Just read: The Internet makes it easy to score a quick hit of feel-good emotion without actually doing anything. But if morality is considered a nutrient, then the cheapest forms of online activism are just doughnuts. “It’s the equivalent of refined foods,” says Gray. “It’s engineered to make us like it, but it’s ultimately empty.”

I just read: “Once, in the southern Jordanian desert, Avi (Shmida, an Israeli botanist) pointed out a single succulent green plant where the only other gross was dry, dusty scrub. ‘What do you know when you see a green plant in the desert?’ he asked. I shook my head, and he exclaimed: ‘It’s poison! Otherwise something would’ve eaten it by now.'” – An excerpt from “Who Gets What and Why”. 

According to a speed-reading testsponsored by Staples as part of an e-book promotion (brilliant marketing, by the way), here are the typical speeds at which humans read, and in theory comprehend, at various stages of educational development:Third-grade students = 150 words per minute (wpm)

Eight grade students = 250

Average college student = 450

Average “high level exec” = 575

Average college professor = 675

Speed readers = 1,500

World speed reading champion = 4,700

See full article at http://onforb.es/K9Q5gd

“Envy not the oppressor, choose none of his ways.Be not wise in thine own eyes, only Jah you must praise.

Strive not with a man without a cause if he has done thee no harm, let bygones be bygones.” – Buju 

This morning I left my apartment around 5:30 to head to the airport. Bahamas on the horizon. Across the street were roughly ten cops, some milling around, others moving into the building. Seems like a lot of cops for pretty much any reason given how causally they were moving. I’ll probably never find out what that was all about..

On the Long Island Expressway a woman in a Prius (of all cars), hit the median after swerving and drifting back and forth across lanes. She had been playing solo bumper cars with the inside of the midtown tunnel, having hit the side (or curb) about four times. At first it seemed like bad driving, then careless driving, then truly reckless driving; but after she hit the median on the highway and came off the ground it was clearly drunk driving. I felt compelled to call it in in the interest of public safety, which may very well have saved her life as well. The Uber driver congratulated me on a “good job” 

It is what is. 

Just occurring to me is this: Words are only the leaves on the trees of thought, held together and arranged. They age, eventually blanketing the forest floor where they take on new life, or merely create a new layer on the carpet of things once said whose shape, color, and precise origin have been forgotten. I am meandering through the forest today from my apartment. I have been somewhat absent here, but always present somewhere. 

Please stay tuned. 

I started paying attention to The Atlantic in recent days after having read some excellent pieces, and I’m thrilled that I did. See below for links to them. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/gifts-debts-inheritances/417423/
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-silicon-valley-suicides/413140/

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

On a rainy, New York day people look like an assortment of shiny mushrooms packed tightly, all in a row..

This thought, the one I’ve just had and decided to share was not driven by any literal wait in line, but came as an example in a thought stream. 

I hate waiting in lines. Sometimes I’ll simply not get something or go somewhere because of the lines. Conversely, I love NOT waiting in lines. That can mean that I abort the entire venture so as not to wait, but it might also mean being granted some line-skipping privilege – which I will almost certainly accept. 

I thought to myself: How do I reconcile these notions with not thinking of myself as (intrinsically) better than others, which I certainly do not. 

I think that the difference is that we can be happy to accept certain privileges and even seek them, so long as we don’t come to believe that we simply deserve them, and deserve them exclusively (and exclusively deserve them).