Dare. Dream. Do: Load Poems Like Ferrante's Guns

“As the old saying goes: Better that 10 guilty men go free than that one guilty Elena Ferrante go to prison ...” 

"Elena is the shape-giver, Lila the shape-shifter. Lila is the quake, Lila is the flood, Lila is the one who—whether she likes it or not—is keyed into the terrifying fury at the heart of Naples..." “Ah, there is no city that gives off so much noise and such a din as Naples,” writes Ferrante...

House aka Home owners set to become the minority in Noisy Sydney as it is in Naples - See Hilda's Story

Accidental Baby BLoomers heading for Ali Baba abodes in 40 country poetic and music towns ....

There’s accidental poetry hidden inside the *Financial Times

There is a likely Australian refugee link to terror attack at the Dhaka cafe siege in Bangladesh

“In Australia there’s a real lack of a public service perception. We don’t have the civil service aspect the British public has." A political communications academic says the bureaucracy can fix that by talking to journalists

Want to Attract More Readers? Try Listening to Them – The Public Editor

"You believed, she said, that it was a feature of the neighborhood. We had it around us from birth, it brushed against us, touched all our life, we thought: we were unlucky. You remember how we used words to cause suffering, and how many we invented to humiliate? You remember the beatings that Antonio, Enzo, Pasquale, my brother, the Solaras, and even I, and even you gave and took? You remember when my father threw me out the window?” She locates the source in the old pit that used to exist under the present-day church of San Giovanni a Carbonera...
“[Rich] Augustus was entertained here,” Hazzard writes, “notably, on an occasion when [its owner] ordered that a slave who had broken a goblet at table be fed to a tankful of carnivorous eels" Czech out  The Story of a New Name such as imRich ..

To live at all is miracle enough 

— Mervyn Peake, born on this date in 1911

“The art of storytelling is coming to an end,” wrote Walter Benjamin. His own humdrum attempts at fiction serve to confirm that conclusion  

"The men in the room suddenly realized that they did not want to know her better. She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close." 

 ~ Google says Good Omens by Pratchett and Gaiman

Artist Peter Doig, known for surrealist and magical landscapes, on seeing a canvas attributed to his youthful self denied that he was the one who painted it. “Not by me,” he said. “The owner, however, disagreed and sued him, setting up one of the stranger art authentication cases in recent history.” [Graham Bowley, New York Times]

Welcome to the strange world of modern-day fame, when it helps to be a nobody if you want to be a somebody! In some ways, we are returning to the rules of the medieval world, when major works of art and technology were created by anonymous innovators. But there’s a difference nowadays: Today’s mystery artists cultivate their aura of secrecy. They prefer obscurity over the perks of celebrity status Banksy daft punk Elena Ferrantethe new cult of the anonymous artist

Academics have exhausted topics like Virginia Woolf and democracy. They now study such things as dust, coffee, masturbation, bullshit, and, most fittingly, Boredom ...

Johnny Ward, a 32-year-old Irishman, is on the verge of completing a decadelong goal of traveling to every country in the world. He’s currently at 183 out of 196. The former-teacher-turned-blogger is documenting his quest on his travel website, One Step 4ward.

Millionaire blogger has visited almost every country in the world

Note Paris Review interview Margalit Fox ...  Read her also at Creative Non-Fiction.  Here is a $2.99 eBook of selected obituaries.  She is funny, that is funny ha-ha, the other funny I could not say

Writer and film director Abbas Kiarostami has passed away.  Jeffrey Overstreet called him his favorite living filmmaker and links to several tributes to him. I was moved by one of his films, Certified Copy, and wrote about it back in 2013

“Wave after wave of digital innovation has introduced a new set of influences on the public’s news habits. Social media, messaging apps, texts and email provide a constant stream of news from people we’re close to as well as total strangers. News stories can now come piecemeal, as links or shares, putting less emphasis on the publisher. And, hyper levels of immediacy and mobility can create an expectation that the news will come to us whether we look for it or not. How have these influences shaped Americans’ appetite for and attitudes toward the news? What, in other words, are the defining traits of the modern news consumer? A new, two-part survey by Pew Research Center, conducted in early 2016 in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, reveals a public that is cautious as it moves into this more complex news environment and discerning in its evaluation of available news sources…”

She also has written two excellent books: The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code, and Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind

The Misguided Logic of Keeping Calm in the Face of Terror Foreign Policy

Political scientists have isolated why disasters push us farther to the right Quartz

Training your political acumen: working on the edge of politics ...

If public servants meet failure on the road to innovation they should try again, Department of Industry, Innovation and Science deputy secretary David Hazlehurst said at the launch of Innovation Month on Monday.

Hazlehurst introduced this year’s theme of “Disrupt. Develop. Display” (updated from last year’s “Dare. Dream. Do.”), setting off four weeks of events across the country for public servants to consider how to improve their own work on topics as varied as behavioural economics, using maps in policymaking, co-design, public sector websites, customer journey mapping and even the importance of biscuits.
Disrupt. Develop. Display: month of innovation kicks off

Radioactive waste and the nuclear war on Australia’s Aboriginal people Ecologist

"He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking" 

~ Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina

“Their method is straightforward. The idea behind sentiment analysis is that words have a positive or negative emotional impact. So words can be a measure of the emotional valence of the text and how it changes from moment to moment. So measuring the shape of the story arc is simply a question of assessing the emotional polarity of a story at each instant and how it changes.” MIT Technology Review: Scientists Fed 1,700 Novels Into Their Computers And Boiled Down Our Literature Into Six Basic Story Arcs

Central banks want to issue national digital currencies, but are countries ready? World Economic Forum 

Truth is in danger as new techniques used to stop journalists covering the news EurekAlert

Empathy is critical when solving genuinely complex problems because empathy facilitates genuine insights into the problem systemically, not superficially.
Design thinking in government: solutions for the people

Woody Guthrie, This Land is Your Land

SWFL food blogger draws 100K visitors with memory-rich recipes

Even amid the tragedies of Louisiana, Minnesota and Texas, it's news that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would badmouth Donald Trump. She told The New York Times' Adam Liptak, “I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be with Donald Trump as our president. For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that.” The media divisions over her comments, including a seeming joke about moving to New Zealand if he wins, are clear.

Writing in Law Newz, the website started by longtime legal affairs writer Dan Abrams, Elura Nanos announced, "I’m bracing myself for the inevitable torrent of criticism that is going to rain down on Ruth Bader Ginsburg for getting vocal on the state of American politics instead of knowing her supposed place." (Law Newz) In her mind, it didn't stretch the notion of judicial impartiality. That itself is a stretch

Sarah Ashcroft aka That Pommie Girl underwent a breast enlargement with Transform last year

A virgin bikes into Transylvania; a Good Food Guide for vampires. Inside the more-Jacobean-than-Shakespearian mind of Angela Carter 

Rivers are a pleasure as they burble through the countryside, but there's something special about rivers when they flow through cities. It's the presence of rivers, after all, that gave birth to many great cities, feeding their transport and trade, providing drinking and washing water and – more lately – much needed recreational space  Praha the Most Amazing Riverfront the Magic of Labe at Loubkovice Neratovice


How Infographics Reveal Your Brain’s Blind Spots
We’ll start with a study of Israeli judges done by researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and Columbia University. They were looking at what caused judges to rule the way they did. Whether or not a prisoner got a favourable ruling depended in part on how long it had been since the judge had something to eat ...

Swan's rising star Dr Jim Chalmers: Alternative Ministry