Weekly Pose Ponder No. 19
Summarizing the week's posts -- Findings, reading Great Books, Arendt on totalitarianism, Storythinking ch. 2, and a new index
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Findings this week included a suggestion for a daily “planetary practice” involving Google Earth, which I’m doing and enjoying immensely! I got a bit preachy about how to read big books. Samantha Rose Hill is publishing 20 key points, one coming each Tuesday, that she’s distilled from a decade of teaching Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. Dan and I are continuing our reading collab on Fletcher’s Storythinking (ch. 2 this week). And I’m closing out the current three-week publishing cadence with an index of old posts.
There’s also a one-off post that didn’t go out by email: my amateur take on the Supreme Court’s ruling re: presidential immunity.
Do you know anyone who might be interested in reading? Please share! 😎
Findings: Planetary Ritual
Sharing what I’ve been reading, which is lot, so here are many things briefly. Anthropocene The world just broke four big energy records - Intrigue (internationalintrigue.io) Summarizing the 73rd edition of the Statistical Review of World Energy. From my favorite email newsletter (on Beehiiv, not Substack). Want to
How to Read a Great Book
In anticipation of studying Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition with Samantha Rose Hill via the Brooklyn Institute this July, I’m reminding myself of the key principles I’ve personally discovered for studying great books — big books, important books, books I include in my personal canon because of their enormity of influence on my thinking.
20 Tuesdays
One of the most instructive teachings of Hannah Arendt through her work on the Origins of Totalitarianism is that the well-known, age-old danger of tyranny or despotism is not the same as the brand new thing that emerged in the 20th century under the label “totalitarianism.” There is something completely new under the sun, and the political danger at ha…
Storythinking with Dan (chapter 2)
Storythinking: The New Science of Narrative Intelligence, Angus Fletcher, 2023
Index No. 5 (Start Here?)
Index posts come at the end of each three-week publishing cadence. (For new readers, Pose Ponder publishes weekdays for three weeks on, one week off.) Indexes —indices? I can never decide — are an opportunity for me to gather together a handful of older posts and re-present them.