→ RFID & NFC human chip implants “We pioneered implantable RFID & NFC so you can do amazing things like open doors and log in with just a wave of your hand!”
→ Shaarli “The personal, minimalist, super-fast, database free, bookmarking service” Absolutely wonderful if you are selfhosting (shared hosting is OK: it is just a PHP app).
→ How and why I stopped buying new laptops “All this means that there’s no environmental or financial benefit whatsoever to replacing an old laptop with a new one. On the contrary, the only thing a consumer can do to improve their laptop’s ecological and economic sustainability is to use it for as long as possible.”
→ The Secret, Essential Geography of the Office “Much as I am glad to not be turned into a human icicle, the missing drumbeat of home-walk-work-walk-home has been a difficult adaptation. To make matters more monotonous, I am working from the same home office every day because my computer with all of my work stuff is an iMac and it is difficult to drag around. So it doesn’t matter what I am doing — writing email, meeting colleagues, having a quick chat — it all happens in exactly the same place staring at exactly the same screen sitting in exactly the same chair rolling around on exactly the same rug.”
→ The Seductive Appeal of Urban Catastrophe “In recent decades, archaeologists and geologists have reanalyzed the evidence about what happened at Angkor. What they found is the truth behind the lost-city myth: Great cities are rarely snuffed out in an instant, nor do they “collapse.” Instead, they transform.”
→ The Cantillon Effect and GameStop “As with any complex event, there are multiple narratives at work. There’s a political story, of populists fighting Wall Street insiders, an economic story of speculation and the casino-like nature of Wall Street, and a financial story of middlemen and con artists manipulating both sides.”
→ John Locke's Index He nearly-possibly invented Zettelkasten quite some years before Herr Luhmann.
→ SMAT “The Social Media Analysis Toolkit (SMAT) was designed to help facilitate activists, journalists, researchers, and other social good organizations to analyze and visualize larger trends on a variety of platforms.”
→ Theodor Adorno and the Crises of Liberalism “Fascism, the studies argued, is not a sublime evil or a pathology for which there is a simple remedy. It is something far more unsettling: a latent but pervasive feature of bourgeois modernity.”
→ Why Is There a Bucatini Shortage in America? “Ultimately, I had more questions than I did answers. I did not, for example, understand who from Big Pasta had targeted De Cecco and why. I was also slightly worried that I had inadvertently made myself a target of Big Pasta. And more importantly, I did not know if I would get to taste De Cecco’s brilliant, sentient noodle ever again.”
→ Nazi Hippies: When the New Age and Far Right Overlap “Last week’s rallies in London, Berlin, and Los Angeles against lockdown measures attracted both New Agers and far-right groups. We’ve seen before this overlap between the spiritual movement and the fast-spreading conspiracy theory, QAnon, which insists that an evil cabal of Hollywood celebs and liberal politicians (led by Tom Hanks and Hillary Clinton) are child-eating Satanists who control the world. Luckily, the theory holds, a secret government source called Q (who leaves cryptic comments on the website 8chan) is gathering together a patriot army to fight back and support President Donald Trump, who is a genius sent by God to defeat the evil cabal and usher in a new Age of Love.”
→ ‘Conspirituality’ Explains Why the Wellness World Fell for QAnon “The term “Conspirituality,” a mash-up of the words conspiracy theory and spirituality, was first proposed in 2011 by anthropologists Charlotte Ward and David Voas, who noticed that sometimes, those with spiritual or alternative beliefs are especially prone to conspiracy-like thinking.”
→ Avant Garde Project This is the Internet Archive home of the Avant Garde Project, known by audiophiles the world over as AGP. The Avant Garde Project is a series of recordings of 20th-century classical, experimental, and electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today.
→ John le Carré obituary “The real enemies for Le Carré were not the Russian gangsters, for all their brutality, but the western, and particularly British, enablers and louche House of Lords and City corruptionists, with palms extended to take a share of the money, however obtained and from whatever source. The upper-class rogues who control “Great Britain plc” come quite high in Le Carré’s ranking of evil men.”
→ A Book Like Foo: Powerful Book Recommendations “Break the Bubble allows you to find out which books you are statistically unlikely to read. The more narrow your reading tastes are, the more you will be challenged by the results.”
→ Harold Budd, RIP “The core Budd sound of yearning piano motifs and reverb-laden impressionism is often called minimalism. But compared with the cyclical craft of Steve Reich and early Philip Glass, his low-key, expansive forays felt deftly maximalist. This has made Budd’s craft synonymous with the dreamworld. An heir to Satie and Debussy, his music was treated and poetic, never kneejerk nor incautious.”
→ Verse by Verse “An experimental AI-powered muse that helps you compose poetry inspired by classic American poets”
→ A New Knot “In 1986, 89-year-old viewer Jerry Pratt showed up at Minneapolis’s WCCO-TV and told local newsman Don Shelby that he didn’t know how to tie his necktie straight.”
→ Introducing Simple Search “We built a browser extension, Simple Search, to show you just the “traditional” search results.”
