Art is a tool to help us with a number of psychological frailties which we would otherwise have trouble handling: our inability to understand ourselves, to laugh sagely at our faults, to empathize with and forgive others, to accept the inevitability of suffering without falling prey to a sense of persecution, to remain tolerably hopeful, to appreciate the beauty of the everyday and to prepare adequately for death.

['Dining, Travel, Technology, Fashion' headings can be renamed to 'Conviviality, Calm, Resistance, Rationality' as those are what we seek to acquire from our consumption in those domains.]

[The powerful in Europe often decorated their rooms with a human skull, positioned in a way to get their attention, so that they might be reminded of death and refocused on more important considerations in life. The bad news of our day can function as the modern version of those skulls.]

[Hearing about a plane crash that doesn't affect anyone we know can still transform us into a panicked relative or air accident investigator: we want to research details and receive regular updates (which media organizations will happily use for their purposes]

[Societies where everyone wants to be famous also fail to prove that being ordinary will make you feel respected adequate for basic dignity.]

[If celebrities have become so as a response to emotional needs not being met during their formative years, a child wanting to become famous can be a useful gauge to how well the parenting is going]

Erin Kissane leaving the internet

[Pretender technologies may only appear to be the next thing, without eventually changing anything, but they can function as a playspace to try possible futures.]

[If we want better networks, we must concretely understand what happened to us, and then use that knowledge to try new things deliberately, with painstaking attention to the human cost.]