Xavier Rudd

Xavier Rudd has a sweet, soulful voice that carries with it the cries, hurts, and hopes of Aboriginal Australians. The purity of the emotion oozing from the singer is clear and his multi-instrumental skill is mesmerizing; Xavier Rudd is one of those artistes to fall in love with, a  rare gem. With a knack for connecting with people on the soul level and even bringing concert goers to the point of tears.

The British author Aldous Huxley (1894–1963). With the publication of "The Doors of Perception" in 1954, Huxley became an early exponent of drug-induced alterations of conscious states, a position he maintained and expounded upon toward the end of his life, as he lost his own visual capacity and the psychedelic movement embraced him warmly.

It was ‘such a great misfortune’, he thought, to lose the capacity to be alone with oneself, to get caught up in the crowd, to surrender one’s singularity to mind-numbing conformity.

Tonight, 62,000 New Yorkers will sleep in homeless shelters, the most since the Great Depression. 14 percent of the nation's homeless population are in New York City. In recent years, homelessness in New York City has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

• 14 percent of the nation's homeless population are in New York City

• In April 2019, there were 61,782 homeless people, including 14,826 homeless families with 21,709 homeless children, sleeping each night in the New York City municipal shelter system. Families make up three-quarters of the homeless shelter population.

“Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility,” James Baldwin reflected in his final interview. “An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love’ — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her superb meditation on the dignity of love.

They say intelligence is a gift,

But sometimes it can be a rift.

Too smart, they call it, a heavy load,

A burden that nobody else can decode.

Walter Lippmann on Public Opinion, Our Slippery Grasp of Truth, and the Discipline of Apprehending Reality Clearly. “If the connection between reality and human response were direct and immediate, rather than indirect and inferred, indecision and failure would be unknown.”

Edward Hopper: Nighthawks (1942)

The diner was a place of refuge, absolutely, but there was no visible entrance, no way to get in or out. There was a cartoonish, ochre-coloured door at the back of the painting, leading perhaps into a grimy kitchen. But from the street, the room was sealed: an urban aquarium, a glass cell.

How to cope with an existential crisis

Has the world gone grey? Are you wondering what life is for? Kierkegaard’s philosophy could help you rediscover your zing

“When I sit in a car or in a van or a room, and I see 90 percent of the people with their faces glowing and their eyes in the palm of their hand, I go, ‘This is Orwellian.’ Their consciousness has been reduced to what other people think, period,” the actor said. “I do enough of it myself. I’m not innocent of it, but I’m cognizant . . . I see what’s happened to the world because of this easy access, social media, and the contraptions we drag along with us like a ball and chain, this new appendage we’ve been saddled with. And I think of Steve Jobs in hell being pursued relentlessly, for eternity, by demons who want a selfie.”