→ Seeing Too Clearly “The US becomes an autocracy, and devolves into a weak and fractious patchwork of jurisdictions run by more or less rapacious oligarchs who conduct a losing war with China, first cold then hot. Human rights become a quaint idea. The environment collapses, and the resulting massive migrations of people lead to vicious authoritarian regimes taking control in richer countries. Genocidal wars are fought over water. The Tibetan plateau is a global flashpoint. New pathogens emerge out of the melting permafrost, killing millions. Life becomes hellish for all but the very wealthy. For the masses, the future looks like an insect world of starvation or highly-surveilled shock work; for the few, a melancholy decadence conducted behind high walls. I always thought the shit would go down when I was young and strong. These days I’m just hoping I won’t spend my old age picking through the ruins of my city looking for expired canned food.”
→ Demonstration of American Dialects, 1958. “DEMONSTRATION OF AMERICAN DIALECTS, 1958.
November 1, 2020 by languagehat 54 Comments
In this 26-minute video clip, linguist Henry Lee Smith (it’s a shame there’s no Wikipedia article for him) demonstrates, with the help of a panel of people from different parts of the country (I particularly liked one guy’s old-fashioned Brooklyn accent), how American speech differs geographically.”
→ Six Charts That Reveal America’s Deep Divides “In 1980, the top 1% of earners took home 10% of US national income, and the bottom 50% of earners took home 20%. By 2016 however, these positions had reversed: the income share of the top 1% had increased to 20%, and the income share of the bottom 50% had decreased to 13%.”
→ Why are ‘anti-imperialists’ defending dictators? “On domestic issues such as the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, tankies tend to take progressive positions. This makes their politics on peripheral countries all the more confusing, especially for those of us on the receiving end of our governments’ brutalities. Tankies would thus condemn American cops yet praise Hong Kong cops, or condemn the Israeli military while praising the Russian army.”
→ How to De-Stress with Niksen, the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing “Niksen is not doomscrolling through social media or streaming whole seasons of shows. Niksen is intentional purposelessness, the opposite of distraction, like meditation but without the postures and instructions and classes and retreats and so forth.”
→ World smallest office suite “We are all familiar with a traditional office suite - a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, maybe a diagramming or note-taking app. We have seen it all in Microsoft Office and Google Docs. Those are really powerful and large. But what would be the most minimal amount of code required to build an office suite?”
→ Bye-bye, Apple Me too - but to a bespoke Tuxedo laptop running Ubuntu. Bliss.
→ 13 Restaurant Cookbooks With Dishes You Can Actually Make at Home “The genre of the restaurant cookbook is both large and varied, but the common denominator that underlies the majority of its titles is the implicit promise that you, too, can reproduce a chef’s work in the confines of your home kitchen. Most of the time, this promise is patently false. But there are a number of notable exceptions, signature dishes that really can be made by home cooks with a command of basic kitchen techniques, as well as access to both adequate time and fairly common pantry staples. Given that these are two things many folks have in abundance right now, there has arguably never been a better moment to start making facsimiles of famous — and yet frequently accessible! — restaurant dishes at home. Here are 13 to get you started.”
→ Pilgrim fathers: harsh truths amid the Mayflower myths of nationhood “These were people who came here for their religious freedom because they couldn’t worship as they pleased in their own country, and yet when they came to this country they did not seem to have that same tolerance for the people that they met here, despite all that the Wampanoag did to help them”
→ McMaster-Carr And that is how you create an e-commerce site that just works.
→ 88 very British phrases “Press down the clutch, put it into gear, then slowly ease off the clutch again. Bob’s your uncle -- you’re driving!”
→ Reasons to be Cheerful “We tell stories that reveal that there are, in fact, a surprising number of reasons to feel cheerful. Many of these reasons come in the form of smart, proven, replicable solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. We’re here to tell you about some of them. Through sharp reporting, our stories balance a sense of healthy optimism with journalistic rigor, and find cause for hope. We are part magazine, part therapy session, part blueprint for a better world.”
→ The Design Encyclopedia “The Design Encyclopedia is a vast collection of meticulously documented design tokens, components, page layouts, interaction patterns, and visualizations.”
→ Harrods for Everything by Harrods Ltd. “This 1,525-page catalogue from London’s world-famous department store, Harrods, does seem to mean everything, with over 15,000 products available for purchase at the store’s location, by mail, or by phone (“anything, at any time, day or night”).”
→ ‘Real’ Programming Is an Elitist Myth “I get asked a lot about learning to code. Sure, if you can. It’s fun. But the real action, the crux of things, is there in the database. Grab a tiny, free database like SQLite. Import a few million rows of data. Make them searchable. It’s one of the most soothing activities known to humankind, taking big piles of messy data and massaging them into the rigid structure required of a relational database. It’s true power. Or mess around with Airtable or its no-code ilk. If you do it long enough and work with friends, you can do wonderful things. You can build data models that work well enough to feed people who need the help. That’s real programming.”
