08 February 2026
See.
To be taught to read—what is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak—but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think—nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.
John Ruskin, from "Of Kings' Treasuries"
Perhaps.
For "crooked trees" everywhere ...
Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which, in their depths, have a life of their own; for even the most articulate people are unable to help, since what words point to is so very delicate, is almost unsayable. But even so, I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if you trust in Things that are like the ones my eyes are now resting upon. If you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself for that but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and don't hate anything.
Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet
Consequential.
The culture loves the simplicity of labels.
Like its sibling catch-alls passionate, awesome and kind, smart is a word that is misunderstood, misused, and inappropriately labelled.
We have surrendered one of our most consequential words.
“Smart” once described a rare and admirable combination of quick pattern-recognition, sound judgment, deep understanding, and intellectual courage.
Coffee makers are smart. Doorbells are smart. Thermostats, scales, toothbrushes, refrigerators, and even trash cans are now smart. Today it is a hollow compliment applied to almost anything that moves, sells, or flatters our self-image. A toddler who stacks two blocks is “so smart!” An adult who can parallel-park receives the same adjective.
When everything is smart, nothing is.
Worse still, we have begun to use “smart” where intrinsic value is lacking.. Calling someone “smart” now frequently substitutes for saying they are good, wise, honest, or brave. The implication is clear and corrosive: intelligence (or any cheap counterfeit) is the only virtue that really matters. Decency, integrity, humility, and perseverance have been demoted to secondary traits—if they are noticed at all.
The result is an overvalue of discernible cleverness. We celebrate people who are quick, shiny, and rhetorically flashy while growing blind to those who are slow, deep, awkward, and true; I admiringly call this group the "crooked trees." We have convinced ourselves that being “smart” is the same thing as being useful. It's not.
Language is a tool used to shape reality. When we continue to culturally degrade language that once pointed toward something difficult and valuable, we devalue the very thing it pointed toward. We no longer have a reliable way to name genuine excellence because we have spent the word on light bulbs, algorithmic patterns, and passive-aggressive comebacks.
It is time to retire “smart” from this type of casual drivel.
Let it rest until we're able use it to describe a mind that sees the wonder others dismiss, holds conclusions lightly but courageously, changes its mind when the evidence demands it, and remains humble in the face of what it does not yet understand.
I move that we abolish the cult of smart. Instead, especially where kids are concerned, try using ...
- Hard-working
- Enthusiastic
- Determined
- Poetic
- Perceptive
- Shrewd
- Discerning
- Experienced
- Well-read
- Critical
- What else?
These still carry weight. They still cost something to say, a reminder that not every convenience, not every quick reply, not every small optimization deserves to be canonized with the same adjective we once reserved for the keenest forms of understanding.
What matters for recognizing high levels of performance is that a person is challenged, requiring attitudes that are perceptive and receptive to being challenged, if not actively seeking out challenge and eagerly facing and admitting the prospect of misadventure, even failure.
That may be the most important thing a parent, a mentor, or even a teacher can impart.
People are born with some innate cognitive differences, but those differences are eclipsed by early achievement, Boaler argues. When people perform well (academically or otherwise) at early ages and are labeled smart or gifted, they become less likely to challenge themselves. They become less likely to make mistakes, because they stay in their comfortable comfort zone and stop growing. And their fixed mindset persists through adulthood. The simple and innocent praising of a smart kid feeds an insidious problem that some researchers track all the way up to gender inequality in STEM careers.
From Inc. ...
Our society is obsessed with the label of being smart. Even more so, we're obsessed with how smart you are compared to others. Historically, these measurements started in early education as a way to place children in the "right" class levels. As a result, our society has become overly focused on intelligence, so much so, that in the business world it's common to innocently describe others as smart without much thought. Being smart is defined in the dictionary as having or showing a quick-witted intelligence. This just tells someone they're fast thinking, but what value does it ultimately provide in the workplace?The proclivity to use this label can cause long-lasting damage. Below are some reasons why being labeled "smart" is actually a hindrance rather than a help.
Hamblin continues ...
At whatever age smart people develop the idea that they are smart, they also tend to develop vulnerability around relinquishing that label. So the difference between telling a kid “You did a great job” and “You are smart” isn’t subtle. That is, at least, according to one growing movement in education and parenting that advocates for retirement of “the S word.”
