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Samantha Basalari
https://www.goodreads.com/sbasalari
The Republic
by
God framed to rule, whom he fashioned of gold; others he made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again to be husbandmen and craftsmen, and these were formed by him of brass and iron. But as they are all sprung from a common stock,
“These plants have discovered that they can attract pollinators by offering them a small shot of caffeine; even better, that caffeine has been shown to sharpen the memories of bees, making them more faithful, efficient, and hardworking pollinators. Pretty much what caffeine does for us.”
― This Is Your Mind on Plants
― This Is Your Mind on Plants
“I used to worry about being more efficient. Now, I think, 'Why? What is velocity, and why is that the ultimate value of everything?' The process is really messy, but it's so fun--and you discover weird things that you can only get from just meandering through stuff.”
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“But each time I tried, something odd happened. At some point in the writing process I got stuck; I could not get the ideas to come together or the argument to take form—or rather, the argument kept changing. When writing in this divested way, in the realm of pure and unmediated ideas, anything is possible, and the possibilities overwhelmed me. I became too conscious of the words themselves and the fact that I could manipulate them endlessly, the way numbers can be manipulated apart from any concrete referent.”
― God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
― God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
“why our usual perception of the world is “limited to what is biologically or socially useful”; our brains evolved to admit to our awareness only the “measly trickle” of information required for our survival and no more.”
― This Is Your Mind on Plants
― This Is Your Mind on Plants
“This is precisely the anxiety that Weber writes about in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Protestantism, he argued, introduced into Western culture a new, obsessive doubt about the status of one’s salvation. Those who cannot know whether or not they are chosen will do everything in their power to act as though they are, if only to ease their mind. They will go above and beyond what is required, in fact, because no assurance will ever convince them that their efforts have paid off. This doubt spurred a remarkable energy—the “Protestant work ethic,” a spirit of industriousness and self-regulation that created the necessary conditions for the rise of capitalism.”
― God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
― God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
Samantha ’s 2025 Year in Books
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70 books
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2,392 books
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2,591 friends
1,822 books
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1,442 friends
4,383 books
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306 friends
2,685 books
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4,526 friends
1,371 books
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84 friends
218 books
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62 friends
606 books
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18 friends
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