Saturday, March 25, 2017

SATIRE: SHAKEN NOT STIRRED


Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history. 
— Nikolai Berdyaev, born around this date in 1874


Money isn't buying Americans happiness. What do we do now?

The Pwer f Trump As A Walking Satire Balloon by armando iannucci veep



Exploring The Powers That Writers Have



“Paying attention is the only thing that guarantees insight. It is the only real weapon we have against power, too. You can’t fight things you can’t actually see. The power a writer has is the power to make things visible, and they are the things that we don’t typically look at or think about. Telling a story about someone has enormous power. People forget a headline. They remember a story.”

How The Soviets Recruited Ernest Hemingway


“Why did Soviets focus on Hemingway? He first caught their attention in 1935 by writing for the far left American journal New Masses. His article was an angry denunciation of the U.S. establishment for leaving a large group of veterans, at work on government relief, to die in the path of a hurricane that struck the Florida Keys that year. Then, during the Spanish civil war, he came into contact with Comintern agents, Soviet spies, and communist guerrillas. They intrigued and captivated him, all the more so because they were fighting for a cause that had ignited his passion



The post Win the moment: Leadership lessons from the football field appeared first on Deloitte Blogs.
 

… Read Me, I’m Irish: 24 Books by Irish-American Poets : The Booklist Reader


7 questions to guide your voice as a writer



 Dublin: A Portrait (Harper & Row, 1967), an oversize album of photos by Evelyn Hofer, with text by V.S. Pritchett ... Hofer remains, as photographers should, out of her pictures. Her interest is the real, not the self. Note  Vrbov cemetery like photo “Gravediggers, Glasnevin.” Czech sic out  Joyce’s death mask.



In most such books, the text is an afterthought, filler, but Pritchett’s prose rivals Hofer’s photos for memorability. Here he welcomes you to the book:

“Dublin as it is; Dublin as it was. I must declare my interest. It is very personal. If I were to write an account of my education the city of Dublin would have to appear as one of my schoolmasters, a shabby, taunting, careless, half-laughing, reactionary.”













Publishers Are Newly Buoyant As London Book Fair Opens


“While it was too early to tell at this year’s book fair, more than one publisher was whistling a happy tune as they entered the Olympia exhibition centre on Tuesday. With print books having a higher average price point than ebooks, and with a weaker pound benefitting exporters – German publishers in particular bought big this year – the mood among the hundreds of publishers was optimistic.”




… Paul Davis On Crime: How The Soviets Once Recruited Ernest Hemingway To be A Spy


Crazy at the wheel: psychopathic CEOs are rife in Silicon Valley, experts say

Think Like a Psychologist

If Your iPhone is Stolen, These Guys May Try to iPhish You

Complacency and cheeseburgers.  “Cowen is optimistic in general, but not necessarily for you.

7 ingredients for effective reviews 






Principles are good and worth the effort only when they develop into deeds,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother in a beautiful letter about talking vs. doing and the human pursuit of greatness“The great doesn’t happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together.” But what stands between the impulse for greatness and the doing of the “little things” out of which success is woven?


When Barthes’s mother died, he fixated on a photo of her as a young girl. Why aremundane objects — a photo, a grocery list — so often central to grief ...  


How writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning story is like eating a big slice of pizza



“For every poet, it is always morning in the world ... History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History.”



"The Sage of Yale Law: Anthony Kronman was a university dean. Now he's a 'born-again pagan' who thinks he might have discovered the meaning of life."Joshua Rothman has this post online today at The New Yorker

 U.S.-Style Homeland Security: Back on Australia’s Agenda?



A US ally shot down a $200 drone with a $3 million Patriot missileVerge Reported previously but worth not missing.


Here are the ages you peak at everything throughout lifeScienceAlert (Chuck L). Simpleminded absolute pronouncements like these, particularly based on junk evidence, are a pet peeve: “Some are also surveys, not controlled trials, so there is a possibility the self-reports don’t capture the most accurate picture.” And that’s before you get to sample bias! So forgive my rant. My personal experience regarding bone density and peak strength differs markedly from their proclamations, and I suspect that would be true for other people who weight train hard and regularly.”Finding a partner” is weird too, since people used to marry much younger on average (being single at 25 was way past your sell-by date in the 1950s). So are we to believe all these past marriages were less successful by virtue of bad social conventions forcing people to get married younger than the ideal time range? No, because if you read the underlying piece, it assumes options remain open past age 26 when they didn’t back then. As my mother depicts her college years, dating was a bigger priority then than now for both sexes. Similarly, “life satisfaction peaks at 23” is based on a German survey. Germany has way better social safety nets that the US. The “normal” pattern likely has to do with getting independent as an adult and having a sense of possibilities before you. That isn’t the case with young Americans these days outside the elites. I bet you’d find a very different result if you surveyed a decent sample of Americans.




 NSA staff used spy tools on spouses, ex-lovers: watchdog.


Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, did not welcome the victory for Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s centre-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD).
“Now the election is over in the Netherlands…when you look at the many parties you see there is no difference between the social democrats and fascist Wilders,” he said according to a translation by Hurriyet.
“All have the same mentality. Where will you go? Where are you taking Europe? You have begun to collapse Europe. You are dragging Europe into the abyss. Holy wars will soon begin in Europe.”
THE RETURN OF THE TURK? Turkish minister claims ‘holy wars will soon begin in Europe’ after Geert Wilders beaten

Don't be a jerk who disserves your client; understand how juries will view your case to win more (and have more fun).