But what do words actually do — what is their responsibility to us and ours to them?

What writers do should free us up, shake us up.

Sontag’s words radiate an aching recognition of our contemporary tendency to form instant opinions and to mistake for informed opinions what are really reactions to reactions

Another problem with opinions. They are agencies of self-immobilization

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions… Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions — whenever asked — cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity.

There is something vulgar about public dissemination of opinions on matters about which one does not have extensive first-hand knowledge. If I speak of what I do not know, or know hastily, this is mere opinion-mongering.

It is the essence of the wisdom furnished by literature (the plurality of literary achievement) to help us to understand that, whatever is happening, something else is always going on.

A writer ought not to be an opinion-machine… The writer’s first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth … and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.

I don’t believe there is any inherent value in the cultivation of the self.

A capitalist society comes to have a vested interest in praising “individuality” and “freedom” — which may mean little more than the right to the perpetual aggrandizement of the self, and the freedom to shop, to acquire, to use up, to consume, to render obsolete.

It isn’t what a writer says that matters, it’s what a writer is

What do we mean, for example, by the word “peace”? Do we mean an absence of strife? Do we mean a forgetting? Do we mean a forgiveness? Or do we mean a great weariness, an exhaustion, an emptying out of rancor? It seems to me that what most people mean by “peace” is victory. The victory of their side. That’s what “peace” means to them, while to the others peace means defeat… Peace becomes a space people no longer know how to inhabit.

the elasticity of language and the way in which words can expand meaning as much as they can contract it

At its base is a piece of information, which simply tells us some basic fact about the world. Above that is knowledge — the understanding of how different bits of information fit together to reveal some truth about the world. Knowledge hinges on an act of correlation and interpretation. At the top is wisdom, which has a moral component — it is the application of information worth remembering and knowledge that matters to understanding not only how the world works, but also how it should work. And that requires a moral framework of what should and shouldn’t matter, as well as an ideal of the world at its highest potentiality.

At the heart of Mandelbrot’s mathematical revolution, this exquisite plaything of the mind, is the idea of self-similarity — a fractal curve looks exactly the same as you zoom all the way out and all the way in, across all available scales of magnification.

It thrills and troubles the mind to bend itself around this concept.

recursive addition while the area bounded by it remains almost unchanged

As you incline toward infinity and repeat this transformation over and over, adhering smaller and smaller triangles onto smaller and smaller sides, the shape becomes more and more detailed, looking more and more like the contour of an intricate perfect snowflake

n the mind’s eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

trees being perhaps the most tangible and most enchanting manifestation of fractals in nature

binominal and bilingual, both adjective and noun, the same in English and in French — and all the universe was new.

English fracture and fraction, concepts that resonated with the nature of his jagged self-replicating geometries.

One winter afternoon in his early fifties, leafing through his son’s Latin dictionary, he paused at fractus — the adjective from the verb frangere, “to break.”

elegy

The revolutionary insight he arrived at while studying cotton prices in 1962 became the unremitting vector of revelation a lifetime long and aimed at infinity, beamed with equal power of illumination at everything from the geometry of broccoli florets and tree branches to the behavior of earthquakes and economic markets.

He lived the proof with his discovery of a patterned order underlying a great many apparent irregularities in nature — a sweeping symmetry of nested self-similarities repeated recursively in what may at first read as chaos.

A great truth that would throw millennia of science into a fitful frenzy, sprung from a mind that dismantled the mansion of mathematics with an outsider’s tools.

the lines we draw to contain the infinite end up excluding more than they enfold.

One way that fractals are different from finite geometric figures is how they scale. Doubling the edge lengths of a polygon multiplies its area by four, which is two (the ratio of the new to the old side length) raised to the power of two (the dimension of the space the polygon resides in). Likewise, if the radius of a sphere is doubled, its volume scales by eight, which is two (the ratio of the new to the old radius) to the power of three (the dimension that the sphere resides in). However, if a fractal's one-dimensional lengths are all doubled, the spatial content of the fractal scales by a power that is not necessarily an integer.[1] This power is called the fractal dimension of the fractal, and it usually exceeds the fractal's topological dimension.[6]

Genomic surveillance in India when Delta appeared was less comprehensive and the seriousness of that new variant did not become apparent until weeks after it had been circulating widely, and exported around the world.

By the next day, dozens of countries, including the UK, had announced new travel restrictions on countries in southern Africa. Some restrictions may have been unavoidable to buy time to understand this new threat, but travel bans come with serious consequences for people and economies in affected countries. Previously, they have delayed, but not prevented, the spread of new variants. There is some chance in this situation that they may be more effective, precisely because of the excellent work done to share information so rapidly.

Fengshan MP Cheryl Chan, who visited the two senior activity centres, said: "We have seniors living in rental blocks who are vulnerable, who live alone and don't have a big network. That's why we are bringing these resources to them."

Crew Dunham has yet to weep for her loss. But multiple times a day she still reaches for her phone to call Frank, yearning to speak to him for hours, as they used to do. "You’d think after 20 years you’d have nothing to talk about,” she says. “Not true.” Those who have lost loved ones to COVID-19, as well as those who’ve experienced a death during the pandemic, are at greater risk of suffering “prolonged grief” due to the lack of traditional rituals, says Dr. M. Katherine Shear, director of the Center for Complicated Grief at Columbia University in New York.“The circumstances of the deaths always matter,” she says. “Losing someone is one of the most stressful things we can experience.”

In America, adults are racing headlong into a post-vaccination summer while kids are being left in vaccine limbo.

The under-50 no-vaxxers’ deep story has a very different starting place. It begins like this:The coronavirus is a wildly overrated threat. Yes, it’s appropriate and good to protect old and vulnerable people. But I’m not old or vulnerable. If I get it, I’ll be fine. In fact, maybe I have gotten it, and I am fine. I don’t know why I should consider this disease more dangerous than driving a car, a risky thing I do every day without a moment’s worry. Liberals, Democrats, and public-health elites have been so wrong so often, we’d be better off doing the opposite of almost everything they say.