→ When two oppressed groups are in conflict “If you tell me that trans folks need protection for jobs and housing, I’ll agree. If anti-trans violence is to be made a hate crime, sign me up. If you tell me that trans people need accommodations–in prisons, sports, bathrooms/locker rooms and emergency housing–I’m inclined to listen (especially when it comes to situations of potential violence). But those accommodations must NOT be stolen from women, who have fought too long and hard to gain them in the first place.”
→ How Dollar Stores Became Magnets for Crime and Killing “Another way of putting this is that crime is not inevitable. Robberies and killings that have taken place at dollar store chains would not have necessarily happened elsewhere. “The idea that crime is sort of a whack-a-mole game, that if you just press here it’ll move over here,” is wrong, Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told me. Making it harder to commit a crime doesn’t just push crime elsewhere; it reduces it. “Crime is opportunistic,” he said. “If there’s no opportunity, there’s no crime.””
→ The Western Origins of the “Southern Strategy” “Unlike Eastern Republicans, whose history was defined by opposition to slavery, Western Republicans had long held racial views toward Asians and Native Americans similar to those of Southern Democrats toward African Americans.”
→ Also, Defund the CEOs “America’s dirtiest three-letter word may now be “CEO,” and our ongoing economic meltdown is only making that tag even dirtier. Chef executives the nation over have spent this past spring scheming to keep their pockets stuffed while their workers suffer wage cuts, layoffs, and even death by Covid-19.”
→ Hawk Nelson Singer Explains Why He No Longer Believes in God After Fronting a Christian Rock Band “But when I got right down to it, I was just trying to convince myself of things in order to hold onto my notion of God. Eventually, I got to this place where I realized if I was honest with myself, and if I could build up the courage to actually say it to myself, I’d have to say “I don’t believe any of it.””
→ How scientists taught monkeys the concept of money. Not long after, the first prostitute monkey appeared “You may have thought things like currency or money are concepts known solely by man - something which differentiates humans from animals. Some might have a sense of ownership, besides of course territory, but trading and the likes haven’t been observed in any other species besides homo sapiens. An economist/psychologist duo from Yale back in 2005, however, managed to train seven capuchin monkeys how to use money, and I’m pretty sure from here on some of you might be able to guess what happened from there on.”
→ Why Do Republican Leaders Continue to Enable Trump? “In the meantime, I leave anyone who has the bad luck to be in public life at this moment with a final thought from Władysław Bartoszewski, who was a member of the wartime Polish underground, a prisoner of both the Nazis and the Stalinists, and then, finally, the foreign minister in two Polish democratic governments. Late in his life—he lived to be 93—he summed up the philosophy that had guided him through all of these tumultuous political changes. It was not idealism that drove him, or big ideas, he said. It was this: Warto być przyzwoitym—“Just try to be decent.” Whether you were decent—that’s what will be remembered.”
→ We're not all going to be working from home, nor should we. Here's why “Because my company has been virtual for more than 10 years. Every one of my 10 people works from home. Sure, the overhead is low. But you know what? I miss an office. My company suffers from not having one. We have no culture. We rarely see each other as a group. We are not really a team, and lack bonding or social connections. We miss out on extemporaneously sharing ideas. Our innovation suffers. As a result, the value of my business suffers. I know I’m not alone in this.”
→ How French “Intellectuals” Ruined the West: Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained “In order to regain credibility, the Left needs to recover a strong, coherent and reasonable liberalism. To do this, we need to out-discourse the postmodern-Left. We need to meet their oppositions, divisions and hierarchies with universal principles of freedom, equality and justice. There must be a consistency of liberal principles in opposition to all attempts to evaluate or limit people by race, gender or sexuality. We must address concerns about immigration, globalism and authoritarian identity politics currently empowering the far- Right rather than calling people who express them “racist,” “sexist” or “homophobic” and accusing them of wanting to commit verbal violence. We can do this whilst continuing to oppose authoritarian factions of the Right who genuinely are racist, sexist and homophobic, but can now hide behind a façade of reasonable opposition to the postmodern-Left.”
→ A Cloud Gazer “But wherever you are, you can still look out the window and up at clouds. They’re always up there, from Mongolia to Manhattan. The sky “is a wilderness within everybody’s grasp,” says Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society. “It’s the part of nature that comes to us.” Here are a few ways to marvel at and identify the meteorological mainstays and what they mean—anytime, anywhere.”
→ The Case for Letting the Restaurant Industry Die “I don’t think there’s anything inherent about the restaurant industry that makes it more worthy of death than any other industry. But it’s an industry that manages to encompass all the different realities of United States life—and I say “United States” because “American” isn’t the right label to encompass all the folks who live here. I’ll be very specific: let’s say you walk into Momofuku at Hudson Yards. You have your transaction: you’re going to buy whatever they sell, and you’re going to leave. But your money is going to Momofuku, which is owned, in part, by David Chang, and owned, in part, by [the real-estate billionaire Stephen Ross’s investment firm] RSE Ventures, which owns multiple companies. The financing of Hudson Yards was done through private capital but also speculative capital, so there was debt involved. But not any kind of debt, a specific debt: commercial mortgage-backed securities. So, all of that is to say that what makes the restaurant industry possible is maybe different from, say, the airline industry, or mining, or some shit. It’s at the intersection of capital, finance, social life, food production, sustenance. It’s all those things. So I think it offers a very important lens to examine the choices that we make.”
