The Mustard Seed - Author Unknown

The Mustard Seed - an old Chinese tale

Once there was a woman whose only son had died. In her sorrow she went to ask a wise holy man is there a way to bring her son back to life. “Fetch me a mustard seed from a home that has never known sorrow. We will use it to bring your son back to life.” He said to her instead of sending her away or try reasoning with her.

At once she quickly set off looking for that elusive mustard seed. The first place she came to was is a huge mansion. Knocking on the door, she asked “I am looking for a house that has never known suffering. Is this the place? It is very important to me.”

“You have come to the wrong place” they told her. They begin to pour out all the tragic things that have befallen upon them.

“Who is better to be able to help these poor unfortunate souls than I who has experience sadness and can understand them?” she thought. Therefore she stayed behind and consoled and comforted them before going to another house that has never known sorrow before.

However, wherever she goes, from huts to palaces, there is never one without tales of sadness and misfortunes. In time to come, she became so involved in listening to other people’s sad stories that she forgot about her quest for that elusive mustard seed. By listening to other people, she had actually driven the grieving out of her life.

Maps of Favorite Fictional Worlds

For months and years, sometimes decades, we live in these worlds - in both books and movies. But sometimes, its hard to connect the dots, of where each place is located, of what it looks like as a whole. Here are some great interpretations of our favorite worlds.

J.R.R. Tolkein

The Hobbit (from The Awl)

This map of Frodo’s journey if he had Google Maps (from Buzzfeed).

Suzanne Collins

Hunger Games (from Livejournal)

The Capitol is in Denver.

D12 is Appalachia.

D11 shares a border with D12, is one of the largest districts, is South of D12, and is primarily used for growing grain and produce.

D10 is primarily used for raising livestock. They do NOT process the livestock in D10. However, to feed an entire nation, D10 is likely another very large District.

D9 processes food for the Capitol and the tesserae; therefore, it likely shares borders with the food production Districts (D4, D10, D11).

D8 produces and treats textiles and is a factory District. It is POSSIBLE to reach D12 from D8 on foot over a course of weeks/months. Therefore, it does not cross a large body of water.

D7 specializes in lumber. It's probably large. It has no role in food processing or manufacture.

D6 works closely with the Capitol in the research and manufacture of drugs (morphling, medicines). It likely has close ties to D5 in the production of mutts.

D5 is entirely dependent on the Capitol, so it's probably somewhat nearby, and specializes in genetic research and manipulation. Because of the necessity of creative thought and intellect, it's most likely a smaller District so that it's easier to monitor and control.

D4 is the ocean. It does have a role in food production. It's very large. It is a Career District, so it likely is near the Capitol and has some self-sufficiency, but not enough that it doesn't engender loyalty. (Aside from that, D4 = perfect.)

D3 has extremely close ties to the Capitol and works with electronics and technology. It is likely small, the Capitol can closely monitor its scientific minds. It has no role in food manufacture or processing.

D2 specializes in weaponry, is the most loyal District (because the Capitol needs to keep its weapon specialists happy, non?), and has no role in food production. D2 also works in some minor Mining elements and trains Peacekeepers. The Panem railroad is easily accessible in D2.

D1 produces luxury goods for the Capitol -- INCLUDING having a diamond mine.  Kelsey Lake Diamond Mine is a defunct diamond mine in Colorado, USA. It is located in the State Line Kimberlite District, near the Wyoming border.

D13 specialized in nuclear power, shares a border with D12, is both visible and reachable from D12 by foot, and is North of West Virginia. Three Mile Island was in New YorkPennsylvania, and probably remained a nuclear reactor or was co-opted again as a reactor. D13 is small but mighty and is surrounded by Wilderness. It is self-sufficient.

