Thomas Ramey Watson

books

Abraham Lincoln’s respect for life extended from humanity to all creatures

Lincoln was like more than a few of us whose pets have run of the house these days: He also left to those friends the dog’s favorite horsehair sofa on which to nap, as well as a long, specific list of rules for how Fido was to be treated during his waking hours. For example, …

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Peter Diamandis’ new book, Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World

from a Huffpost interview: Diamandis: Yes, we have ISIS. But the data overwhelmingly suggests the future I’ve been describing. One big problem is that the news media has a grip on our imagination. The fundamental function of the news media is to deliver every piece of negative news to my living room in high definition …

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Why Reading On A Screen Is Bad For Critical Thinking

A related distinction is between what’s called deep reading (that time-consuming process involving reasoning skills and reflection) and hyper reading (a term developed in the late 1990s). In How We Think, Katherine Hayles defines hyper reading as “a strategic response to an information-intensive environment, aiming to conserve attention by quickly identifying relevant information, so that …

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“The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.”

In a section of his 1843 masterwork Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (public library), which also gave us Kierkegaard on our greatest source of unhappiness, the Danish philosopher defines boredom as a sense of emptiness and examines it not as an absence of stimulation but as an absence of meaning — an idea that also …

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