Encouragement is like an apple; praise is like candy.

[Praise] can only be given after success. Encouragement is so potent that it can be given after failure.

Praise is general and high-energy. Encouragement is low-key.

By the way, “thank you” is a powerful form of encouragement.

Rather than wondering if alien beings exist in the cosmos, let's assume that they are all around us, everywhere, at all scales.

Why should a new aesthetic [be] interested only in the relationship between humans and computers, when so many other relationships exist just as much? Why stop with the computer, like Marinetti foolishly did with the race car?

Being withdraws from access. There is always something left in reserve, in a thing.

A convent is a world apart, unduplicable. But the Sisters of St. Joseph, a congregation in this Rochester suburb, animate many factors that studies say contribute to successful aging and a gentle death — none of which require this special setting. These include a large social network, intellectual stimulation, continued engagement in life and spiritual beliefs, as well as health care guided by the less-is-more principles of palliative and hospice care — trends that are moving from the fringes to the mainstream.

“We approach our living and our dying in the same way, with discernment,” said Sister Mary Lou Mitchell.

Few sisters opt for major surgery, high-tech diagnostic tests or life-sustaining machinery. And *nobody can remember the last time anyone died in a hospital*, which was one of the goals in selling the old Mother House, with its tumbledown infirmary — a “Bells of St. Mary” kind of place — and using the money to finance a new facility appropriate for end-of-life care.

*** “Hospitals should not be meccas for dying. Dying belongs at home, in the community.” ***

Dr. McCann said that the sisters’ religious faith insulated them from existential suffering — the “Why me?” refrain commonly heard among those without a belief in an afterlife. Absent that anxiety and fear, Dr. McCann said, there is less pain, less depression, and thus the sisters require only one-third the amount of narcotics he uses to manage end-of-life symptoms among hospitalized patients.

Instead of thinking of social media as a clear window into the selves and lives of its users, perhaps we should view the Web as being more like a painting.

Tourists would stand with their back to the landscape and look at a reflection of it rather than look directly at the landscape they had traveled to see. The Claude glass may be a long-forgotten piece of technology, but in that regard it’s a perfect metaphor for much of the modern Web.

As we do offline, our self-presentations online are always creative, playful, and thoroughly mediated by the logic of social-media documentation. The Claude glass metaphor describes an Internet that’s more than beautiful — one that is picturesque.

The wealthy 18th century tourists enjoyed more than just the view, the reflections, and the paintings. More fundamentally, they enjoyed demonstrating their refined taste, distinct from the lower and middle classes as well as the new rich.

We propagate the myth of identity as being natural, authentic, and spontaneous and forget what thinkers like Erving Goffman and Judith Butler have painstakingly illustrated: Identity, on and offline, is a performance.