Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny”

By Sheldon I just finished reading On Tyranny. Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century by Yale historian Timothy Snyder. It is a very important book that everyone who harbors anxiety about the future of the United States should read, and read … Continue reading

Whole Earth and Hippy Wisdom

Lately I had the good fortune to hear from an old friend of mine, Richard “RJ” Jergenson, who, along with his brother Phil is one of the pioneers of the grid beam construction and prototyping system. I’ve written about this … Continue reading

Bay Choral Guild: A Festival of Masses

Mass that has defined Christian liturgy since the early Church represents what, on the surface seems like one of the great challenges in the musical arts: given a set text, one that the listeners historically knew by heart and had heard literally thousands of times, find a way to make it new and interesting.

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Bay Choral Guild’s Pacific Passions

One of my favorite performing groups, the Bay Choral Guild, began a three-night series of concerts featuring choral music written by living, West coast composers. This unusual format produces what I think is one of the richest and most deeply-textured performances by BCG in recent memory.

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Knowledge and Liberty for All

Change, especially the kind that moves a civilization forward, requires easy access to knowledge and information. The Founding Fathers understood this. As exponents of the Enlightenment, they saw the availability of knowledge and information as a critical element of a thriving and prospering nation.

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Persistence of Memory, or, Google is for Wimps

It’s commonly known that in the pre-print age people relied on their memories to store information, but it is not commonly realized just what this entails. When we think of memorizing something, we think in terms of learning something by rote, so that we could recite it if called upon to do so.

The medieval memory went far beyond that. The art of memory was not merely about holding information, but about processing it.

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