Month: November 2012

• November 14, 2012

  The challenge posed by Udacity

  I agree with the New Media writer Clay Shirky that the time is right for a massive disruption of higher education. In his blog, “Napster, Udacity, and the Academy,” Shirky explores how higher ed content is–like music after what’s been dubbed the ‘Napster moment’–set to become ‘unbundled.’ Udacity’s power play is to ‘decouple’ the course…
• November 13, 2012

  Love of love

  What’s love got to do with it? Yesterday morning, one conversation partner spoke of wanting to “love life without limit.” We spoke about how to draw out the meditative aspects from the ordinary run of life. In the afternoon, Cheyenna Weber, Interim Director at the New Economy Network and Founder of SolidarityNYC, told me that,…
• November 9, 2012

  Plotinus on beauty (an exhortation)

  In “On Beauty” (Ennead 1.6), Plotinus invites us to consider “what it is that attracts the gaze of those who look at something, and turns and draws them to it and makes them enjoy the sight.” He thinks this is a particularly good question into what makes something beautiful when it is so called (his answer will…
• November 8, 2012

  Lines composed the morning after the Noreaster (Plotinus, Ennead 1.6)

  Lovers love the beautiful. Plotinus inquires what about the beautiful makes it so. Early on in Ennead 1, he says (pace the Stoics) that it is not the mere proportions of the thing that make whatever the thing is beautiful, hence not the proper relations of part to whole. For cannot a line be beautiful and cannot a…
• November 7, 2012

  To the country to be full-time cultivars of the spirit

  I now have the warm socks, the woolen ones; they came in the mail yesterday. I’m told the wood is stacked up in the shed, ready in case the power goes out. We’re supposed to pick up an axe (the old one looked a shame, even to a novice such as myself) as well as…