Essays & short stories

saor

saor

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Anything cool you've read recently? Leaning more toward essays but short (short short, not 20+ pages) stories welcome. Preferably with links to online versions.

Have never read Dennetts books, but these two short things are fun reads:

Where Am I
https://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/Dennett-WhereAmI.pdf
Fictional story about brains and where consciousness is located.

Real Patterns
https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/pe...2012/FP2012_readings/Dennett_RealPatterns.pdf

Terry Bison - They're made of Meat
http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html
Great little story about aliens discovering earth.
 
Death Speaks
Jeffrey Archer
There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdadm for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.
 
Enjoy her descriptions here of a thing we've probably all seen before...

Virginia Woolf - The Death of the Moth
Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellow-underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us.
Click to expand...
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/chapter1.html
 
A bit long but relevant to recent discussions of education & our failings at math education...

A Mathematician’s Lament - Paul Lockhart
...by concentrating on what, and leaving out why, mathematics is reduced to an empty shell. The art is not in the “truth” but in the explanation, the argument. It is the argument itself which gives the truth its context, and determines what is really being said and meant. Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity— to pose their own problems, make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be wrong, to be creatively frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble together their own explanations and proofs— you deny them mathematics itself. So no, I’m not complaining about the presence of facts and formulas in our mathematics classes, I’m complaining about the lack of mathematics in our mathematics classes
Click to expand...
https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
 
One of the most prolific British authors of the early 20th century, G.K. Chesterton is best known today for his novel "The Man Who Was Thursday" (1908) and his 51 short stories...

In the preface to his essay collection "Tremendous Trifles" (1909), Chesterton encourages us to be "ocular athletes": "Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see the startling facts that run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence." In this "fleeting sketch" from that collection, Chesterton relies on two common items -- brown paper and a piece of chalk -- as starting points for some thought-provoking meditations.
Click to expand...
Fun read...
'A Piece of Chalk'
https://www.thoughtco.com/a-piece-of-chalk-essay-by-g-k-chesterton-1688762
 
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