→ How the Black Death Gave Rise to British Pub Culture “By the 1370s, though, the Black Death had caused a critical labor shortage, the stark consequence of some 50 percent of the population perishing in the plague. Eventually, this proved a boon for the peasantry of England, who could command higher wages for their work and achieve higher standards of living. As a result, the alehouses that were simply households selling or giving away leftover ale were replaced by more commercialized, permanent establishments set up by the best brewers and offering better food.”
→ Tunisian Novelist and Essayist Albert Memmi Dies at 99 ″“In Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno writes that “to those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home.” I really think Albert Memmi’s life shows how much truth there is in that statement. Through his writings, he built a home for himself and for thousands of Tunisian Jews-”
→ The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months “It’s time we told a different kind of story. The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other. After my wife took Peter’s picture, he turned to a cabinet and rummaged around for a bit, then drew out a heavy stack of papers that he laid in my hands. His memoirs, he explained, written for his children and grandchildren. I looked down at the first page. “Life has taught me a great deal,” it began, “including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.””
→ American Grotesque “Insane birthers and Glenn Beck-worshipping tea-partiers, proud racists and gun-toting antigovernment loons—they’re all here, and they’re all angry about something. John Jeremiah Sullivan goes deep into the bowels of the great American Rage Machine on a patriotic quest for common ground with his countrymen.”
→ What the Hero’s Journey Teaches About Happy Retirement “It’s a nice narrative, especially if you’ve worked hard and done pretty well in life. The problem is the real-life ending, after the triumphant return. People have no script for that part. There’s no Star Wars sequel where Luke Skywalker hangs around the house all day, yelling because someone touched the thermostat and telling his grandkids about blowing up the Death Star for the thousandth time while they roll their eyes.”
→ This Time, Americans Are Doing Nothing “To be absolutely crystal clear: I am not praising China’s efforts. I am simply calling attention to the fact that, in a world where people laugh at the American president, they might succeed. Inside the bubble of officials who surround Pompeo, it may well seem very brave and cutting-edge to use the expression “Wuhan virus” or to call for bigger and bolder rhetorical attacks on China. But out there in the real world—out there in the world where Pompeo’s boss is perceived as a sinister clown, and Pompeo himself as just the sinister clown’s lackey—not very many people are listening. Once again: A vacuum has opened up, and the Chinese regime is leading the race to fill it.”
→ Mike Davis in the Age of Catastrophe “On the day I spoke to Davis, Bernie Sanders had announced that he was suspending his Presidential campaign. Yet Davis was uncharacteristically optimistic, a catastrophist with proof. Maybe people would finally listen. “I’m a wild, extreme leftist, but to me it’s clear that global capitalism can no longer guarantee the survival of the human race, in three ways,” he said. “It can’t generate jobs. It cannot guarantee the public health of the world. And it cannot decarbonize the economy or transfer the resources to adapt the countries that bear the brunt of greenhouse gases.” He went on, “This seems an age of catastrophe, but it’s also an age equipped, in an abstract sense, with all the tools it needs. Utopia is available to us. If, like me, you lived through the civil-rights movement, the antiwar movement, you can never discard hope. I’ve seen social miracles in my life, ones that have stunned me—the courageousness of ordinary people in a struggle. Eleven years ago, Bill Moyers brought me on his show and presented me as the last socialist in America. Now there are millions of young people who prefer socialism to capitalism.””
→ What Happened to the Novel? “How this has come about is a question of great interest, but before taking it up, one must add that it begins to look as if fiction, and in especial the novel, may now be joining visual art and poetry in the dustbin of former cultural importance. Such at least is the argument of Joseph Bottum in The Decline of the Novel. In his brief book, Bottum argues that, apropos of the novel, “a fundamental art of Western civilization for hundreds of years just doesn’t seem to count for much anymore.”” But take this with some grains of salt.
→ Does living in New York make any financial sense after this pandemic? “New York will probably always be my favorite city. As exhausting and precarious as each is, I love every one of my jobs. We love our kids’ public school. But staring down the barrel of another decade of constant worry and part-time work and clawing our way out of the rubble of the second recession, it feels borderline insane to continue as we have.”
→ Shakira’s Ancient Philosophy Graduation Diploma Explained “While other people have spent their quarantines learning how to bake bread or learning new TikTok dances, Shakira has apparently been taking a course in Ancient Philosophy through the University of Pennsylvania for “fun,” (quotation marks her own) after she put the kids to bed.”
→ After Cosmopolitanism “Like globalist, cosmopolitan has become a freighted term, not least for its anti-Semitic undertones. On the right, it is an epithet for bleeding-heart liberals who support looser immigration policies, foreign aid, and multilateral efforts to confront climate change. On the left (and the nativist right), it is used to describe the Davos crowd and footloose capitalists. But as the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum reminds us in The Cosmopolitan Tradition, cosmopolitanism has a rich history as a mode of political and ethical thought, one that “urges us to recognize the equal, and unconditional, worth of all human beings.””