The idea is that when we praise kids for being smart, those kids think: Oh good, I'm smart. And then later, when those kids mess up, which they will, they think: Oh no, I'm not smart after all. People will think I’m not smart after all. And that’s the worst. That’s a risk to avoid, they learn.“Smart” kids stand to become especially averse to making mistakes, which are critical to learning and succeeding.
“Mistakes grow your brain,” as the professor of mathematics education at Stanford University Jo Boaler put it on Monday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by The Atlantic. I wondered why, then, my brain is not so distended that it spills out of my ears and nose. I should have to stuff it back inside like a sleeping bag, and I should have to carry Q-tips around during social events as stuffing implements. Boaler notes, more eloquently, that at least a small part of the forebrain called the thalamus can appreciably grow after periods of the sort of cognitive stimulation involved in mistake-making. What matters for improving performance is that a person is challenged, which requires a mindset that is receptive to being challenged—if not actively seeking out challenge and failure. And that may be the most important thing a teacher can impart.
Psychology Today looks closely at the culture's neutering obsession with "smart"...
The other aspect of "smart" is an evaluative one. It says, roughly, that this display of intelligence is one that the speaker considers praiseworthy, or which accords with the speaker's values. If there is a cleverly worded advertisement in favor of a political cause that I support, or a thoughtfully posed objection that supports my point of view, that is "smart." But if there is a cleverly worded advertisement in support of my political opponent, or an objection which undermines my favored theory, that is not smart at all.This account of the meaning of "smart," if it is on the right track, encourages a degree of caution. Thick concepts are notorious for the way they build evaluative views into purportedly neutral language. Consider "chaste." This term has a certain descriptive content to it, but it also tacitly accepts a certain view of gender and sexual morality, one which many of us would now reject. We are therefore rightly reluctant to describe people as "chaste," and I think we should show a measure of reluctance toward "smart" as well, which is not as descriptive as it seems to be.
Let’s stop using smart.
Thinking.
Understand this clearly: you can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.
John Ruskin, from The Stones of Venice
Accordance.
Steve points to the Friedmans on the concentration of power ...
We have been forgetting the basic truth that the greatest threat to human freedom is the concentration of power, whether in the hands of government or anyone else. We have persuaded ourselves that it is safe to grant power, provided it is for good purposes.
Fortunately, we are waking up. We are again recognizing the dangers of an overgoverned society, coming to understand that good objectives can be perverted by bad means, that reliance on the freedom of people to control their own lives in accordance with their own values is the surest way to achieve the full potential of a great society.
Wrestling.
Do not get discouraged. Be encouraged and of great courage. Your voice matters. Your witness matters. And as a young, serious intellectual, engaging the life of the mind, finding joy in the life of the mind, not just in the instrumental way and using ideas for politics—there’s a joy in the life of the mind. Never apologize for that. That's like John Coltrane apologizing because he’s playing the saxophone, a European instrument. He loves playing that instrument, but in that love of playing that instrument, he also knows he can inspire and illuminate and instruct people to be more courageous forces for good, in solidarity with the poor around the world, in every culture and every continent. And so we’re in a very dim and grim time, but we have to have a blues sensibility. And the blues is about wrestling with catastrophe, but never allowing catastrophe to have the last word, because we have a love and a courage and a joy inside of us that can never be taken away.
Rev. Dr. Cornel West, from an interview with Dr. Nathan J. Robinson
Happy Birthday, John Ruskin
Ruskin, Ca’ d’Oro, Venice, 1845
Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, ridgidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom--a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom--is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality.
John Ruskin, born on this day in 1819, from The Stones of Venice
07 February 2026
Pleasant.
The dirt resists you. It is very hard to make the earth your own. I’ve done much less to try to make it mine. All my association with it is a kind of freedom. Yet it’s hard to live at the ranch. When I first came here I had to go 70 miles on a dirt road for supplies. Nobody would go by in two weeks. I thought the ranch would be good for me because nothing can grow here and I wouldn’t be able to use up my time gardening. But I got tired of canned vegetables so now I grow everything I need for the year at Abiquiu. I like to get up when the dawn comes. The dogs start talking to me and I like to make a fire and maybe some tea and then sit in bed and watch the sun come up. The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.
Georgia O’Keeffe
Inspiration.
