These pieces were not written by the late British poet, Ken Smith (1938-2003), nor the other Ken Smiths who make bass guitars, study marine biology, sell cars, teach card counting, paint war scenes in oils, guide bear hunters in Idaho, teach forest management, study immunology, do war reporting, sell real estate, photograph nature, teach cryptology, provide legal counsel to the gay and lesbian community, realign the spines of athletes, listen for seismic faults in the Sierra Nevadas, operate a 4-axis milling machine, work for sustainable development in Alberta, play blackjack, or criticize Junk English. Nor were the pieces written by the Ken Smith who is “the Elvis Costello of Landscape Architecture” nor the one who serves in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives nor the one who hit a home run for the Atlanta Braves in 1983. I only wish.
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Machiavelli today
Machiavelli tells the oligarch who takes over a society with a custom of liberty: You must destroy that society. If the oligarch does not trash the society's institutions of liberty and isolate the citizens from each other, the memory of liberty will motivate them to cast out the oligarch. From the early pages of Chapter…
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RSS options
One of the powers of composing on WordLand, I believe, is the ability to inform WordPress pretty much instantly which of your RSS feeds you'd like a post to belong to. Or to more than one RSS feed, as well, if I'm reading the clues properly. I've described this too compactly to reflect the working-together…
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Well-aimed teamwork in the crisis
In the final pages of Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, small groups of people take responsibility for protecting particular things that they believe must survive if their world is to someday recover its better self. They organize in small groups, with each group committing to a certain focused task. In that dystopian society, each…
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Purveyors of propaganda
Writing in 1936 about one group of purveyors of propaganda in our society, E. B. White said, “Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword.” So…
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Our pathology
The deal we Americans generally try to make with the world is not having to know, or seem to know, or be seen to know, and not having to spend time with anyone who will call us out for knowing. As a result, we can't have certain conversations, can't even stand to know these conversations…
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Higher education & fatalism
Respected colleagues I worked with for years before I retired from the university were talking in a cluster in the hallway about the surveillance and censoring of academics now underway in the land. Alarming, frightening, everyone agreed. Not much of an idea about what to do next. Keep your heads down? Look for quiet strategies?…
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March 5, 2025
Two languages. In a pamphlet about the short story, William Carlos Williams draws a contrast between two ways of speaking about people. In places such as newspapers, writers commonly use stock phrases, a jargon that is both debased and debasing, says Williams, calcified language that is "fixed by rule and precedent," treating one person as…
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March 3, 2025
Carrying a camera makes visually interesting things more interesting. Carrying a camera makes interesting things more visually interesting. Work to see. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtains, the Wizard commanded. Some effort goes into creating the illusions, and if they're well enough designed and we're well enough trained, nobody needs to speak…
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How insiders talk to others
In a one-minute clip on Instagram, Andy Cato explains that paying customers and voters may very well not understand an insider's term, an expert's term, such as regenerative agriculture, even though a great many people would like streams to be clean enough to swim in, birds and bees thriving so that nature in general can thrive,…
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Sly tricks
I caught a couple of minutes of a Fox News broadcast earlier today. They were floating the idea that political leaders who oppose Trump are the kind of sickos who don’t want America to heal. So that's name-calling, isn't it? Instead of addressing the merits of an opponent's argument, float the innuendo that this kind…