→ Robert Reich: CEOs are ruining America “CEOs are in business to make a profit and maximize their share prices, not to serve America. And yet these CEOs dominate American politics and essentially run the system.”
→ How the White Working Class Is Being Destroyed “Faced with a coal miner suffering black lung disease, or a laid-off factory hand, liberals feel compassion. Faced, on the other hand, with a man in cowboy boots and red MAGA hat, arms defiantly folded, who dismisses climate science and insults overeducated “snowflakes,” many see — and hate — “the enemy.”<br /><br />
Yet what if these are one and the same man? Or almost the same man? What if the man in the red MAGA hat has a brother or high school classmate who died of a heroin overdose? What if his buddy on the road crew drove drunk off an embankment at night and no one called it suicide? What if he fears it’s too late or too expensive to go to college? If we could ask the men in this book, before they swallowed their last pill or swig of whiskey, or fired their last shot, whom it was they would have voted for in 2016, chances are it would have been for that dogged and aggressive great salesman of hope, Donald Trump.”
→ Debt and Power: An Interview With Michael Hudson “Mesopotamian and other Near Eastern rulers were not idealistic utopians. They were simply being practical in realizing that debts grow faster than ability to be paid. All of their mathematics shown that. So their models 4000 years ago were more sophisticated than the models that are used today, which just assume that debts will remain a stable proportion of income and output.”
→ Always Narrating: The Making and Unmaking of Umberto Eco “While doing all these things — creating worlds, populating them, and ruling over them — a novelist, Eco must have thought, feels what God himself would have felt as he was bringing this world into being though his act of divine narration. Eco may have lost his faith in God, but never in storytelling. “Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis,” he observes. Yet playing God is not without drama, when the player is a mere mortal — nor without danger, when he is not a believer.”
→ Books About Next to Nothing Maybe yes, maybe no: “The Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai is among the few interesting voices still working at the coalface, those who have waded through the postmodern cesspit and saturated themselves in its stink and illogic in the hope of accidentally breaking through to what’s on the other side. I would mention also the American George Saunders and the Frenchman Michel Houellebecq—post-postmodernists in that they seek to think their way to the very end of postmodern evasiveness, with a view, perhaps, to building a new city on the far side.”
→ The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile “You can visit all the addresses in the course of a long day. Bertolt Brecht lived in a two-story clapboard house on Twenty-sixth Street, in Santa Monica. The novelist Heinrich Mann resided a few blocks away, on Montana Avenue. The screenwriter Salka Viertel held gatherings on Mabery Road, near the Santa Monica beach. Alfred Döblin, the author of “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” had a place on Citrus Avenue, in Hollywood. His colleague Lion Feuchtwanger occupied the Villa Aurora, a Spanish-style mansion overlooking the Pacific; among its amusements was a Hitler dartboard. Vicki Baum, whose novel “Grand Hotel” brought her a screenwriting career, had a house on Amalfi Drive, near the leftist composer Hanns Eisler. Alma Mahler-Werfel, the widow of Gustav Mahler, lived with her third husband, the best-selling Austrian writer Franz Werfel, on North Bedford Drive, next door to the conductor Bruno Walter. Elisabeth Hauptmann, the co-author of “The Threepenny Opera,” lived in Mandeville Canyon, at the actor Peter Lorre’s ranch. The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno rented a duplex apartment on Kenter Avenue, meeting with Max Horkheimer, who lived nearby, to write the post-Marxist jeremiad “Dialectic of Enlightenment.” At a suitably lofty remove, on San Remo Drive, was Thomas Mann, Heinrich’s brother, the august author of “The Magic Mountain.””
→ The most surprising Unix programs “Originators of nearly half the list--pascal, struct, parts, eqn--were
women, well beyond women’s demographic share of computer science.”
→ Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost its Soul “The class remake of the city was minor, small scale, and symbolic in the beginning, but today we are seeing a total class retake of the central city. Almost without exception, the new housing, new restaurants, new artistic venues, new entertainment locales—not to mention new jobs on Wall Street—are all aimed at a social class quite different from those who populated the Lower East Side or the West Side, Harlem, or neighborhood Brooklyn in the 1960s. Bloomberg’s rezoning of, at latest count, 104 neighborhoods has been the central weapon in this assault.”
→ No time to read? This app lets you digest best-selling books in just 10 minutes I think I remember Th. Adorno saying that any philosophy that can be summarized is not worth nothing. I probably remember wrong. But in that vein I would like to add that a book you can get the gist of in 10 minutes is not worth it. And if it was, it cannot be comprehended in 10 minutes. But we live in a no-attention-span world now. I shall pick up my copy of Les Temps Perdus and have another go. See you in a (long) while.
→ The paradox of an atheist soul I am not sure that I agree with Mr. Gray, but his is an argument that you need to consider.