A.A. Milne 

Winnie the Pooh (from the Awl)

L. Frank Baum

Wizard of Oz (from Buzzfeed)

from the awl

J.K. Rowling

Hogwarts (from tumbler)

from livejournal

William Goldman

The Princess Bride

Walt Disney

The location of Disney movies around the world (from buzzfeed)

George Orwell

1984 (from buzzfeed)

According to the Washington Post, sales of Orwell’s ‘1984’ have spiked since Kellyanne Conway’s ‘alternative facts’ speech. 

A map of the galaxy depicted in the Star Wars movies (from buzzfeed)

Mark Twain

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (from The Huffington Post)

And if they all existed together, as they often do in our minds and conversations, the world might look like this:

I love this <3 by ida-is-the-half-blood-prince on Polyvore

Writing and Life, and the Advice We're Misusing.

K.M. Weiland work has been posted in the past and probably will be in the future, because it's just good stuff.

Her latest post, "6 Bits of Common Writing Advice You're Misusing," is another great resource for writers, but it's also a great resources of life.

Here are a few most notables:

1. Write a Likable Character

You hear it all the time. If you don’t create characters readers like—and especially a protagonist readers like—why would they ever want to read your story? Stories are made or broken on the strength of their characters, which means you must get readers invested in your main character right from go.

Common writing advice says your protagonist must be likable. But don’t confuse likability with perfection. Readers love flawed characters.

What Writers Sometimes Think This Means:

The problem is that writers sometimes think this means they must write a character who is an utter saint. If he makes a mistake, if he speaks in anger, if he’s selfish, if he sins—readers will instantly judge him, hate him, and drop him. Instead of creating a realistically flawed (andinteresting) human being, these writers end up with either a

a) a self-righteous goody-goody

b) a self-flagellating goody-goody

The irony here is that “perfect” characters are hardly ever likable characters.

What This Bit of Writing Advice Really Means:

Because we often equate other people’s ability to like us with our ability to avoid of messing up, we think the same must apply to our characters. But (aside from the fact this is an utterly false paradigm) consider some of your favorite characters. I’m willing to bet most of them are egregiously flawed. And don’t you love them the more for those flaws?

When you’re told to “write a likable character,” what you’re really be told is to “write a realistic, compelling, relatable, interesting character.” So give him a relatable motivation and pile on the sins, because readers have a high capacity for forgiveness.

Application to Life:

We love flawed fictional characters because they are relatable. Characters that are to goody-goody become distant because we know ourselves. We know that, try as we might, we are deeply flawed and fully sinful - that we have ghosts. 

When we read the struggles and failures of fictional characters, we see ourselves, and we have compassion, and we end up loving them more.

Characters like Cora who kills a white boy while trying to escape North, the adulterous John Proctor in The Crucible, and lying, scared, and over emotional disciple, Peter.

But not so much with the non-fictional characters of our daily workplaces, the family members that gather around the Thanksgiving table, and the members of our churches. Their faults are not lovable but deplorable. They drive us apart, they seep into our thoughts while driving or washing the dishes. They're the subjects of our cryptic blog posts. 

Suddenly, the realistic, compelling, relatable, interesting characters that are so lovable in books are our enemies in life.

Patrick Lencioni refers to this as the Fundamental Attribution Error, "The tendency of human beings to attribute the negative or frustrating behaviors of {others} to their intentions and personalities, while attributing their own negative or frustrating behaviors to environmental factors" (The Advantage).

Reading and writing stories can remind that, just as we and our favorite characters are flawed, so to is our neighbor. And that makes them realistic, compelling, relatable, and interesting . . . if only we choose to keep reading and not close the book.

4. Flesh Out Your Minor Characters

Your protagonist may make or break the show, but the supporting cast is just as important to the success of his story. If your minor characters are boring, flat, and clichéd, your entire story will suffer. This means you must lavish just as much attention on the little people as you do your shakers and movers. Even your smallest of walk-on characters need to strike readers with just as much realism and charisma as your larger-than-life protagonist.

Common writing advice says you must flesh out even your minor characters—and you should! But you must do it artfully, using only story-pertinent details.

