What is Geistlet?
My other website, Geistlet, is a Monday to Friday chronicle of the animal spirit. As I explain in the About section of that site,
A geistlet is a fragment of spirit (geist) that mirrors the spirit of the age (zeitgeist) on a smaller scale. A geistlet may be a statistic, a story, an image, a video, a chart, a meme, a style—in short, anything that gives us a sense of the mind of the market and the spirit of our brief moment in history. Each geistlet is presented merely to ask, "What does this tell us about ourselves?"
Typically, I consume a lot of business news over the course of a week and Geistlet is my way of making sense out of it. The first two things I read every day are Dennis Dutton's Arts & Letters Daily and Michael Kesterton's "Social Studies" in the Facts and Arguments section of the Globe and Mail; Geistlet is a sort of amalgamation of the two applied to the world of business. It's a way of asking, "Who are we?" with an anthropological emphasis on the qualitative character of commerce.
Socrates says in the Phaedrus (230d), "Landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me—only the people of the city can do that."* That is to say, Socrates is interested in the natural world only insofar as it affects human beings; Ionian physics, for example, concerns him solely to the extent that it changes the way in which we live and think.
Similarly, Geistlet is a business blog only in the most peripheral sense. The stock price of Google or the balance sheet of Apple interest me only insofar as they tell us something about who we are, what we value, and where we are headed. Geistlet, then, is a consideration of commerce as a thermometer for the human soul.
I hope you'll find it worthy of your daily reading.
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*Nehamas and Woodruff translation
