~ ~ Adam Michnik Mate of Vaclav Havel they performed first aid on each other
“Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide,” Kurt Vonnegut admonished in his magnificent Fredonia commencement address. But when the run is generations long — when hate lodges itself in the soul of its carrier and becomes part of the spiritual DNA that propagates the species — it becomes more toxic than anything human beings can synthesize Anatomy of Hatred: The Paradoxical Latitudional Psychology of How That Which Repels Us Binds Us
MEdia Dragon, GEORGE SPENCER, 365Courage, a blog dedicated to, well, courage.
“There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
How Bullwinkle Taught Kids Sophisticated Political SatireSmithsonian. Fun fact: “All the male Simpsons have Bullwinkle & Rocky’s middle initial ‘J.'”
Is Franz Kafka Overrated? - The Atlantic
Toward A Predictive Theory Of Depression Slate Star Codex (UserFriendly MEdia Dragon)
APRA 'risk culture' reviews to become the norm | afr.com
Important message to spread.
Making A Living As A Writer Was Always Precarious. Now Evidence It’s Getting Worse
“Recent initiatives by the European Commission as well as Irish and English governments begin to recognise an alarming state of affairs for the contemporary writer. A European Commission report indicates that Irish and British writers are disadvantaged compared to some of their Euroland brethren. In Ireland a controversial pilot scheme announced in June acknowledges Irish writers as self-employed and thus permitted to seek jobseeker’s allowance. Meanwhile in the UK, the Arts Council of England (ACE) has told of its “concerns that something significant is occurring” in the realm of literature.”
JULIA COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT. de Blasio: You Know You Want Government to Control as Much of Your Life as Possible.
"Sometime after he gave up the idea of being a poet, Parfit developed a new aesthetic obsession: photography. He drifted into it—a rich uncle gave him an expensive camera—but later it occurred to him that his interest in committing to paper images of things he had seen might stem from his inability to hold those images in his mind. He also believed that most of the world looked better in reproduction than it did in life. There were only about ten things in the world he wanted to photograph, however, and they were all buildings: the best buildings in Venice—Palladio’s two churches, the Doge’s Palace, the buildings along the Grand Canal—and the best buildings in St. Petersburg, the Winter Palace and the General Staff Building.
I find it puzzling how much I, and some other people, love architecture. Most of the buildings that I love have pillars, either classical or Gothic. There is a nice dismissive word that applies to all other buildings: “astylar.” I also love the avenues in the French countryside, perhaps because the trees are like rows of pillars. (There were eight million trees in French avenues in 1900, and now there are only about three hundred thousand.) There are some astylar buildings that I love, such as some skyscrapers. The best buildings in Venice and St. Petersburg, though very beautiful, are not sublime. What is sublime, I remember hearing Kenneth Clark say, are only the interiors of some late Gothic cathedrals, and some American skyscrapers.Although he admired some skyscrapers, he believed that architecture had generally declined since 1840, and the world had grown uglier. On the other hand, anesthetics were discovered around the same time, so the world’s suffering had been greatly reduced. Was the trade-off worth it? He was not sure.
He believed that he had little native talent for photography, but that by working hard at it he would be able to produce, in his lifetime, a few good pictures. Between 1975 and 1998, he spent about five weeks each year in Venice and St. Petersburg.
Fashion Photography
As sanctions bite, are North Korea hackers stepping up bitcoin attacks?