→ Was this life’s first meal? “Studies of the origin of life are replete with paradoxes. Take this doozy: Every known organism on Earth uses a suite of proteins—and the DNA that helps build it—to construct the building blocks of our cells. But those very building blocks are also needed to make DNA and proteins.<br />
The solution to this chicken-and-egg conundrum may lie at the site of hydrothermal vents, fissures in the sea floor that spew hot water and a wealth of other chemicals, researchers report today. Scientists say they have found that a trio of metal compounds abundant around the vents can cause hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide (CO2) to react to form a collection of energy-rich organic compounds critical to cell growth. And the high temperatures and pressures around the vents themselves may have jump-started life on Earth, the team argues.”
→ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas “So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
→ Uber and Lyft generate 70 percent more pollution than trips they displace: study “A more systemic effort to address climate pollution has yet to emerge from either Uber or Lyft. And the solutions they’ve proposed so far are unlikely to address the core problem with ride-hailing: it is often more convenient and less expensive than other, less-polluting transportation options.”
→ Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet “Yet in an era when Silicon Valley’s promises look less gilded than before, Wikipedia shines by comparison. It is the only not-for-profit site in the top 10, and one of only a handful in the top 100. It does not plaster itself with advertising, intrude on privacy, or provide a breeding ground for neo-Nazi trolling. Like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, it broadcasts user-generated content. Unlike them, it makes its product de-personified, collaborative, and for the general good. More than an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto—the closest thing there is to an online public square. It is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web. A free encyclopedia encompassing the whole of human knowledge, written almost entirely by unpaid volunteers: Can you believe that was the one that worked?”
→ Rush Limbaugh Is Sure Coronavirus Is 'An Effort To Bring Down Trump' “It probably is a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized,” he said. “All superpower nations weaponize bioweapons. They experiment with them. The Russians, for example, have weaponized fentanyl. Now, fentanyl is also not what it is represented to be.”
→ Today I Learned That Not Everyone Has An Internal Monologue And It Has Ruined My Day “My day was completely ruined yesterday when I stumbled upon a fun fact that absolutely obliterated my mind. I saw this tweet yesterday that said that not everyone has an internal monologue in their head. All my life, I could hear my voice in my head and speak in full sentences as if I was talking out loud. I thought everyone experienced this, so I did not believe that it could be true at that time.”
→ Why Do Corporations Speak the Way They Do? “People used a sort of nonlanguage, which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient: a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors, inflated with self-importance. Calls to action; front lines and trenches; blitzscaling. Companies didn’t fail, they died.” She describes a man who wheels around her office on a scooter barking into a wireless headset about growth hacking, proactive technology, parallelization, and the first-mover advantage. “It was garbage language,” Wiener writes, “but customers loved him.”
→ The American Health Care System Costs Four Times More Than Canada “The average American pays a whopping $2,497 per year in administrative costs — which fund insurer overhead and salaries of administrative workers as well as executive pay packages and growing profits — compared to $551 per person per year in Canada, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine last month. The study estimated that cutting administrative costs to Canadian levels could save more than $600 billion per year.”
→ The Oldest Company in Almost Every Country (That is Still in Business) “Located in the walls of St Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, St. Peter Stifts Kulinarium opened in 803 and remains the oldest restaurant in Europe that you can still eat in. The inn is rumoured to have served Christopher Columbus, Johann Georg Faust, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. A short leap forward in time and over the border to neighbouring Germany, you’ll find Staffelter Hof Winery, a winery established in 862.”
→ How Private Equity Ruined Fairway “Tucked away in the IPO filing, though, was a paragraph detailing how Sterling would be able to use the proceeds to pay itself a dividend of nearly $80 million. PitchBook, a highly regarded source of data on private equity, reports that Sterling investors also paid themselves and their management team an additional $17 million from Fairway’s funds.”
→ The Map of Mathematics “If mathematics is the poetry of logic, as Albert Einstein once wrote, then through this we hope to provide an appreciation for all the beauty that it describes. Scroll down to begin.”
→ The Times of Bill Cunningham “In 1994, legendary street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham gave a six-hour interview about his life and work. This interview was recently rediscovered and made into a documentary called The Times of Bill Cunningham.”
→ "Low class" Donald Trump and the Wasps: Reckoning with vulgarity, snobbery and the presidency “The whole point of being a Wasp, as best as I can conjure, is to get through life without embarrassing oneself in public. Trump’s ancestors plainly failed to pass on this characteristic; otherwise, he would have known that — to use but one example of dozens — when someone flails his limbs in imitation of a disabled person, as Trump did at one of his rallies, it’s not the disabled person who should be mortified.”
→ Loosely belted. “Julius Caesar was criticized for his loosely belted toga. “Beware the badly belted boy,” said Sulla; Cicero sneered at Caesar’s habit of “trailing the fringe of the toga on the ground like an effeminate.” His political rival Cato the Younger made a point of wearing a short toga with no tunic underneath, as was considered masculine. But a decade later it was common for young Roman men to grow goatees, wear flowing togas, and use “loosely belted” as a catchphrase.”
