— Boris Pasternak, who died on this date in 1960
Robot Journalist Accidentally Reports on Earthquake from 1925 Gizmodo Life is filled with Coincidences - Today is June's93th birthday party
Do you ever get the feeling that everyone is trying to pull one over on you? They probably are. Maybe life is just one big scam. But, here are some stories that could help with that.
Politics run through Shakespeare’s plays, but we know little of his own political opinions. His characters speak, they do not lecture. Yet certain themes recur... Machiaveli
As the company grows, GoFundMe scams are more and more common. We talked to the woman who spends her free time hunting down fraudulent campaigns
During the famine of the civil war, a delegation of starving peasants came to Lenin’s headquarters in the Smolny in Petrograd to submit a petition. “We have even started eating the grass like horses”, says one peasant. “Soon we will start neighing like horses!”
“Come on! Don’t worry!” says Lenin reassuringly. “We are drinking tea with honey here, and we are not buzzing like bees, are we?”
A regional Communist Party meeting is held to celebrate the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. The Chairman gives a speech, “Dear comrades! Let’s look at the amazing achievements of our Party after the revolution. Maria here, where was she before the revolution? An illiterate peasant; she only had one dress and no shoes and stockings. And look at her now. She is a champion milkmaid celebrated throughout the entire region. Or take, Ivan, he was the poorest man in this village, he had no horse, no cow, not even an axe. And now? He is a tractor driver with two pairs of shoes! Or *Trofim Semenovich Alekseev – he was a vicious hooligan, a love rat, a drunk, and a wastrel. Nobody would trust him even with a snowdrift in winter as he would steal anything he could get his hands on. And now he’s Regional Leader and Secretary of the Party Committee!”
What is the most boring whodunit in the world? The most boring whodunit is “The History of the Communist Party” because by the third page you know who committed the murders.
Buy the Google Books - Cold As Ice But in the Right Hands It Melts ... No point go being the richest man or woman in the cemetery ;-) Amen
“Come on! Don’t worry!” says Lenin reassuringly. “We are drinking tea with honey here, and we are not buzzing like bees, are we?”
CHARLIE MARTIN: Brush Up Your Shakespeare
Boston Review – This essay is excerpted with permission fromDream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard Reeves, Brookings Institution Press, 2017.
Three Years From Now, Streaming Video From Netflix And Amazon Will Pull In More Money Than Cinemas
“Paying for TV content from on-demand digital video services will grow by more than 30% to £1.42bn at the turn of the decade, claims consultancy firm PwC. This rise in popularity will see revenue from video services edge ahead of an estimated £1.41bn from cinemagoers.”
A couple of weeks ago, a piece by Jia Tolentino came out in The New Yorker called “The Personal-Essay Boom is Over.” The title alone was enough to deluge social media feeds with writers stepping forward to defend the vitality of the personal essay in spite of the article’s assertions, or otherwise agreeing with Tolentino that the personal essay is, in fact, “dead.” The only problem is, the article isn’t actually about what we writers know as the personal essay at all, but rather a separate subgenre of nonfiction called the “confessional essay.” If we want to get even more specific, Tolentino’s article is talking specifically of the confessional essays typically printed in online “women’s” publications such as xoJane, Jezebel, Salon, and others. To compare the personal and the confessional is a common false equivalence, and a great underestimation of all that first-person nonfiction writing encompasses.
… A Response to Jia Tolentino’s “The Personal-Essay Boom is Over” | BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog
FREQUENT sex will boost your brain power. And you can quote Oxford University on that. In a study released today in The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological and Social Sciences, researchers found that people who indulged in frequent ...
Mike Schmidt apologized last week for doing something that is no longer tolerable in a media age fueled by website hits and social media clicks. He gave an honest answer to a simple question.
How dare he.
This latest example of the decline in the simple art of communication was especially maddening to me because I got caught right in the middle of it. I asked the greatest third baseman in baseball history whether Odubel Herrera could ever be a major building block to a championship team.
Schmidt paused before answering, and then said this:
“My honest answer to that would be no because of a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s a language barrier. Because of that, I think he can’t be a guy that who would sort of sit in a circle with four, five American players and talk about the game . . . or come over to a guy and say, ‘Man you gotta run that ball out.’ It just can’t be, because of the language barrier.”
Best Place To Write? Surrounded By Books, Of Course
Yep, in a public space in the library: “Few things are as treasured by writers as privacy, that place where you can tune out the world and live in the alternate one on your page. I found it in one of the most public places imaginable, crowded with tour groups and class visits, a must stop in the guide books. For over twenty years I have been writing in the New York Public Library—eight novels and a ninth underway—and I can’t imagine working anywhere else.”
The Journalist As Serious Reader (As Opposed To Browsing Articles)
For one piece, the necessary reporting might include 20 books. Adam Gopnik writes with the morning coffee from 9 and reads after dinner until 11, usually for four hours each. “I’ve discovered that reading is actually one of those skills that increases exponentially the more of it you do, and it doesn’t stop improving the older you get, which is an encouraging fact,” he told me. For work, he now reads the average book, preferably with Mozart or Haydn playing, in one and a half, maybe two hours.
- Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone[1]
- Laughter is the best medicine[1]
- Late lunch makes day go faster.
- Least said, soonest mended[1]
- Less is more[1]
- Let bygones be bygones[1]
- Let not the sun go down on your wrath[1]
- Let sleeping dogs lie[1]
- Let the buyer beware[1]
- Let the dead bury the dead (N.T.)[1]
- Let the punishment fit the crime[1]
- Let well alone[1]
- Let your hair down.
- Life begins at forty[1]
- Life is too short not to do something that matters.
- Life is not all beer and skittles[1]
- Life is what you make it[1]
- Lightning never strikes twice in the same place[1]
- Like father, like son,[1][8]
- Little pitchers have big ears[1]
- Little strokes fell great oaks[1]
- Little things please little minds[1]
- Live and let live
- Live for today, for tomorrow never comes[1]
- Loose lips sink ships
- Look before you leap[1]
- Love is blind The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act II, Scene 1 (1591)[1]
- Love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.[22]
- Love makes the world go around[1]
- Love will find a way[1]