What Writers Sometimes Think This Means:

Every character is the hero of his own story, right? And that’s exactly what some writers seem bent on doing: writing an entire story for every minor character, however insignificant they actually are within the plot. When you end up telling a minor character’s entire life story just to “flesh him out,” you know you’ve gone too far. In fact, even just sharing a single detail about this character if it is not pertinent to the story is a bridge too far.

If you introduce your walk-on taxi driver with a lengthy conversation about his large family, you’re telling readers this man and his family are important—to the plot, to the protagonist’s development, or to the thematic premise. In short, every minor-character detail you include had better be doing double or triple duty, rather than simply serving to tell readers, “See, look, this guy is a real human being! No, really!”

What This Bit of Writing Advice Really Means:

By all means, bring your minor characters to life. But do it deftly. Do it in a way that creates irony and subtext—and most importantly moves the plot forward.

Application to Life:

"You must lavish just as much attention on the little people as you do your shakers and movers." And how much more this applies to life.

How we treat those who can do nothing for us, who can provide little or no return, defines our character more than anything else. Being kind to those who are kind is easy. Being kind to those who are undeserving, who are cruel and seemingly fully selfish, is not. But it's what makes a "successful story."

In life, there are not minor or flat characters, there is only people - humans who want and love and fail and feel just like the rest of us - who want to be the hero. Lavishing attention on the "little people," those who cannot speak for themselves, fight for themselves, or think for themselves, is the mark and beauty of the best of humanity - it's humility. It's the mark of a hero.

People like Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, and those whose names will never appear in blogs or headlines because they didn't do what they did for attention, but because it was the right thing to do. And at the end of their lives, their funeral parlor is full.

5. Add Conflict to Every Scene

Here’s one you hear a lot these days: conflict, conflict, conflict. Without it, you have no plot and no story. If characters aren’t fighting, struggling, overcoming in every single scene, the forward momentum of the plot will founder, and readers will grow bored and give up on the book. More than that, conflict is directly related to the pertinence of any scene within your story. If something isn’t happening to push the conflict forward, then chances are high that scene can and should be trimmed from the story.

Common writing advice says you must include conflict in every scene—and you should! But you must make sure it is story-driving conflict, rather than random arguments.

What Writers Sometimes Think This Means:

In their determination to include the magic story elixir of conflict, writers sometimes end up manufacturing it. The result is random conflict—arguments, obstacles, and even physical altercations that actually do nothing to move the plot.

Turns out, conflict all by itself is not a surefire indicator of a scene’s plot-progressing necessity. Too often, writers feel their story is lagging (particularly in the Second Act), so they throw in a random argument between allies—or the neighborhood bully attacks—or there’s a car wreck—or who knows what else. The result is, at best, melodrama. At worst, readers will be just as bored as if the characters really were doing nothing.

What This Bit of Writing Advice Really Means:

It’s not enough to throw in a random argument to spice things up. Every bit of conflict in every scene must function as part of the overall plot, creating a seamless line of scene dominoes—one knocking into the next—that progresses your story from beginning to end.

Just as importantly, every bit of this conflict must pertinently impact your character’s arc and your story’s theme. If it misfires on any of these three levels—plot, character, or theme—it risks irrelevance and must be reexamined to strengthen it into something with the ability to truly power your story.

Application to Life:

Saying that a story without conflict is boring and will cause the readers to lose interest is perhaps true, but it is also shallow at the least - inaccurate and unhelpful at most because it doesn't relate to life. Try telling a middle school child struggling with the harshness of an overwhelming bully that it's what makes his life - his story- interesting. Tell a father whose searching for answer after losing his job or a wife and mother of three who has recently discovered that she a widow and must carry the burden alone that this is what moves their story along, "from beginning to end," and see if they are comforted. 

It won't. Because the purpose of conflict is not to move the story along. 

Conflict and hardship is a part of life, we know that. But how we interpret conflict can change how we view life.

