Arts & Letters Daily is one of my favourite places on the internet to feel smart. It's an aggregator of fairly intelligent essays, articles, book reviews and things like that — a way to waste time on the internet without really feeling like you are wasting time.
Each link on A&L is accompanied by a tantalizing blurb which attempts to encapsulate the thrust or central question of the piece to which it leads. Often, these blurbs contain thought-provoking questions. Also often, the thoughts provoked by these questions are some that every thinking person has had provoked countless times before. I can not blame A&L. Often the questions in the blurbs accurately present the central topic of the article. It is not the questions' failure to transform my consciousness that entertains me, but the fact that they seem to attempt it. I suppose intellectuals — who I imagine are the target audience of A&L — will not click on anything that promises anything short of paradigm explosion. I think anyone who has ever written a paper has gotten excited about a question like this and clung to it despite knowing that the only answer one can reasonably reach is "maybe." Here are some obvious answers to game-changing questions.
Does God exist?
Probably not, but maybe.
Steve Jobs is a paragon of entrepreneurial intensity, a role model. Or is his a cautionary tale, of an abusive boss with a broken family?
Probably both.
Is autocorrect progress?
In some ways.
Does LSD have a bum rap? Can it improve problem solving?
Yes. Sometimes, but it also might break your mind.
What is the nature of knowledge?
Complex.
What does a dispute among the muses have to do with empathy?
I am sure you can find something.
This one, they answered themselves: Does quantum physics undermine materialism? Ostensibly, yes. But it sort of depends.
Is there a more overexposed poet than Robert Pinsky?
Yes. Who is Robert Pinsky?
Wedged too tightly behind their laptops, have literary writers given up on politics?
No.
Is Facebook making us lonely?
No.
How could people listen to Mozart one day and beat up Jews the next?
They are awful.
Another self-answerer: Can punk aerobics, speed dating, and “edgy” book clubs save libraries? Not likely.
Who but Elaine Pagels can drain the melodrama from the Book of Revelation, turning the climactic confrontation between good and evil into an anti-Christian polemic?
A lot of tiresome people I have met.
That'll teach 'em to be intellectually curious.
Seriously, though, A&L is a great site and these articles are, for the most part, worth a read.
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