Gary Bennett

“As you climb the academic ladder, the pressure to specialize only increases. The academic world is ruled by the law of publish or perish. If you want a job, you must publish in peer-reviewed journals. But journals are divided by discipline, and publishing an article on virus mutations in a biology journal demands following different conventions from publishing an article on the politics of pandemics in a history journal. There are different jargons, different citation rules, and different expectations. Historians should have a deep understanding of culture and know how to read and interpret historical documents. Biologists should have a deep understanding of evolution and know how to read and interpret DNA molecules. Things that fall in between categories—like the interplay between human political ideologies and virus evolution—are often left unaddressed.[20]”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“For most of the people in [my] class,4 art was the truth about life—and life itself, as they saw it, was more or less a lie,” he wrote. “If civilization could be thought of as having a sexuality, art was its sexuality”
― Philip Gefter, Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

“The belief that mathematics exists somewhere else than within us, that it is discovered more than created, is called Platonism, after Plato’s belief in a non-spatiotemporal realm that was the region of the perfect forms of which the objects on earth were imperfect reproductions. By definition, the non-spatiotemporal realm is outside time and space. It is not the creation of any deity, it simply is. To say that it is eternal or that it has always existed is to make a temporal remark, which does not apply. It is the timeless nowhere which never has and never will exist anywhere but which nevertheless is. The physical world is temporal and declines, the non-spatiotemporal one is ideal and doesn’t.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“A science involving things you can’t see whose presence is confined to the imagination.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age