Search Results for: label/book reviews/page/38/2011/04/making-it

898 results

Paleo Grift

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Thoughtstylings
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...ok Work: A Deep History, From the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. Suzman’s book, popular with the tech bro set, focuses on the Bushmen or San people of the Kalahari Desert, made famous by the 1980s movie The Gods Must Be Crazy (which I’ve never understood the appeal of, frankly). Suzman, relying on bad research, makes the claim that the San work 15 hours a week. In reality that 15 hours is the time spent just gathering food and the total doesn’t t...

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Netflix Before Netflix: The Tabard Inn Library

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Design
4 Comments
...rug stores and other retail establishments. Eaton also had a home delivery book service called the Booklovers Library. The scheme didn’t last long but did result in the creation of a huge mailing list that Eaton attempted to use for other businesses. Does this sound familiar? My local Von’s grocery store has a DVD rental service kiosk out front that still gets use. No, I’m not going to build a Tabard Inn Library reproduction for myself but I certa...

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Acedia, iPhone Addiction and the Noonday Devil

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Thoughtstylings
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...tackling the solutions to acedia. Applying acedia to phone addiction is a book length project, not a blog post, but allow me to consider some of the solutions these thinkers came up with. First is simply mapping the qualities of acedia to better understand what to do about it. The Desert Fathers, sitting in their cells, found that restlessness could mean just looking out the window to see what’s going on. Paradoxically, as the Desert Father Evagr...

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The Question Concerning Technology: Heidegger on Tech

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Goats, Thoughtstylings
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...es in the ineffable, that which can only be accessed, if dimly, through poetry, through art, through the irrational. If you’d like to read Heidegger’s essay I’d suggest heading to your library where it can be found in a book Readings in the Philosophy of Technology, edited by David M. Kaplan. That book also contains an essay by Hubert Dreyfus “Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology” that gives some more context. You can also find Heide...

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Tiny House Dweller as Contemporary Hermit in the Garden

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Thoughtstylings
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...ther and went so far as to pay people to act as hermits. Gordon Campbell’s book The Hermit in the Garden From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome contains the following story, At one great house in England the accounts disclose a half-yearly payment £300 to a hermit, who had, for this commensurate salary, to remain bearded and in a state of picturesque dirtiness for six months in the year in an artificial cave at a suitable distance from the house–j...

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