Latest news with #Thoreau
The Guardian
30-06-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Brain rot isn't new – but now we're all talking about it
With excellent timing, your article (From Chimpanzini Bananini to Ballerina Cappuccina: how gen alpha went wild for Italian brain rot animals, 25 June) appeared on the day that 'brain rot' was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. When researching the entry, we discovered that brain rot is nothing new. The earliest evidence of its usage that we found was in Henry David Thoreau's book Walden (1854); in it he lamented society's tendency to devalue complex ideas in favour of simple ones, viewing it as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort. The term has been applied variously to reading too many books, watching too much television, and listening to 'pimpley music', bringing us up to date with the digital content that takes the blame currently. While it took the last year or so to really cement it in the language, it seems that nothing much has changed except the medium. Concerned parents, citizens, or even linguists can take comfort in one fact revealed by our research: the supposed consumers or victims of brain rot are often the very people using the term (to mean both the content itself and its impact on them). This suggests that – whatever the cost to intelligence or attention spans – they at least retain self-awareness or a sense of irony. To quote David Bowie, 'They're quite aware of what they're going through.'Fiona McPhersonExecutive editor, Oxford English Dictionary Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
Gulf Today
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
Jess Walter's 'So Far Gone' sets a redemption story in fractured, modern America
When the history of the United States in 2025 is written, perhaps one of the best things that will be said is: "Well, it made for some great art." Consider "So Far Gone," the new novel by Jess Walter. Set in present day America, it opens with two kids wearing backpacks knocking on a cabin door. "What are you fine young capitalists selling?" asks Rhys Kinnick, before realizing the kids are his grandchildren. They carry with them a note from Kinnick's daughter, describing dad as a "recluse who cut off contact with our family and now lives in squalor in a cabin north of Spokane." It's a great hook that draws you in and doesn't really let up for the next 256 pages. We learn why Kinnick pulled a Thoreau and went to the woods seven years ago (Hint: It has a lot to do with the intolerance exhibited by no small percentage of Americans and embodied by a certain occupant of the White House), as well as the whereabouts of Kinnick's daughter, Bethany, and why her messy marriage to a guy named Shane led to Kinnick's grandchildren being dropped off at his cabin. In a neat narrative gimmick, the chapters are entitled "What Happened to ___" and fill in the main strokes of each character's backstory, as well as what happens to them in the present timeline. Told with an omniscient third-person sense of humor, the book's themes are nonetheless serious. On the demise of journalism in the chapter "What Happened to Lucy," one of Kinnick's old flames and colleagues at the Spokesman-Review: She "hated that reporters were expected to constantly post on social media… before knowing what their stories even meant." Or Kinnick's thoughts as he holds a .22 Glock given to him just in case by a retired police officer who is helping him get his grandkids back from the local militia: "The shiver that went through his arm! The power!… The weight of this gun was the exact weight of his anger and his fear and his sense of displacement… That's where its incredible balance lay." As Kinnick links up with various characters and drives across the Northwest in search of his daughter and grandchildren, the plot unfolds quickly. Most readers won't need more than a day or two to reach the final page, which satisfies the Thoreau quote Walter uses in the story's preface: "Not till we are lost… 'till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves." Associated Press
New Straits Times
15-06-2025
- Business
- New Straits Times
MONEY THOUGHTS: Our time metric of wealth
THE 19th century American essayist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote: "Wealth is the ability to fully experience life." Sadly, Thoreau died of tuberculosis two months shy of his 45th birthday. Modern readers probably only know him as the author of Walden, a classic book which focused on his brand of ascetic, simple living in a natural woodland area by Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Although he didn't live long, Thoreau's body of writing was sizable. From, it we know Thoreau identified the true cost of things we choose to purchase — be they goods or services — is the time-measured slice of our lives we expend to earn the money to buy the stuff we need, want or crave. In today's context, what Thoreau referred to is the time we spend earning active income, or AI. Yet as regular Money Thoughts readers know, I use this broader formula, TI = AI + PI, to better understand our lifetime total income (TI). PI, as you may have guessed, is the income we earn passively through our wise acquisition of assets within a diversified portfolio that pumps out passive income into our bank accounts. Returning to Thoreau's insights, AI is the income we earn actively by the sweat of our brow, so to speak. In last week's column I wrote about the relative wealth of two characters, Adam and Zeke, and also focused on contemporary financial guru Robert Kiyosaki's assertion that wealth is more accurately measured in time than in money. (If you haven't yet read last week's stage-setting column, you may do so at Regarding time and money, consider what my favourite American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1748: "Time is Money." Franklin lived to be 84 years old. He was born in Boston in 1706 and built such a successful business as the leading printer of Philadelphia that he was able to retire from active business in 1748 at the age of 42 — the mid-point of his allotment on Earth. MONEY IS TIME Franklin fruitfully spent the second half of his life in non-self-serving civic leadership roles, and ended