Gain spiritual insight by understanding which direction a person tells you they’re moving in—including yourself. — Desire Is Movement I’ve been reading a lot of Augustine recently, partly as research for a (potential) new book project. I was struck to find that, in his Confessions, Augustine describes the period just prior to his conversion experience as one in which mimetic models of desire were the main catalyst.

My Conversation with the writer Thomas J. Bevan on the Making of Anti-Mimetic Art — I first met Thomas J. Bevan, a fascinating writer (because a fascinating person) who is based in a small town in England, after I started spending more time online in the darkest days of the pandemic, 2020. For better or worse, I got back on Twitter seriously for the first…

People are mesmerized with other people due to a force of human psychology that is similar to the force of gravity in physics — An Untold Story Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician who practiced medicine shortly after Sir Isaac Newton, was fascinated by the corollary between the psychological ‘movements’ he observed in the world and the physical effects Newton described in his theory of gravity. Could there by a relationship between the two, he wondered?

A New Series on My Alternative Investments — This is the first edition in a new series that I plan to publish periodically called “What I Invested In”. I mean ‘invest’ in the broadest sense possible. The list might include a list of noteable essays or books that I’ve read since the last edition, along with new dishes…

5 Ways to Separate Stimulus from Response and Express Yourself More Authentically — The medium is the mimesis. Most of us are price-takers in the market of communication. We don’t set the tone; we adopt one. Receive a passive aggressive email, send a passive aggressive email. See a bunch of snarky tweets in your feed, you tweet snark. Get emoji-filled text, send emoji-filled…

You would be mistaken to think it’s a book about business — “Wanting is the clearest, most accessible introduction to René Girard available.” — Peter Thiel Peter Thiel’s book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, is one of the most brilliant and subversive books on startups — and on business in general — ever written. It…

My first retreat in 2009 changed my life. I can’t unsee what I saw, I can’t unhear what I heard. They should be normalized. — — From my journal, written at a small retreat house in Flagstaff, Arizona, 2009. I haven’t eaten in 2 days, I haven’t heard a human word in 3. If I found a cigarette, I’d smoke it. The weight of this particular life decision is now apparent; the weight of all…

He is a flawed human like the rest of us, and the problems of social media are not technological problems but profoundly human — I have to admit that I’m growing tired of the ‘dopamine hit’ critique of social media (disseminated in the documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’), which gives the impression the human beings are merely sheep being manipulated by big tech like pavlovian dogs; and I’m growing even more tired of the ‘social…

Love in the Ruins of Corporate America — A few decades ago, a well-respected professor of strategy at a business school in Spain wrote a line inspired by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman on the board of the classroom: “The only purpose of a company is to maximize shareholder profit.” A young student named Carlos was outraged. He…