Kenneth Grahame's boyhood home, "The Mount", from which it is said he drew great inspiration for The Wind in the Willows ...
The weary Mole also was glad to turn in without delay, and soon had his head on his pillow, in great joy and contentment. But ere he closed his eyes he let them wander round his old room, mellow in the glow of the firelight that played or rested on familiar and friendly things which had long been unconsciously a part of him, and now smilingly received him back, without rancour.
He was now in just the frame of mind that the tactful Rat had quietly worked to bring about in him. He saw clearly how plain and simple — how narrow, even — it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one's existence.
He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage.
But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.
Kenneth Grahame, from The Wind in the Willows
Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens
I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange sort. Almost all men are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a listener’s internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveler, who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a sea-serpent, would have no fear of mentioning it; but the same traveler , having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before he would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which such subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of these subjective things as we do our experiences of objective creation. The consequence is, that the general stock of experience in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect.
Charles Dickens, born on this day in 1812, from "To be Taken with a Grain of Salt"
Covers.
Joe Paulik covers a few Lightfoot favorites ...
"Long River"
"Sea of Tranquility"
"Home from the Forest"
06 February 2026
Happy Birthday, Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan was born on this day in 1911.
From his "A Time for Choosing" speech in 1964 ...
You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down—up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order—or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.
04 February 2026
Mickey Lolich, Rest in Peace
Mickey Lolich, my first sports hero, has passed.
The quintessential bluecollar player in a bluecollar town ...
03 February 2026
Happy Birthday, Simone Weil
Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.
Simone Weil, born on this day in 1909, from "Reflections on War"
Happy Birthday, Felix Mendelssohn
Magnus, Felix Mendelssohn, 1846
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Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was born on this day in 1809.
The Frankfurt Radio Symphony, conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada, performs Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, Op.27 ...
02 February 2026
Beware.
The dark ages may return, the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science, and what might now shower immeasurable material blessings upon mankind, may even bring about its total destruction.
Beware, I say; time may be short. Do not let us take the course of allowing events to drift along until it is too late.
Sir Winston Churchill, from "The Sinews of Peace"
Re-Adorn.
Down with the rosemary and bays,
Down with the misletoe;
Instead of holly, now up-raise
The greener box, for show.
The holly hitherto did sway;
Let box now domineer,
Until the dancing Easter-day,
Or Easter's eve appear.
Then youthful box, which now hath grace
Your houses to renew,
Grown old, surrender must his place
Unto the crisped yew.
When yew is out, then birch comes in,
And many flowers beside,
Both of a fresh and fragrant kin,
To honour Whitsuntide.
Green rushes then, and sweetest bents,
With cooler oaken boughs,
Come in for comely ornaments,
To re-adorn the house.
Thus times do shift; each thing his turn does hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.
Robert Herrick
Happy Candlemas.
Thanks, Mum.
Comes.
Wyeth, February 2, 1942, 1942
The hedge-rows cast a shallow shade
Upon the frozen grass,
But skies at evening song are soft,
And comes the Candlemas.
Each day a little later now
Lingers the westering sun;
Far out of sight the miracles
Of April are begun.
O barren bough! O frozen field!
Hopeless ye wait no more.
Life keeps her dearest promises—
The Spring is at the door!
Arthur Ketchum
Happy Birthday, Ayn Rand
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Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of my life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred? No, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?"
"I've felt it all my life," she said.”
Ayn Rand, born on this day in 1905, from Atlas Shrugged
01 February 2026
Difference.
- took photos of the family, friends, and scenery, not themselves.
- discussed politics at the dinner table, not in public.
- were humble, never bragged.
- read books, listened to music, and did puzzles, not video games.
- posted their kid's report cards on the refrigerator, not in the newspaper.
- wore dress clothes to church, never shorts and a t-shirt.
- made and drank coffee at home, not the grocery store.
- celebrated and sacrificed, never indulged.
- circled-the-wagons and stuck together through tough times, never gave up.
- took their kids on vacation in the summer, not in February.
- waited their turn, held doors, and offered encouragement, condolences, and congratulations, not proclamations.
- made eye-contact, nodded, and smiled at strangers, not self-absorbed.
- were quiet when they didn't have something nice to say, never said "F-you," ... ever.
- showed up, never skipped.
I'm lucky. Back then it made a difference.
Look.