"It’s not enough to throw in a random argument to spice things up," Weiland writes, and that is true, and it's probably good advice for writers. But in life, there is no "random argument" because, to paraphrase Weiland, every bit of conflict in every moment of life functions as part of the overall story, "creating a seamless line of scene dominoes—one knocking into the next."

The argument with a loved one that seemed to spawn from nothing and that ended nowhere is part of the seamless line of dominoes that was knocked, sometimes days or even years prior.

A blowup is never just a single isolated blowup. Somewhere, someone has pushed a domino. 

Knowing this can remind us perhaps of a few things.

1. Patience - because if we love that person, we want to know what's really going on. We want to lay a domino on its side and stop the progression.
2. Empathy - because we know ourselves and that really, when we are frustrated over a dirty kitchen, there is really something bigger we're wrestling with. So we listen.
3. Forgiveness - when we are close to someone, we are the ones they fall on. And sometimes,, they can't do anything about it - they've just been pushed over. So we bare it.

Thank you K.M. Weiland for the post, and thank you for reading!

Dangers of A Single Story - Chimamanda Adichie

 Good God, Chimamanda Adichie is good. 

You can read the transcript here.

Here is a list of Mrs. Adichie's books. Amazon doesn't carry them all.

• Decisions
• For Love of Biafra
• Purpose Hibiscus 
• Half of a Yellow Sun
• The Thing Around Your Neck
• Americanah
• We Should All be Feminists 

Hemingway's Cocktail for Rough Times

Eighty years ago, Ernest Hemingway invented the perfect cocktail for the times.

“Death in the Gulf Stream,” as he called it, was Hemingway’s salve for 1937—a dark year marked by an economic recession in the US, Joseph Stalin’s wrenching Purge Trials, a new war between China and Japan, and the Spanish Civil War which he covered as a journalist for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

War corespondent Ernest Hemingway, 1937.(AP Photo)

That year, the then-38-year old Farewell to Arms writer was emerging from a creative slump. He published To Have and Have Not, a novel about a desperate fishing-boat captain forced to engage in contraband operations between Key West, Florida, and Cuba in order to make ends meet. Hemingway devised what he called a “reviving and refreshing” gin based highball that “cools the blood and inspires renewed interest in food, companions and life.”

Hemingway describes it as a cocktail to be enjoyed from 11:00am on.

Take a tall thin water tumbler and fill it with finely cracked ice.

Lace this broken debris with 4 good purple splashes of Angostura, add the juice and crushed peel of 1 green lime, and fill glass almost full with Holland gin…

No sugar, no fancying. It’s strong, it’s bitter—but so is English ale strong and bitter, in many cases.

We don’t add sugar to ale, and we don’t need sugar in a “Death in the Gulf Stream”—or at least not more than 1 tsp. Its tartness and its bitterness are its chief charm.

Hemingway’s recipe was documented in Charles Baker’s 1946 compendium, The Gentleman’s Companion, An Exotic Cookery and Drinking Book. It’s also included in a book of cocktail recipes compiled by Colin Field, the head bartender of the Ritz Hotel Paris, who created a themed bar in honor of the Nobel Prize winning writer.

From Quartz.

For what it's worth, thank you.

All images are from the Lens of White House Photographer Pete Souza.

You took on one of the most scrutinized, difficult, and public offices this country has to offer, and you did so with a weight no other president had to endure - being the first black president of a country with a deep and dark history of racism.

For that, thank you.

You weren't perfect, but you served.

You found time to play.

To inspire.

To love and honor your wife.

To comfort.

For eight years, you represented this beautiful country and all that it holds dear - the right to be heard, to pursue happiness, and to expect equality. 

For these and the many other sacrifices you made,

thank you.

All of you.

President Obama's Library, From the Past Eight Years

President Obama is a reader. NY Times book critic Michiko Kakutani interviewed Obama about his reading just before he left office.

