Gabbie who is living her acting dream in Melbourne invaded Sydney for a few days to touch basis with her friends and to smell the salty air of Sydney Beaches ... I was never as brave as Gabbie, what a brave young woman, to travel around the world in 8 eight months. Enjoy your 20s, go out, have fun, travel, get some life experience, fall in love, have your heart broken, be disappointed, put out good plays, put out bad plays, but when you get to your 30s, that's when you'll put out important works, that's when you'll act in the best roles of your life ... Inspiring teenagers across the world
The tortured lives and spiritual anguish of three great modern poets. The accursed poets. Name the malady, Baudelaire, Verlaine, or Rimbaud suffered from it: arthritis, diabetes, alcoholism, syphilis. Each relished his own martyrdom, even flaunted it... The Cursed Poets and Their Gods
What should be a blessing – more leisure – has become a curse. Or as Slavoj Žižek puts it: Being exploited in a job is now considered a privilege... Capitalism produces unemployment.
Enduring allure Taking a Novel Approach to Life
Attention, novelty junkies: New is not always improved. Ideas that succeed are those that stick around long enough to become old...
Neophiliacs tend to chase the new at all costs. Neophobes—also known as fuddy-duddies—tend to avoid it.
Are we overwhelmed by the new or trapped in the old? The digital age bombards us with technological wonders. And yet, as Simon Reynolds argued in the recent book "Retromania," our attachment to the past leads us to consume pop culture well past its shelf life. The iPod may have revolutionized how we listen to music, but many people are using it to listen to tunes that hit the big time half a century ago—or using their iPads to book tickets for a revived 1950s Broadway musical or for the latest movie based on a comic book from the 1940s.
• · Taking a Novel Approach to Life [ On the Internet, expertise is pooled, intelligence is collective, and discovery is being reinvented. Welcome to the era of open-source science Sunlight; Joan Didion is guilty of a great artistic and personal crime: She got old. Her writing got old, her perspective got old. Her bag of tricks doesn’t work anymore The Autumn of Joan Didion ]
• · · Authors’ ability to endlessly edit their digital work will overturn publishing. Maybe books will improve, but movable type is easily abused...Books That Are Never Done Being Written ; The writer’s work is a triumph—and a disaster; The Internet, says John Brockman, is the infinite oscillation of our collective conscious interacting with itself, adding a fuller, richer dimension to what it means to be human... Undercover
• · · · Saint or crank? By turns a pleasure-seeking aristocrat and a peasant guru of antimaterialism, Tolstoy was both monstrous and moral... Tolstoy: A Russian Life; Enduring allure ... More Persian and Indian than Arab, The Arabian Nights is the stuff of Occidental fantasy. What explains Scheherazade’s enduring allure? Visions of the Arabian Nights
• · · · ·Who is Vladimir Putin? A master of persuasion, not coercion. No ordinary KGB-trained thug, he doesn’t destroy enemies. He manipulates them Putin and the Uses of His Story; William Shirer devoted 1,250 pages and 25 years to understanding the Third Reich. He didn’t pretend to have all the answers. Some things are inexplicable... Revisiting The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
• · · · · ·Sigmund Freud, the boy who was born on the banks of the Moravian river Morava, is out of fashion. The reason? His heroic refusal to flatter humankind Freud: the last great Enlightenment thinker; The human mind, he wrote, is a perfect computer corrupted by ‘incorrect data’ Religion, grrrr