Transcript of a lecture by Stephen Fry.

When I first found out about and joined the internet and watched it grow with the arrival of the www I described it to friends, whom I was anxious to convert and get themselves email addresses, as the greatest gathering of human beings in the history of the planet. As new services came on line and web 2.0 blossomed into the social media services we now know and perhaps rely on, I believed, I really believed, that humankind might well be saved by the all-gifted net. It would spread, art, literature, music, culture, philosophy, enlightenment and knowledge. In its train would come new freedoms, a new understanding between the peoples of the world, a new contract. This was to be our millennium’s Pandora, an all-gifted organism that would bring nothing but learning, understanding, amity, comity and friendship. I looked at budding projects like…

Have you ever stood next to the oceans soaring powers, spread your arms wide and just screamed from the deepest pits of your power? Well… I did the last time this past weekend and that my friends is real freedom!

There’s something insanely powerful with letting yourself feel that vulnerable as when you open your mouth and take a deep breath before letting it all out. We should do that more I am sure of that, but that doesn’t really come to mind these days, even though we have more to scream out than ever before. At least I had. It doesn’t have to be a bad feeling that or anxiety you scream out, it can be out of pure happiness! Just let yourself free from all that you’ve hold in and feel the deep rooted freedom sinking in.

But what is freedom, to you? How you manifest it in…

Fallen leaves

fall on each other—

rain beats on the rain.

~ Kyōtai, from Haiku: An Anthology of Japanese Poems

Notes: Haiku via soracities. Photo: Rain and Coffee

In the current wave of sexual-assault allegations, the conversation should not be framed in terms of retribution. Source: “Should Al Franken Resign?” Is the Wrong Question

Dianne Alfaro sat in a pew in the back of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, her head bowed during Mass on Sunday morning. She cast her eyes down as the hymn “Jerusalem My Happy Home” swelled around her.

As the words “Hosanna in the highest!” echoed in the cathedral, she never looked up. That is, until she finished buying a pair of black boots off the internet on her iPhone.

“At some point, the priest during the Mass says, ‘Lift up your hearts.’ He does not say, ‘Lift up your cellphones to take pictures,’” Pope Francis said last week during a general audience at St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, where he urged Catholics to leave their phones home.

But during Sunday Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, it seemed either the pontiff’s message had not yet reached across the Atlantic or the churchgoers were not listening.

Beside a font of…