Paul Beakley

You know, when I started writing, there was only one comment? When you say something interesting, trying to talk early on is like jumping into a tsunami with a surfboard.

And yes — I think that fortune cookie wisdom is a natural and unfortunate side effect of discussions trying to understand something genuinely hard and elusive. Science tries to get around this by redefining terms from Latin and Greek, but humanities are usually at least trying to pretend they’re accessible, so you get pithy phrases that are really just a reference to some nebulous thing hiding in the whole discussion.

Insert comment about fingers pointing at the moon here.