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All Aphorisms, All The Time
The World in A Phrase at Politics and Prose
November 17, 2025
Thanks to the wonderful team at Politics and Prose for hosting me and The World in A Phrase on Nov 15. And thanks to everyone — shout out to the Nieman Fellows! —who came out to juggle words, ideas, and balls.
There was a blank sheet selected from the globe — in fact, it was the first sheet selected from the globe 😬 — and the subject was: Rhetoric. I came up with something from FDR ...
Be sincere, be brief, be seated.
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The World in A Phrase at Politics and Prose
November 17, 2025
Thanks to the wonderful team at Politics and Prose for hosting me and The World in A Phrase on Nov 15. And thanks to everyone — shout out to the Nieman Fellows! —who came out to juggle words, ideas, and balls. There was a blank sheet selected from the globe — in fact, it was […]
The World in A Phrase at the Harvard Book Store
November 16, 2025
Thanks to the wonderful team at Harvard Book Store for hosting me and The World in A Phrase on Nov 10. And thanks to everyone who came out to juggle words, ideas, and balls. There was a blank sheet selected from the globe, and the subject was: Anthropology. With a little help from everyone in […]
Welcome to The World in A Phrase!
November 8, 2025
Fortuna stands some seven feet tall, on a pedestal overlooking seven Black automatons, in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Roberts Family Gallery. The mechanized figures in plots of obsidian perform a kind of ritual resurrection: One automaton, limbs flailing, repeatedly rises from and falls to the ground, summoned by another robot dressed in […]
Getting my globe ready for The World in A Phrase
November 3, 2025
I’m dusting off my trusty old globe in preparation for upcoming talks about The World in A Phrase. Back in the day, I conducted little happenings with aphorisms in which I neatly excised the Arctic Circle from a desktop globe, so that the top of the earth came off like the lid of a cookie jar. […]
The World in A Phrase arrives on my doorstep (literally)
November 2, 2025
Receiving the first copies of a book you have written is the oddest feeling… The object before you has lived in your mind for years, and you have spent many days working to place what is inside your mind outside your mind so others can see it. The book is like a black […]
Aphorisms on journalism by John Bennet
October 19, 2025
Through a series of fortunate hyperlinks, I recently stumbled across aphorisms on journalism by John Bennet, former New Yorker editor and professor in magazine writing at Columbia Journalism School. In a brief 2022 obit on the Columbia j-school site, Betsy Morais, editor in chief of the Columbia Journalism Review, wrote that Bennet “often spoke in […]
Richard Kostelanetz’s aphorisms of “radical constraint”
October 18, 2025
Richard Kostelanetz is interested in “radical constraint.” And the aphorism is the ideal form in which to put that interest into practice. Aphorisms are, by definition, short. But Kostelanetz takes concision to an extreme by restricting himself even further — to aphorisms consisting of just four (“quadrigraphs”), three, and two (“minimaxims”) words. Kierkegaard wrote, “The […]
More Aphorisms by Ninus Nestorović
October 5, 2025
I first blogged about the aphorisms of Ninus Nestorović back in December of 2007. Ninus was recently in touch with some new aphorisms, deftly translated by his 15-year-old daughter, Tea. Ninus is a journalist, satirist, and ex-professional footballer who lives in Novi Sad, Serbia. These sayings come from his book 11:52. In an email accompanying […]
Ashleigh Brilliant (1933–2025)
October 4, 2025
Ashleigh Brilliant, the prolific creator of the drawings-aphorisms he called “Pot-Shots”, died last month in in Santa Barbara, CA. This New York Times obit has a nice summary of his writing career and a selection of some of his best sayings. A piece in the local Santa Barbara outlet Noozhawk has more detailed information on […]
Irving Weiss (1921-2021)
July 10, 2021
Writer, teacher and translator Irving Weiss passed away on June 13. We have Irving to thank for bringing the aphorisms of Malcolm de Chazal into English. Malcolm de Chazal (Geary’s Guide, pp. 359–361) was an aphorist and painter from Mauritius. I discovered the 1979 Sun edition of Chazal’s aphorisms, Sens-Plastique, by chance in a used […]
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