The idea that “doing nothing” is actually an event in and of itself. The idea that we no longer run on a treadmill of activity from getting the kids ready for school, to brushing our teeth, to conference calls, to picking up kids, fixing dinner, and bed- only to start over again. The idea that our actions day to day become influenced by our instincts and no longer by routines, shoulds, and musts.
Writing a book about the quest for ethical perfection, Schur risked coming across as unbearably pedantic or worse, sanctimonious, but he grounds his overviews of abstract doctrines in self-deprecating digressions. He confesses he still has books by Woody Allen on his shelves and hasn’t been able to renounce him even after allegations of sexual abuse came to light. He describes the self-loathing he would feel whenever he left a tip at Starbucks but paused to make sure that the barista saw him do it. He agonizes over his privileged status as an educated, affluent white man, worries that his hybrid car is still bad for the environment and frets that the money he spends on baseball tickets and other luxuries could have gone to people in need. (He’s donating his earnings from the book to several charities and nonprofits, he said.)
 |
Born in Ann Arbor, Mich., and raised in Connecticut in a casually Unitarian family, Schur has had a charmed career that he attributes to a series of lucky accidents, beginning with the day he stayed home sick from school and his mom let him watch Allen’s movie “Sleeper.” At Harvard, where he majored in English, he joined the Lampoon, a comedy magazine that has served as a pipeline for TV writers, and those connections helped him land a job as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” in 1998.
He was later hired as a writer for “The Office,” and around the third season, he signed an overall deal with NBCUniversal. He went on to cocreate “Parks and Recreation” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” both wholesome workplace comedies. When the network gave him free rein to make a show about anything he wanted, he pitched “The Good Place.”
Early on, he ran into a problem: He didn’t know much about moral philosophy. So he started a self-taught course in ethics, reading works by Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Bentham, Rawls and others, and devouring academic papers he found online.
When he found concepts to be impenetrable, he sought out professionals. He asked Pamela Hieronymi, a philosophy professor at U.C.L.A, to be an adviser for the show, and she gave lectures in the writers room and guided writers through conundrums like the Trolley Problem. “He wants it to be digestible, but he doesn’t want to water it down,” she said of Schur.
Schur also brought on the philosopher Todd May as a consultant after reading his book, “Death.” Schur would sometimes send May an urgent email with a “philosophical emergency” when he was worried he had bungled some ethical nuance.
 |
| 'Reflection' by the Scottish artist Fiona Graham-Mackay shows a young Anne Frank looking up towards an imagined older version of herself. |
As a camera wobbles, we glimpse a yellow star sewn onto a girl’s dress: “Jood,” it reads — “Jew.” A group of girls horse around together in an Amsterdam street, giggling. But then we catch sight of some German soldiers. “Anne, put your camera away,” one of the girls says.
"No piece of art has ever emotionally affected me the way this robot arm piece has. It's programmed to try to contain the hydraulic fluid that’s constantly leaking out and required to keep itself running...if too much escapes, it will die so it's desperately trying to pull it back to continue to fight for another day. Saddest part is they gave the robot the ability to do these 'happy dances' to spectators. When the project was first launched it danced around spending most of its time interacting with the crowd since it could quickly pull back the small spillage. Many years later... (as you see it now in the video) it looks tired and hopeless as there isn't enough time to dance anymore.. It now only has enough time to try to keep itself alive as the amount of leaked hydraulic fluid became unmanageable as the spill grew over time. Living its last days in a never-ending cycle between sustaining life and simultaneously bleeding out... (Figuratively and literally as its hydraulic fluid was purposefully made to look like it's actual blood).
"The robot arm finally ran out of hydraulic fluid in 2019, slowly came to a halt and died - And I am now tearing up over a friggin robot arm.
 |
| Kalie Kismet |
God, grant me the serenity
to accept the people I cannot change,
which is pretty much everyone,
since I’m clearly not you, God.
At least not the last time I checked.
And while you’re at it, God,
please give me the courage
to change what I need to change about myself,
which is frankly a lot, since, once again,
I’m not you, which means I’m not perfect.
It’s better for me to focus on changing myself
than to worry about changing other people,
who, as you’ll no doubt remember me saying,
I can’t change anyway.
Finally, give me the wisdom to just shut up
whenever I think that I’m clearly smarter
than everyone else in the room,
that no one knows what they’re talking about except me,
or that I alone have all the answers.
Basically, God,
grant me the wisdom
to remember that I’m
not you.
Amen.
 |
| Off The Leash Daily Dog Cartoons |
I grew up with an optimist, and I married an optimist, but even the sunniest human being is barely more than a neophyte where hope is concerned. In any household, the true master of hope is the family dog.
President Snow: Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective, a lot of hope is dangerous. A spark is fine, as long as it's contained.