CEREMONY UPON CANDLEMAS EVE
Down with the rosemary, and so
Down with the bays and misletoe ;
Down with the holly, ivy, all,
Wherewith ye dress'd the Christmas Hall :
That so the superstitious find
No one least branch there left behind :
For look, how many leaves there be
Neglected, there (maids, trust to me)
So many goblins you shall see.
Robert Herrick
31 January 2026
Happy Birthday, Phil Manzanera
Phil Manzanera was born on this day in 1951.
"On an Island," with David Gilmour ...
Dared.
In January, Lake Erie froze nearly to Canada. One evening, standing before its ominous expanse in my ice skates, with a wool cap pulled over my ears and a long scarf wound around my neck and crisscrossed over my chest beneath my blue Navy-surplus pea jacket, I left the shore. I planned to face down the spectre of my fear by going as far as I dared toward Canada, or the Livingston ship channel if the icebreaker had been through.
I hoped that my love of skating would propel me through the worst of my worries ...
Tom McGuane, from "Ice"
Happy Birthday, Franz Schubert
Rieder, Franz Schubert, 1825
Franz Schubert was born on this day in 1797.
Members of the Vienna Philharmonic perform "The Trout," Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667 ...
Priority.
But whatever the depths of self-enchantment, the demagogue has to say something ...
There is always rivalry, and there is always a search for means of exploiting the means of advancing one's own position. In other ages, one paid court to the king. Now we pay court to the people. In the final analysis, just as the king might look down with terminal disdain upon a courtier whose hypocrisy repelled him, so we have no substitute for relying on the voter to exercise a quiet veto when it becomes more necessary to discourage cynical demagogy, than to advance free health for the kids. That can come later, in another venue; the resistance to a corrupting demagogy should take first priority.
William F. Buckley Jr., from "The Demagogues Are Running"
Warns.
"Don't Be a Sucker" is a 1943 U.S. Army Signal Corps film that warns Americans about the dangers of bigotry, hate speech, and demagoguery by showing how they mirrored the rise of Nazism in Germany ...
Happy Birthday, Thomas Merton
In an age when totalitarianism has striven, in every way, to devaluate and degrade the human person, we hope it is right to demand a hearing for any and every sane reaction in favor of man's inalienable solitude and his interior freedom. The murderous din of our materialism cannot be allowed to silence the independent voices which will never cease to speak. It is all very well to insist that man is a "social animal" -- the fact is obvious enough. But that is no justification for making him a mere cog in a totalitarian machine -- or in a religious one either, for that matter.
In actual fact, society depends for its existence on the inviolable personal solitude of its members. Society, to merit its name, must be made up not of numbers, or mechanical units, but of persons. To be a person implies responsibility and freedom, and both these imply a certain interior solitude, a sense of personal integrity, a sense of one's own reality and one's ability to give himself to society -- or to refuse that gift.
When men are merely submerged in a mass of impersonal human beings pushed around by impersonal forces, they lose their true humanity, their integrity, their dignity, their ability to love, their capacity for self-determination. When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment, and hate.
No amount of technological progress will cure the hatred that eats away the vitals of materialistic society like a spiritual cancer. The only cure is, and must always be, spiritual. There is not much use talking to men about God and love if they are not able to listen. The ears with which one hears the message of the Gospel are hidden in man's heart, and those ears do not hear anything unless they are favored with a certain interior solitude and silence.
In other words, since faith is a matter of freedom and self-determination -- the free receiving of a freely given gift of grace -- man cannot assent to a spiritual message as long as his mind and heart are enslaved by automatism. He will always remain so enslaved as long as he is submerged in a mass of other automatons, without individuality and without their rightful integrity as persons.
Thomas Merton, born on this day in 1915, from Thoughts in Solitude
30 January 2026
Filled.
For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Morituri Salutamus: Poem for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Class of 1825 in Bowdoin College"
Truth.
If we cannot justify the very concept of the aesthetic, except as ideology, then aesthetic judgement is without philosophical foundation. An "ideology" is adopted for its social or political utility, rather than its truth. And to show that some concept—holiness, justice, beauty, or whatever—is ideological, is to undermine its claim to objectivity. It is to suggest that there is no such thing as holiness, justice or beauty, but only the belief in it—a belief that arises under certain social and economic relations and plays a part in cementing them, but which will vanish as conditions change.
Sir Roger Scruton, from Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
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