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Thursday, September 07, 2017

Spontaneous Decade of Luck ...

What makes popular-science books popular? The opportunity to measure your comprehension against the best minds. Falling behind is part of the thrill Falling  

UNLESS IT REMOVES THE PLANK FROM THEIR EYE, IT WILL BE NO GOOD: Professors get grant to develop fake news detector




Palantir: the ‘special ops’ tech giant that wields as much real-world power as Google
Peter Thiel’s CIA-backed, data-mining firm honed its ‘crime predicting’ techniques against insurgents in Iraq. The same methods are now being sold to police departments. Will they inflame already tense relations between the public and the police?

Palantir Blog

Japanese robot priest is available to conduct funerals



Few have played as central a role in the long, slow destruction of literary study as Stephen Greenblatt. And few have profited from it as much, professionally and financially Literary  

During the Gilded Age, some rich people dabbled in séances and breakfasted with corpses. Consider the portrait subjects of John Singer  Sargent 


Mary Shelley Didn’t Just Invent The Science-Gone-Wrong Genre, She Also Pioneered Post-Apocalyptic Fiction In English


Frankenstein was not her only groundbreaking novel; in 1829, she published The Last Man, depicting England circa 2100 as a post-plague dystopia. "As with Frankenstein, Shelley was playing on some very real anxieties in Industrial Revolution-era society - anxieties that live on to the present day. And, just like with Frankenstein, she got flack for it." … [Read More]



“Once a poem is made available to the public,” teenage Sylvia Plath once wrote to her mother, “the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.” It is by this right of interpretation that popular music, popular culture, and perhaps all culture belongs to us at all. It is by this right that art is always appropriated by life, that a catchy song with no particular meaning, eavesdropped on by a little boy with his ear pressed to the Iron Curtain, can be woven into a family myth across time and space. This is what popular art does at its best — it provides a screen onto which vastly different people in vastly different circumstances can project the singular meaning of their lives



In Their Lives features twenty-seven more essays on beloved Beatles songs, cross-pollinating personal histories with cultural history in a poetic intersection of memoir, music, and the collective legend-making of great storytelling.

GlobeScan, a consultancy, has regularly conducted surveys in several developing and developed countries. They measure support for trade barriers, globalisation and free markets. Since 2002, average global support for trade barriers has remained relatively stable at around two-thirds of respondents (see chart 1). Support for globalisation and the free market has been...A survey finds support for both globalisation and import tariffs


Greens Senator outs ATO mismangement over massive fraud