How to Cite These Archived Letters
Dear Colleague Archive 2010
| Date of Letter | Topic Summary | ID |
|---|---|---|
| 5-January-2010 | On the effects of hesitation. "So, dear colleague, ask. Silence is sterile and can even kill. Don’t hesitate too long, though, whether in words and in deeds..." | |
| 25-January-2010 | "Change in the human condition has historically depended more on push than on pull. Now that the push, driven by life’s intolerable burdens, has somewhat eased in the world, can we hope that the pull—the lure of the Good—will play a larger role?" | |
| 5-February-2010 | On pessimists and optmists | |
| 22-February-2010 | "Isn’t this the reward of exposure to the humanities? A knowledge of the books links us to humankind and beyond humankind to the whole of nature." | |
| 15-March-2010 | On chaos and symmertry in the number pi. " From chaos and randomness, come order and beauty, and from order and beauty, come an appreciation for mild exhibitions of chaos and randomness." | |
| 26-March-2010 | Exploring the small life events that engender patriotism | |
| 5-May-2010 | Ethics is about others, is it not? (Bobby, the last Kantian in Nazi Germany) | |
| 1-June-2010 | "Can one be a really good person and also a pessimist?" and other questions. | |
| 15-June-2010 | On paradox in life. "To have a human mind is to live in a world of paradoxes. Put another way, it is to live in a world of fantasy in which elementary logic counts for naught. How can we see ourselves as rational beings when we routinely accept nonsense?" | |
| 6-July-2010 | The public and the private, the body and the mind. | |
| 20-July-2010 | " To feel real, we have to be acknowledged. What to do? Technology provides an answer—the cell phone." | |
| 6-August-2010 | "Human equality is apparently just one of those things one has to accept. It is a first principle. To the question, What backs it up? the answer has to be, it cannot be another humanly-devised principle. It has to be something not quite of this world–religion. " | |
| 20-August-2010 | On Judaism | |
| 1-October-2010 | On modern Tibet and the problem of identity | |
| 16-October-2010 | Living in a magnificent--or not so magnificent--body | |
| 22-November-2010 | Chance/Accident: an essay by Yi-Fu Tuan |
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