→ Dark Towers review: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump and a must-read mystery “Steve Bannon, the brains behind Donald Trump’s upset election victory, saw the danger posed by the cash cravings of the First Family. In Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff chronicled Bannon drawing a direct line between purported dark doings at Deutsche Bank and Jared Kushner’s brushes with the Mueller investigation: “This is all about money laundering … It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit.””
→ Yuval Noah Harari Gives the Really Big Picture Well, hmmm. I read some of Sapiens, but put it down, irritated. So many smug conclusions with such great and unexplained leaps in-between. His (libertarian) political agenda shines through every little hole. A Malcolm Gladwell for a new generation. But such a careful groomed image.
→ This Is How Scandinavia Got Great “Today, Americans often think of schooling as the transmission of specialized skill sets — can the student read, do math, recite the facts of biology. Bildung is devised to change the way students see the world. It is devised to help them understand complex systems and see the relations between things — between self and society, between a community of relationships in a family and a town.”
→ The Chalk Market: Where Mathematicians Go to Get the Good Stuff “Filmmaker Kyung Lee never dreamed she’d become a dealer. But bringing her first feature-length documentary to fruition required money she simply didn’t have. What she did have, however, was an idea for getting high-quality product and access to exclusive clientele.”
→ An Inflammation of Place ″“One of the most pronounced symptoms of Newyorkitis,” he wrote, “is a circumscribed mental horizon. The patient thinks in a circle bounded by the confines of Manhattan Island.” By these measurements no one was immune from the disease or could “resist some degree of inoculation” after living on the island for a few years.”
→ Science Hasn't Refuted Free Will “Deterministic physical laws arguably do not preclude forks in the road within human agency. An agent’s future choices can be open at a psychological level even if the underlying physics is deterministic.”
→ What is Hydrogen-Infused Water, and What Does It Do? “Morton Tavel, a clinical professor emeritus of medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine put it bluntly to Vice last year: “Health claims regarding hydrogen water are based on no acceptable scientific data in humans.””
→ The Nobel Women of Eastern Europe - An Eastern European reading list “Despite their differences, Eastern Europe’s Nobel women often use a similar tone of voice, one that is bleak, desperate, and detached. Perhaps it’s a tonal signature of their region’s suffering over the past hundred years, a century that included genocide, gulags, nuclear tragedy, and government surveillance. These six selections represent both the range and unity of these authors, along with the continental catastrophes that unite them.”
→ The way we read now “The sad truth is that the novel now doesn’t occupy the same cultural high ground, and it doesn’t typically feel to readers like a practical device for addressing problems. The decline of the novel’s prestige reflects a new crisis born of our culture’s increasing failure of intellectual nerve and its terminal doubt about its own progress.”
→ How Trump Boxed the EPA Out of a Major Climate Rollback “Surveying the rollback process as a whole, Nichols said: “The errors [administration officials] have fallen into are that they don’t know [anything] about how cars work.””
→ And, oh, how we celebrated M. Althusser, back in the day “He invented a lot else. He had to. He’d done precious little of the donkeywork required of a professor of philosophy. As he admitted in that posthumously-published memoir, though he’d been the École’s go-to guy for counsel on the most abstruse philosophical ackamarackus, he’d actually been winging it for years. He hadn’t, it turned out, read all that much. “I knew the work of Descartes and Malebranche well,” he wrote, before descending into a more confessional mode: “Spinoza a little, Aristotle not at all . . . Kant not at all, Hegel a little.” A little is right. For his thesis on Hegel, Althusser actually made up quotations that were never spotted by his tutor, Gaston Bachelard.”
→ Here Are the Most Common Airbnb Scams Worldwide “In the aggregate, these emails paint a portrait of a platform whose creators are fundamentally unable to track what goes on within it, and point to easily exploitable loopholes that scammers have steamed their way through by the truckload.”
→ The Last Words of the Hero of the Heatwave Wars “The five stages of ecological grief were climate denial, ethno-nationalistic anger, economic depression, and then bargaining with Alison Brun’s company but quickly accepting her terms. She was, after all, the most famous environmental urban engineer in the world, the woman who saved Chennai (for a while), and the last person to leave Houston besides the soldiers and biologists of the informally named North Hell Base.”
→ A Pedophile Writer Is on Trial. So Are the French Elites. “Hiding is new for Mr. Matzneff. For decades, he was celebrated for writing and talking openly about stalking teenage girls outside schools in Paris and having sex with 8-year-old boys in the Philippines.
He was invited to the Élysée Palace by President François Mitterrand and socialized with the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. He benefited from the largess of the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, the business tycoon Pierre Bergé.”
→ The Golden Age of White Collar Crime “OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS, nearly every institution of American life has taken on the unmistakable stench of moral rot. Corporate behemoths like Boeing and Wells Fargo have traded blue-chip credibility for white-collar callousness. Elite universities are selling admission spots to the highest Hollywood bidder. Silicon Valley unicorns have revealed themselves as long cons (Theranos), venture-capital cremation devices (Uber, WeWork) or straightforward comic book supervillains (Facebook). Every week unearths a cabinet-level political scandal that would have defined any other presidency. From the blackouts in California to the bloated bonuses on Wall Street to the entire biography of Jeffrey Epstein, it is impossible to look around the country and not get the feeling that elites are slowly looting it.” I would like to add that it is not only in America ... Google Sanjay Shah, for example, and weep.