Last Friday, seven days before his departure from the White House, Mr. Obama sat down in the Oval Office and talked about the indispensable role that books have played during his presidency and throughout his life — from his peripatetic and sometimes lonely boyhood, when “these worlds that were portable” provided companionship, to his youth when they helped him to figure out who he was, what he thought and what was important.

During his eight years in the White House — in a noisy era of information overload, extreme partisanship and knee-jerk reactions — books were a sustaining source of ideas and inspiration, and gave him a renewed appreciation for the complexities and ambiguities of the human condition.

During his tenure in office, the President publicly recommended 86 different books, compiled into one list by Entertainment Weekly. Here are several of them, some of which I have also read and recommended on this very site:

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Dr. Atul Gawande
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
Seveneves, Neal Stephenson
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari
The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert
Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan
The Power Broker, Robert A. Caro
Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
Working, Studs Terkel
Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow
The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin
What Is the What, Dave Eggers

Not a bad list.

Repost from kottke.org

How Does it Feel : Patti Smith

PHOTOGRAPH BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX

By now, we all know the story of Patti Smith faltering during Dylan's Nobel Price ceremony.

Beautiful. In spite of and perhaps even more so because of the such obvious failure.  In an interview with the New Yorker Patti Smith shared that she "conflicting emotions." "In his absence," she asked herself, "was I qualified for the task?" She didn't want to displease Bob Dylan. But she committed herself to it and decided to sing 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, a song she "'loved since {she} was a teen-ager, a favorite of {her} late husband."

Then she fell, and fell hard. When she took her seat, she "felt the humiliating sting of failure, but also the strong realization that I had somehow entered and truly lived the world of the lyrics."

When I arose the next morning, it was snowing. In the breakfast room, I was greeted by many of the Nobel scientists. They showed appreciation for my very public struggle. They told me I did a good job. I wish I would have done better, I said. No, no, they replied, none of us wish that. For us, your performance seemed a metaphor for our own struggles. Words of kindness continued through the day, and in the end I had to come to terms with the truer nature of my duty. Why do we commit our work? Why do we perform? It is above all for the entertainment and transformation of the people. It is all for them. The song asked for nothing. The creator of the song asked for nothing. So why should I ask for anything?

When my husband, Fred, died, my father told me that time does not heal all wounds but gives us the tools to endure them. I have found this to be true in the greatest and smallest of matters. Looking to the future, I am certain that the hard rain will not cease falling, and that we will all need to be vigilant. The year is coming to an end; on December 30th, I will perform “Horses” with my band, and my son and daughter, in the city where I was born. And all the things I have seen and experienced and remember will be within me, and the remorse I had felt so heavily will joyfully meld with all other moments. Seventy years of moments, seventy years of being human.

A metaphor for our own struggles - of being human. And beautiful.

You can read the full lyrics here.

And watch Dylan sing it here.

Embrace the Shake

One of my favorites. 

PostSecret : Thoughts and Deeds That Expose Us All

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard. Their secrets are posted every Sunday.

Some are funny and innocent.

Some are not.

All, in a strange way, are relatable.

We all understand pain, embarrassment, and loneliness.

In the social media age, putting the best images, ideas, and moments of ourselves forward is expected. Which, in moments of despair and grief, isolates even more. 

To steal a concept from Stranger Things, PostSecret reveals the Upside Down dimension - the existing yet hidden parallel dimension of sorrow and fear inhabited by all human beings.

All human beings.

So even if we've never done this:

we can all relate to having our own secrets of stupidity that have been tucked away in the attic of shame and regret, only be unpacked and shared on a postcard. Not Facebook.

We are beautiful and wonderful, we are flawed and broken, and we all carry secrets.

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer, by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, 

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, 

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, 

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, 

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, 

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, 

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, 

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Yet, how much MORE mystical the perfect silence of the stars when we're also able to measure them, their distance, their mass, and their purpose - what they mean for all that we cannot see. 