up as a signatory of both America's Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, and of two treaties with the French, who strategically supported the original 13 colonies of the New World in their fight for independence from Great Britain. He also excelled as an inventor and scientist, which meant he understood the power of numbers. So, let's take a closer look at Franklin's aphorism, "Time is Money". Consider how, say, 4 + 5 = 9 = 5 + 4. This bit is straightforward. Now track with me as we flip Franklin's aphorism on its head to "Money is Time". The symmetric relationship isn't perfect, of course, because someone with a RM10 million portfolio won't live 10 times longer than someone with a RM1 million portfolio simply because she has more money. However, the PI element of the formula, TI = AI + PI, does mean having a robust — ideally ballooning — stream of passive income into our pockets can free up our time for activities we prefer over working ourselves into premature graves. FINANCIAL FREEDOM Last week, I promised to explain how we may generate infinite wealth (measured in years) even though our actual pile of wealth (measured in RM) is finite. While our mortal selves won't live forever, our financial legacy may well last hundreds of years by providing PI streams for future generations (which, however, may not be a great idea if you believe the provision of a bloated trust fund can dull the edge of industry within your descendants) or (better yet) for charities and foundations that can continue to do good tomorrow in your memory financed by your savvy money management today. But your more immediate goal should be to attain personal financial freedom. So, to achieve that coveted status, do the following: 1. Spend less than you earn. 2. Save and invest the difference. 3. Do so for a long time into a diversified portfolio, which comprises both riskier capital gains focused long-term investments and passive income generators that are less volatile. 4. Over the decades, shift the balance from your capital gainers to PI generators. 5. Aim to reach the point where your steady inflow of monthly PI exceeds all normal expenses, including lifestyle maintenance and regular debt repayments, and then: 6. As each current debt is repaid in full, avoid taking on fresh liabilities. Instead, use the previous regular repayments on that retired debt to do three things in equal measure: save more money for emergencies, invest more money to further beef up your PI inflows, and spend more money on your loved ones and, very importantly, on yourself. As you decide on how best to take my recommended six steps, I suggest you also invest the coming week (1/52 of this year) mulling upon these salient truths: 1. Time is Money, and; 2. Money is Time. How will you use your supply of both? © 2025 Rajen Devadason
NZ Herald
13-06-2025
- General
- NZ Herald
Our minds work in mysterious ways
The news you need to know comes to find you, and the rest is titillation. As dear old Thoreau put it, 'if we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter - we need never read of another.' Indeed so in theory, but human nature doesn't run on theory. We are inquisitive creatures. We want to know about the world around us, and we can't help asking questions. Consider, for example, Thoreau's cow run over on the Western Railroad. One would have thought that the story wouldn't be about the cow but about the train. For surely a cow run over would mean a train derailed, and a train derailed would mean disaster. Hence those strange metal devices like giant moustaches attached to the front of American steam trains, known, I believe, as cow-catchers. Though therein lies another puzzle - see the mind at work - because surely the purpose of the device was not to catch the cow, but rather to strike it a blow at an angle that would fling it aside, no doubt with horrific injuries. And with no prospect of the train stopping to render first aid, one has to feel sorry for those old-time cows. A literal cow-catcher would have been both more humane and less wasteful. If the front of the train could be engineered in such a way that it scooped the offending beast off the track and somehow transferred it to a cattle truck alive and well, the train could arrive eventually in New York or Los Angeles with a small herd of astonished cattle that the rail company could sell at a profit to the nearest abattoir. Nevertheless, one has to wonder why a cow would ever stand in front of a train. The Western Railroad ran through the vast open prairies of the USA where the buffalo roamed until the white man shot them all. And given the narrowness of the railway and the vast breadth of the prairie, and given the inedibility of one and the magnificent grazing of the other, it seems improbable that any cow would ever choose to stand on the line. And even more improbable that it would continue to do so with the rails humming at the train's approach and Casey Jones a-tooting of the whistle to try and scare the thing off. Which thoughts I record only to demonstrate that it is all very well for high-minded Thoreau to assert that we don't need to know the news, but it is human nature to do so and to become engrossed. As I am by the Italian Financial Police Force's alpine rescue dog. Being a financial policeman in Italy would be no cake walk given the vigorous proclivities of the Mafia. Press a little too forcefully for a GST return and suddenly you're in bed with a horse's head. As for the alpine division, what sort of financial crimes happen in the Alps? Fraudulent ski-field operators? Or maybe there's a stream of financial criminals who try to flee over the Alps to Switzerland, where they are famously uninquisitive about wealth so long as you stick it in their banks. And could it be that because the pursuing officers are nerdish types, expert with the calculator and the spreadsheet but rather less expert with the crampons and the snowshoes, it is necessary for the force to retain a rescue dog to haul them out of the snowdrifts from time to time? I ask these questions only to illustrate the restless nature of the mind, and I don't pretend to know the answers. Though I am confident about one thing, which is the breed of the rescue dog in question. It just has to be a ciao.
