was an important issue that seemed to be missing from the article. That and the risk of burns.

There's nowhere left near me at all that sells the New York Times, which was the paper I liked to read in physical form. Used to be a fun weekend ritual to pick up the Sunday edition from the coffee shop down the street and sit around reading things and doing the crossword, but I can't find it anymore. I'm not sure if it was covid that killed off the distribution or just the economics of print.

Sometimes I find these kinds of link submissions pretty baffling. "Here's a nearly 30 year old article about a dead comedian!"

Thanks, I guess. But also: why?

Why this arbitrary New Yorker article, as opposed to any other article written in the last three decades?

Nothing that Christopher Hitchens ever said struck me as remotely insightful. Characterizing one of his reductive proclamations as a "razor" does not make it more useful or accurate.

Also Francis Fukuyama: history ended in 1992.

As opposed to CEOs and upper management, who are all lovely people and want nothing but the best for their employees, and are definitely not motivated by short-term gains.

Don't Look Up, currently out on Netflix, seems to owe a fair amount to Idiocracy. And/or to the ways in which American culture morphed into Idiocracy over the last several years.

Right but the ostensible hook for the reader's interest is the moderately banal design of the corkscrew. Which, to anyone with any sense of perspective, is not a particularly compelling problem.

Indeed, I would rather have a banal corkscrew than have to read a totally banal essay. At least the corkscrew does not falsely purport to impart wisdom to me.

>Why is there even a counter?

Yes! It makes no frickin' sense in an age of internet booking, and this is why I, too, use Hertz Gold. As much as Hertz was raked over the coals in that recent Twitter post (seemingly justifiably), I have generally have pretty good experiences with them and hope to never again stand around at a counter having a moronic experience instructing somebody else to re-type all the information I've already typed in when I made the reservation in the first place.

My stepfather (a retired professor) is endlessly fascinated by these kinds of questions. If you ever ask him at dinner "so what are you working on?" the result is often a half-hour-long explanation of how many polygons could conceivably fit into some other polygon, if it's not about how many numbers could be derived from some other set of numbers. I've never been able to understand any of it, but it makes him happy.

That's interesting, thank you. Funny how ugly the product is, I almost prefer the goofy kid car phone.

Holy shit, I have wanted exactly this product (minus the "child" styling) for years for my actual office, as a productivity tool. I just want to be able to take and make calls on my phone without being dragged into a vortex of tangential nonsense.