'Free' is the museum show of our times, presaging the whole Wikileaks dustup, and it shows shifting power dynamics and a glimpse of the human in a world of flowing data.

It makes me happy to meet other poetry fans. Especially when they recommend poets I'm not familiar with.

I joined a meetup group called Bay Area Parents for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which I had searched for, as I was going to start a group like it myself.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to find kids to hang out with that don't consume a lot of commercial culture.

After reading about the Al Ain Oasis by ECWC, I became curious about cultivating dates, and browsed about the web a bit, learning.

One of the many wonderful things about homeschooling is that I am constantly learning alongside my daughter.

'Apartamento,' a magazine out of Spain but written in English, is one of my favorite magazines.

I'm sure there was some amazing art at the Frieze Art Fair, but I wasn't able to find it. However, found some friends there, which was even better. And the boat to and from was lovely.

The wall at Le Philosophe is covered with French philosophers, and supposedly, if you are able to name all of them, they will pay for your meal. I was only able to identify Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Descartes and, I think, Foucault. And, I think, Luce Irigaray.

Ecstasy is almost never discussed anymore, but leaving the earth is one way of attaining it. To exchange ecstasy for death is often the bargain.

'You, too, can be the President,' every American kid is told. But one unintended consequence of this belief, it is that, as a result of our being a meritocracy, if you have not succeeded, you are of lesser merit. It is shameful to be a failure in this country.

If there is a national, secular religion in the United States, it is the belief that America is the Land of Opportunity, that we are a meritocracy, that any kid, no matter who they are, or where they come from, can work hard and move up in the world: that their effort matters.

Because the Internet is a medium, it doesn't care whether it transmits love or hate. It is what we build and who we are that make it what it is. We can build things that diminish our humanity or build things that bring us to human flourishing.

Our successes have been so great and so rapid that, within 20 years, we've gotten a third of the world's population online, shrunk our computers to the size of our hands, and connected each to each.

A lot of things have changed since the days of Flickr. Facebook has concentrated the sociality of the Internet within its blue borders, like a Walmart siphoning off the mom-and-pop shops that formerly comprised the Internet's gathering places. Communication, in the age of mobile dominance, has become, of necessity, shorter and snack-sized.

I first got online in the late '80s when I was an eccentric teenager in suburban New Jersey, in a town mostly interested in sports, popularity, and clothes. I was a reader, into Jorge Luis Borges, and I found, connected to, and delighted in a group of Borges scholars from Aarhus, Denmark, that I met online.

The Internet is full of strangers, generous strangers who want to help you for no reason at all. Strangers post poetry and discographies and advice and essays and photos and art and diatribes. None of them are known to you, in the old-fashioned sense. But they give the Internet its life and meaning.

Good parents, who are able to maintain the affection and respect of their children and whose offspring admire them and value their good opinion, can be reasonably certain that their values and ways of socialized behaving will be adopted by the next generation.

I wish we didn't have to be nude to be noticed... But given the game as it exists, women make decisions. For instance, the Miss America contest is, in all of its states... the single greatest source of scholarship money for women in the United States.

I had never understood why the farmlands of the U.S. had been settled in such a sparse and isolated way, whereas the farming communities in Europe seemed closer, more convivial, centered around village life.

One of the issues we face here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley is a sense that the people all around us are as conversant in startup and tech culture as we are. But we need to remember, and remind ourselves repeatedly, that we're a small minority in a larger population.

College is an environment designed to encourage openness - the ability to think of things in novel ways and entertain unconventional beliefs.

As a child, I learned hundreds of poems by heart, which I can recite to this day.

The single thing I've found it valuable to memorize is poetry.