TESTStoneslide

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We at The Stoneslide Corrective propose a government initiative to promote the design, manufacture, and distribution of firearms made for toddlers. This may sound surprising to those who don’t think deeply about public policy. We think deeply. The ultimate goal of government is to minimize suffering. Let us explain how this program will accomplish that.

Imagine this situation: It’s after midnight. I’ve dealt with house guests, cleaned the kitchen, taken care of work emails, but I can now finally go to sleep. On my way to bed I pass the two year old’s crib and hear, to my utter horror, “Hi Daddy!” She’s standing up in the crib, smiling, looking me right in the eye, and I think, I wish she’d just shot me. If she had a little rifle … [Read more…]

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Everyone knows that Dickens wrote fast—he was famously paid by the word. He produced stacks of copy, but he also generated prose of such brilliance that people know the lines by heart more than a century later. We at The Stoneslide Corrective investigated his process of composition in order to understand how it was possible for him to achieve both such quantity and such quality.

The Stoneslide Corrective occasionally studies early drafts of writings, in order to learn, to instruct, to grow, and sometimes in order to explore for the sheer enjoyment of compositional exploration. Consulting the work of scholars, archivists, biographers, librarians, private foundations and repositories, and, when appropriate, consulting the writers themselves, we re-create the process through which a work was brought into being, often including the many drafts writers go through.

Note: All historical work is verified by HistoriRight, Inc.

Unless you’re at church, temple, mosque, or a court proceeding, do feel free to turn up the volume of the device you’re using to read this (except your brain, of course; please don’t turn up that device’s volume).

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I wouldn’t have time to violate them.

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The rock singer Bono is a lyricist of great and deserved renown. The heart of his success is his artistic expression, and that wasn’t formed in the public sphere of cocktail parties, expert panels, or focus groups. It was forged in solitary labors, where the soul pounds against the hard truths of nature and the limits of language.

Note: All historical work is verified by HistoriRight, Inc.

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by Tia Creighton

I’m standing on the porch of another split-level, post-war modern home waiting for an answer. I have a green, plastic, grocery bag full of Girl Scout cookies, and I know what I’m going to hear. I am out of Thin Mints, and that’s all they want.

“Got any Thin Mints?” a man in a ribbed, white, tank tee shirt’s going to ask while he scratches his electrified salt and pepper hair and tugs his shirt down over his hanging belly.

“No,” I’ll have to respond through the screen door he hasn’t opened. “I’m all out. But I have lots of—” [Read more…]

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A fourteen-hour discussion among the world’s leading academic psychologists, sociologists, biologists, anthropologists, and philosophers ended in consensus on a new definition of what it means to be human.

Previous definitions of what made humans distinctive within the animal kingdom, such as being “the tool-using species” or “the language-using species” have each briefly allowed us to hold ourselves above the brute beast, but have eventually fallen by the wayside as science uncovered greater and greater complexity in the lower orders: dolphins communicating with chirps and squeaks and chimps using stone and wood tools. Other potential distinguishing points, such as the ability to feel loyalty or devotion, did not withstand the barest observation of various bird species that have monogamy rates much higher than those found in human communities. Altruism has been proposed as another distinguishing feature, but after researchers defined it in such a way as to rule out behaviors such as maternal nursing and primate grooming, they could not locate the quality in humans either.

The idea that only humans drink beer from cans affixed to headgear was rejected as a difference of degree, not kind. The proposal that only humans ride sleds onto half-frozen ponds to see if they can get across was disproved when a drunk man in Vermont put his bichon frise on a sled and pointed it at the water. The dog was seen to bark happily before going under.

All of this background was revisited in the first seven hours of debate without resolution. But then one computer scientist ventured the definition that only humans could create a machine capable of outsmarting its creators. [Read more…]

Books & Magazine

The Stoneslide Corrective No. 1

Gracious Living Without Servants

Shock to Equilibrium