Category: ethics

• February 27, 2012

  On a good friend being a good introducer

  One of my friends, Dougald Hine, told me once that a good friend is someone who senses when to introduce who to whom. (I take him to be talking about action, not about grammatical constructions.) Let’s parse this statement. First of all, an introduction is not a recommendation, i.e., not a “should” statement, but a…
• February 25, 2012

  Now think fast!: Brief reflections on the making of ‘Despatches from the Invisible Revolution’

  The very idea of the book is undergoing a paradigm shift before our eyes. For the life of me, I can’t tell exactly what a book is, what it is supposed to do, how it is meant to loop into or out of our cultural moment, or what purpose it will likely serve in the…
• February 24, 2012

  Hospitality in actu: A search term poem

  First Digression Last night I dreamed I was surfing idly on the internet. Pretty quickly things got dicey. When I entered search terms or a URL into Google Chrome, I was immediately re-directed to a page of ads. “No,” I thought. “This can’t be right.” No, that’s not quite it. It was rather that “andrewjtaggart.com”…
• February 23, 2012

  ‘I fear I am becoming an old man already…’

  I fear I am becoming an old man already. I keep a spare tissue wedged down in the two finger nook of my pocket. Sometimes it is crisp from use or age, and when I am hard up I do not think twice of tearing off a jagged piece of toilet paper from the half-used…
• February 22, 2012

  Late afternoon, the fugitive stillness

  There’s a moment, not long, sometime after late afternoon but well before twilight. It’s not like the early morning before the signs turn to face you and the feet clap up the stairwells. It’s not like the “dead of night” or the “dead of winter” when stillness is near universal and the “streets are empty.”…