A Random Assortment

~ On Living in a FLW house:

In Wright’s original plan, there were doors from those rooms to the backyard. Paul remembered, “I said, ‘Mr. Wright, we don’t want our children escaping in the middle of the night.’ ” Helen jumped in, saying, “He gave us quite a lecture on why we shouldn’t be so controlling of children.”

~ Can't ever get enough about Elizabeth Bishop.

~ This is awesome:

“Actually,” Istvan said in a cheerful tone, “it’s far more dangerous coming downhill, because we’re relying on 40-year-old brake pads here.”
Although I was not sure I wanted to live forever, I was sure that I didn’t want to go down in a blaze of chintzy irony, plunging into a ravine strapped into the passenger seat of a thing called the Immortality Bus. For all that Istvan railed against the tyranny of death over human lives, his attitude toward basic road safety was at times wildly cavalier. The fact that he was piloting a 38-foot coffin bus through New Mexico did not, for instance, stop him from looking at his phone every couple of minutes, responding to texts and emails, checking the social-media analytics on his latest piece for TechCrunch, etc.
... Reading on, I learned how I, or my soul, might survive the death of my body and all other worldly things by surrendering myself to the Lord. I remembered asking Horn, earlier that day, about how his religious upbringing might have informed his belief that he would live forever through science. He said there was no longer any need for gods.“Science is the new God,” he said. “Science is the new hope.”
...While Istvan fielded a call from his irate wife about an overflowing toilet he failed to repair before setting off across the country to promote immortality, I took the opportunity to quiz Horn about his lifestyle choices.He was a transhumanist ascetic, a young man who had largely withdrawn from the world so that he might never have to leave it.