Otago Daily Times
11-06-2025
- General
- Otago Daily Times
Arrivederci to the IFP's rescue canine
Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), American naturalist and author. The human mind is a restless thing. One minute you are idly flicking through the newspaper, the next you've got a head full of questions. So it was this week when I read about the search for some missing mountaineers in the Italian Alps. Involved in that search was a rescue dog belonging — and I am not making this up — to the Alpine Rescue Branch of the Italian Financial Police. How can you not ask questions about that? Of course, there was no need for me to read this story. The news you need to know comes to find you, and the rest is titillation. As dear old Thoreau put it, "if we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter — we need never read of another." Indeed so, in theory, but human nature doesn't run on theory. We are inquisitive creatures. We want to know about the world around us and we can't help asking questions. Consider, for example, Thoreau's cow run over on the Western Railroad. One would have thought that the story wouldn't be about the cow but about the train. For surely a cow run over would mean a train derailed, and a train derailed would mean disaster. Hence those strange metal devices like giant moustaches attached the front of American steam trains, known, I believe, as cow-catchers. Though therein lies another puzzle — see the mind at work — because surely the purpose of the device was not to catch the cow, but rather to strike it a blow at an angle that would fling it aside, no doubt with horrific injuries. And with no prospect of the train stopping to render first aid, one has to feel sorry for those old-time cows. A literal cow-catcher would have been both more humane and less wasteful. If the front of the train could be engineered in such a way that it scooped the offending beast off the track and somehow transferred it to a cattle truck alive and well, the train could arrive eventually in New York or Los Angeles with a small herd of astonished cattle that the rail company could sell at a profit to the nearest abattoir. Nevertheless, one has to wonder why a cow would ever stand in front of a train. The Western Railroad ran through the vast open prairies of the USA where the buffalo roamed until the white man shot them all. And given the narrowness of the railway and the vast breadth of the prairie, and given the inedibility of one and the magnificent grazing of the other, it seems improbable that any cow would ever choose to stand on the line. And even more improbable that it would continue to do so with the rails humming at the train's approach and Casey Jones a-tooting of the whistle to try and scare the thing off. Which thoughts I record only to demonstrate that it is all very well for high-minded Thoreau to assert that we don't need to know the news, but it is human nature to do so and to become engrossed. As I am by the Italian Financial Police Force's alpine rescue dog. Being a financial policeman in Italy would be no cakewalk given the vigorous proclivities of the Mafia. Press a little too forcefully for a GST return and suddenly you're in bed with a horse's head. As for the alpine division, what sort of financial crimes happen in the Alps? Fraudulent skifield operators? Or maybe there's a stream of financial criminals who try to flee over the Alps to Switzerland, where they are famously uninquisitive about wealth so long as you stick it in their banks. And could it be that because the pursuing officers are nerdish types, expert with the calculator and the spreadsheet but rather less expert with the crampons and the snowshoes, it is necessary for the force to retain a rescue dog to haul them out of the snowdrifts from time to time? I ask these questions only to illustrate the restless nature of the mind, and I don't pretend to know the answers. Though I am confident about one thing, which is the breed of the rescue dog in question. It just has to be a ciao. • Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