There has to be a balance. Too much of either and not enough of both lends itself to error on both sides.

So, yes, Mr. Whitman. But also, incomplete.

jtinseoul : Loud yet Clear

JT White is a street and documentary photographer based in Seoul, South Korea. "Noise" in digital photographs is used to describe visual distortion - grain for example, and JT White's photography has a lot of noise. But it works.

Each photograph is full of emotion - tone even.

And his ability to capture a moment is truly mesmerizing. 

Here's a few images from his tattoo project entitled, "The Culture."

JT White has also been featured at Lensculture and can be followed on instagram: @jt_inseoul. 

Canvas of My Life: Jason Momoa

That's Amazing : The Magic of Making Sound

In Hollywood, everything is magic and make-believe, even sounds. When you watch a film that immerses you completely in its world, you’re probably hearing the work of sound artists. If the work is done right, you won’t be able to tell that the “natural” sounds on screen are manufactured with studio props. That's the challenge for Warner Bros. Foley artists Alyson Moore, Chris Moriana and mixer Mary Jo Lang. Theirs is a practice in recreation, one creative element at a time.

- Great Big Story -

The Dream of Dr. King, with the help of a Queen

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 was unusual among great American speeches in that its most famous words — “I have a dream” — were improvised. - Drew Henson, NY Times

Without question, Dr. King's "I Have A Dream Speech" is not only one of the most famous speeches of American history, it is one of the most iconic moments. And it almost didn't happen.

Several historians and friends of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have shared that at the most critical and crucial moment of Dr. King's Speech, he went off script, stumbled for just a moment, then, with the encouragement of Mahalia Jackson, shared his beloved dream.

"King read from his prepared text for most of his speech," Henson writes, relying heavily on "the Bible, the constitution and the Declaration of Independence - just as President John F. Kennedy had a few months earlier."

But according to Economist Tim Hartford, Dr. King never seemed satisfied with what he had. In addition to staying up late the night before, editing and re-editing, he also scratched and marked his speech in the back seat of the car on the way to the Washington Memorial and even on stage while waiting his turn. But even then, Dr. King knew something was missing. So about six minutes into his speech, Dr. King looked down at the script, his well crafted but "a little bit lifeless" script and realized it wasn't working.

So he improvised.

The line Dr. King was supposed to say was "Go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction." 

Instead, he says:

Then, Dr King paused.  The people behind him knew he no longer was on script, and it was then that history was made. 

Mahalia Jackson, the Queen of Gospel, had long been a supporter of Dr. King and the "no-famous bus boycott that lunged the modern Civil Rights Movement," and she had heard him, on more than one occasion, tell his dream of "seeing little Negro boys and girls walking to school with little white boys and girls, playing in the parks together and swimming together"(History.com). And she knew the people needed to hear it.

When Dr. King begin to speak from the heart and not the script, when she sensed a brief pause of thought, she yelled out, "Tell 'em about the dream Martin."

So he did.

You can read his scripted/unscripted script here.

"When we allow freedom to ring-when we let it ring from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all (If God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last, Free at last, Great God a-mighty, We are free at last."

Jump!

Philippe Halsman was a renowned portrait photographer who was particularly active in the 40s, 50s, and 60s and most famous for his iconic photos of Salvador Dali and Albert Einstein. For a period in the 1950s, Halsman ended his portrait shoots by asking his famous subjects to jump. The results were disarming.

When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears.

Halsman got all sorts of people to jump for his camera: Richard Nixon (above), Robert Oppenheimer, Marilyn Monroe (above), Aldous Huxley, Audrey Hepburn (above), Brigitte Bardot, and the Duke & Duchess of Windsor (above). He collected all his jump photos into the recently re-released Philippe Halsman’s Jump Book.

Repost from kottke.org

First off, kottke.org is just a great resource for fun information so thanks to kottke for yet another inspiration/stolen post!