→ The Platonic Ideal of the male Trumpeteer “The single men my age around here are alcoholics, druggies, toothless, unbathed, drivers of broken down pickup trucks, racist, creepily evangelical, and more often than not alumni of special ed programs.” Somewhere in that mix she needlessly included “Trump supporters.”
→ The worst case is happening “As it’s turned out, the costs of climate change have arrived much sooner than we expected. And the only mitigation options adopted so far have been low cost or even negative cost choices like energy efficiency and abandoning coal (more than justified by the health costs of particulate pollution).”
→ The Seriousness of George Steiner “Steiner challenged his readers but never condescended to them. He assumed that they cared as much as he did. He was the real thing, the last of the great middle-European intellectual journeyers, one with Benjamin and Cioran and the other exiles, for whom books were the one constant country and reading them a matter of life and death.”
→ Blaming “the intellectuals" “Intellectuals become an all-purpose scapegoat, “whipping boy”, or “straw man” for what, often, are your own shortcomings or that of the organisation to which you belong. Lost your way on Brexit? Blame the intellectuals. Just lost your constituency in the last election. Blame the intellectuals. Lost a vote at your recent branch meeting. Blame that bloody intellectual who sits in the corner reading Hegel etc.”
imagery found
→Photographer Wanders NYC Streets To Reveal Neo-Noir Stories Hiding in Plain Sight →A cat had to be rescued when it got stuck on a frozen lake in Bokrijk with a bag of Cheetos crisps on her head →→Photographing Life as It’s Seen, Not Staged →Loreley — Oskar Kokoschka →Bra stalls and tripe: the long lost world of Stockport market →Body Farm →'Too negative!': The Welsh seaside images that caused a controversy →A Long, Lonesome Look at America →The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam Has Digitized 709,000 Works of Art, Including Famous Works by Rembrandt and Vermeer →Frans Snyders, Fish Stall. So many details. Thomas Wright's An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe →Venice in Beautiful Color Images 125 Years Ago →Accidentally Wes Anderson →Bromley after dark →Sophus Claussen læser sit digt »Imperia« for Helge Rode og J. F. Willumsen →→Close-up →Copenhagen Archive →By David Byrne himself →Giuseppe Arcimboldo →Dorothea Lange Digital Archive →Kaspar Hauser’s Art →A Photographic Window into the Remote Siberian Territory of Yakutia →Jazz Musician Lettering →→Robin Wong →Rising sons: the radical photography of postwar Japan – in pictures →“Grey American Landscape” by Photographer Yeon J Yue →Congolese dandies →→European Summers in the 1970s and 80s →→After Discovering a 120-Year-Old Time Capsule, Photographer Develops Two Cyanotypes of Cats →“Champion” by Photographer Prarthna Singh →Stunning Latin American photography →Luci Pina's energetic illustration work is made with “a loving consideration for the politics of representation” →→Photographs by Helga Paris of life in postwar East Germany →→Portrait of Thomas Cromwell, 1532 →→Some Minimalist Bookshelves →See Jean Jullien’s Escapist Paintings From the French Countryside →Apennines to Afghanistan: Eric Newby's travels in pictures →Balconies →Jenia Fridlyand →Paul Hennebelle →Copenhagen’s Distinct Architecture Knit into Color-Blocked Urban Landscapes by Jake Henzler →50 Weirdest Stock Photos You Won’t Be Able To Unsee →Abandoned computers →100 Banned Personalized License Plates →Maria Sibylla Merian →Harsh, blurred and brilliant: the great Daidō Moriyama →Myths and magic: the new American west →New York Was Not Designed for Emptiness →→→→→→→→→Buffalo Bill in Glasgow →→“The desert looks best in black and white” →Intricate Patterns Hand-Carved into Fruit and Vegetables by Takehiro Kishimoto →The awakening of Norman Rockwell →Nearly 100,000 Images by Harlem Photographer Shawn Walker Acquired by Library of Congress →Jacques Oulé →Sonny Rollins is at peace. But he regrets trying to one-up Coltrane. →→→→→Because all good things must succumb to Gucci stores and banks and frozen yogurt palaces →Dancing cranes →→→→Way Out West →→→The man behind the counter →Into the Black Forest With the Greatest Living Artist →Santu Mofokeng →Italo disco. Yay. →Ghosts →→How it all ends →→Rotary cell phone →Karl: is that you? Vivian Maier: Kirk Douglas →Biodiversity Heritage Library →Designer Reimagines Famous Historical Figures as Modern People Living Today →7 Photographers on Alzheimer's, Dementia, and Heartbreaking Memory Loss →→Green beam →Otto’s Greenhouse →Old book illustrations. 1000s of them. →Jules Verne →Tintin, the sharp dresser →The Italian radicals who imagined utopia →
