Remembering Aaron Swartz: David Foster Wallace on the Meaning of Life

“Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”

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In Defense of the Fluid Self: Why Anaïs Nin Turned Down a Harper’s Bazaar Profile

“I am more interested in human beings than in writing, more interested in lovemaking than in writing, more interested in living than in writing.”

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The Half-Life of Facts: Dissecting the Predictable Patterns of How Knowledge Grows

“No one learns something new and then holds it entirely independent of what they already know. We incorporate it into the little edifice of personal knowledge that we have been creating in our minds our entire lives.”

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Henry Miller on Reading, the Life of the Mind, and How to Fix Education

“Our whole theory of education is based on the absurd notion that we must learn to swim on land before tackling the water. It applies to the pursuit of the arts as well as to the pursuit of knowledge.”

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The Freud Files: How Freud Engineered His Own Myth

What Copernicus and Darwin have to do with Marie Bonaparte’s diary and Carl Jung’s scathing fury.

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