Second, what's so great about these pictures is the "other side" of those being photographed - the "real person." Everyone has a child inside, often hidden and suppressed by expectations, judgements, and "maturity." Jumping seems to be the key to unlocking the cage. If only for a little while.

Thanks Philippe Halsman for the great photos!

Pablo Escobar's Son is an Architect, and He's Building Peace

"At the peak of his power, infamous Medellin cartel boss Pablo Escobar brought in and estimated $420 million a week in revenue, easily making him one of the wealthiest drug lords in history."

And his son was along for the ride.

Sebastian Marroquin grew up in Medellin, Colombia, as Juan Pablo Escobar, the son of legendary drug kingpin and leader of the Medellin Cartel, Pablo Escobar. As a kid, Marroquin enjoyed time at “Naples,” a 20-square-kilometer (eight-square-mile) ranch that included swimming pools and a zoo filled with millions of dollars’ worth of exotic animals. “I’ve never been to Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch,” he told The Independent. “But I doubt it had anything on Naples.” 

While accompanying his father for years evading the police and rival gangs, young Sebastian saw the perils and pitfalls of the criminal life and has since started a new life as a successful architect. Senior Editor Matt Shaw sat down with Marroquin to discuss his path to architecture, what he learned from his father, and what he hopes to accomplish for Colombia in the future. - Matt Shaw

In this interview, Sebastian Marroguin says he doesn't think much of shows like Narcos because "They are telling lies about [his] whole life", was inspired by his father's architectural ability to hide runways with removable homes, is currently "designing a free, public wellness center and water therapy facility for a small town in Argentina."

Copia de Casa Clau in Colombia by Sebastian Marroquin. (Courtesy Sebastian Marroquin)

But what's even more crazy, is how architecture has saved his life . . . and helped him forgive. 

"Architecture saved my life because it gave me the possibility to believe that even when something is demolished new things can come out of that and architecture really helps to know how to think not only about architecture but also about life."

He's even built a house for the guys who, in 1988, "put 700 kilos of dynamite in my house. It was a miracle that we survived because I was with my mom and my little sister there. . . So I built the house for the guy who ruined mine.

"It was a way for them to ask for forgiveness and in a way to understand us," Marroguin explains, "They knew who I was from the beginning. It was weird and it was a clear opportunity and it was clear that a lot of things have changed in Colombia and that is a great example of how things have really changed now.

People want to make peace."

So he built a house for them.

Copia de Casa Clau in Colombia by Sebastian Marroquin. (Courtesy Sebastian Marroquin)

John Legend and Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Art of Writing

Dec 05, 2016 

Video by  The Atlantic

At a taping of Live from the Artists Den at New York City's Riverside Church, The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates had a frank conversation with the musician John Legend about his prolific songwriting and his creative process. Legend admits to being a workaholic, but also someone who dives in without much planning and lets his art move him. “I don’t need a lightning bolt of inspiration to say ‘Okay, I know what I want the album to be about,’” Legend tells Coates. “I figure that the writing process will give me those lightning bolts eventually … the best advice I give to writers is to write."

A Marriage, by Michael Blumenthal

Sometimes, marriage isn't easy. Sometimes, it's work. Most often, it's a choice.

For Margie Smigel and Jon Dopkeen

You are holding up a ceiling
with both arms. It is very heavy,
but you must hold it up, or else
it will fall down on you. Your arms
are tired, terribly tired,
and, as the day goes on, it feels
as if either your arms or the ceiling
will soon collapse.

But then,
unexpectedly,
something wonderful happens:
Someone,
a man or a woman,
walks into the room
and holds their arms up
to the ceiling beside you.

So you finally get
to take down your arms.
You feel the relief of respite,
the blood flowing back
to your fingers and arms.
And when your partner's arms tire,
you hold up your own
to relieve him again.

And it can go on like this
for many years
without the house falling.

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-N- Stuff  :  Poetry  :  Inspiration