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Quotes from American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton by Victoria Houseman

Edith set out to create an entirely new version only of Thomas Bulfinch’s first mythology book, The Age of Fable, which had contained Greek, Roman, and Norse myths. Bulfinch, who had received his education in classics at the Boston Latin School and at Harvard, had died in 1867, the year Edith was born. He had been a Boston bank clerk when he had published The Age of Fable, which was subsequently…

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Gabbler Recommends: Everyone's Cheating At Chess (Allegedly) by Sarah Z

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YouTuber Rachel Maxey encounters...bird automata

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What’s Wrong With Eating Humans? | daily mind trap

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GABBLER RECOMMENDS: 'AI Signals The Death Of The Author' |

If the author as the principal figure of literary authority and accountability came into existence at a particular time and place, there could conceivably also be a point at which it ceased to fulfill this role. That is what Barthes signaled in his now-famous essay. The “death of the author” does not mean the end of the life of any particular individual or even the end of human writing, but the…

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If We Could Talk to the Animals | LA Review of Books

How does Cohn suggest we write about animals? First, through “lyrical description,” which helps “reframe our understanding of belonging in a time of exigency.” Novelists may be catching up to what poets have long known: that lyric, as a less anthropocentric mode, might hold capacities that traditional narration lacks. Lyric, with its vividness, concreteness, and immanence, dodges the usual…

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"On Science, Ancient Philosophy, and Re-Enchanting Nature"

I teach a course called “How to Think About Animals,” in which we read T.H. Huxley’s classic paper “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata and Its History,” published in the journal Nature in 1874. Huxley (1825–1895), nicknamed Darwin’s Bulldog for his fierce defense of Natural Selection against the counter-tide of Victorian sentiment, recounts sympathetically how one of the greatest…

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GABBLER RECOMMENDS: Broey Deschanel's 'Severance, Mickey 17, and the "Digital Double"'

The doubles mentioned here are statements on capitalism and argued to be acceptances of AI (or The Other in general?). But may I suggest a version of a double that wasn’t forced onto someone because of capitalism and is more so a statement on trans-humanism? 

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Quote from Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death by Susana Monsó

Anthropomorphism also needs to be distinguished from anthropocentrism. In its most general sense, anthropocentrism refers to a bias that leads us to consider our own species as the center of the universe. It’s the tendency to think that, given that we are the most important thing from our perspective, we must be the most important thing in general. Anthropocentrism can manifest in different ways…

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GABBLER RECOMMENDS: Brittany Broski's mythology kick

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What We Can Learn About Death and the Afterlife From the Earliest Humans

“I’m overwhelmed with sadness at the brevity of human life,” Xerxes mused. “Each of these men is in their prime but not a single one will be alive in a hundred years’ time.” Herodotus no doubt invented the anecdote. After all, who would have told him? Even so, it is very moving, all the more so since Xerxes is far from sympathetically portrayed elsewhere in his History. Even the most arrogant…

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Quotes from Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich

The facts, such as they are, about the god are first that he was j beautiful, in an androgynous way, to both men and women. Euripides describes him with “long curls…cascading close over [his] cheeks, most seductively.” Cross-dressing was part of Dionysian worship in some locales. Al though he had occasional liaisons with women, like the Cretan princess Ariadne, he is usually portrayed as…

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"[Those] who monopolize resources monopolize imagination."

“For some of the most outspoken proponents of longtermism, humanity as we know it, flesh-and-blood Homo sapiens, is old-school. These advocates are enamored by the prospect of digital descendants who, in the deep future, they believe will be (should be?) granted the same moral standing as you and me. In their new-ish stories, the most important task we face is ensuring the ‘longterm potential’ of…

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2025 books.

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Valentines to give your twin. Er, I mean, crush.

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Quotes from _Something in the Woods Loves You_ by Jarod Anderson

“Beyond the illusion of objectivity, shame also shifts our focus away from the real time and place of our power. Our agency dwells in the present moment. The here and now is the place where we can actively exercise control. It becomes impossible to access our power to shape our lives and outlooks when shame is forever shoving us into memories of a painful past and twisted assumptions about…

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Quotes from ON EXTINCION by Ben Ware

“It is not therefore, as King Lear warns his daughter Cordelia, that ‘nothing will come from nothing,’ but precisely the opposite: something can come only from nothing; only less can become more; only humanity at its nadir stands any chance of being redeemed. This dialectic is neatly captured in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, when the blind Oedipus divested of his power and identity, asks his…