Friday, December 22, 2017

Slash Pile: "We Also Know That God Is in Control"

None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can't teach people that - they have to learn by experience
— Dorothy L. Sayers, who died in 1957
The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.      — Freeman Dyson, born  in 1923


 Kate Hamer: I find Edna O’Brien an absolutely extraordinary writer – her work is so lucid and accomplished it’s almost like she’s recasting a vision. Photograph: Mei WilliamsKate Hamer Q&A: ‘Write the story that is burning inside you’
Evidence-based policy: missing in action?
Evidence-based policy is like a black rhino — “seldom seen and rarely funded” — says Karen Chester

Philosophy Is An Art. Making It Simply Academic Marginalizes It


"What makes philosophy such an endurable affair, in the West as well as in the East, is that it engages not only our cognition, but also our imagination, emotions, artistic sensibility, religious impulses — in short, our being complicated, messy, impure creatures. To be human is to be always caught in existential entanglements, to have to deal with hybridity and messiness of all sorts. We are an unlikely union of high and low, spirit and flesh, reason and unreason. And philosophers, if they are not to lose their integrity, need to account for such wholeness." … [Read More]


The Editor Who Pulled Joseph Conrad From The Slush Pile



He worried it was one of many Far Eastern potboilers in the pile, but then he started to read. “Indeed, the manuscript seemed to challenge many of the conventions of such books: there was a distinctly antiheroic aspect to its main protagonist, the portraits of the natives ran counter to prevailing stereotypes, and the narrative’s mordant undercurrent was entirely unlike superficially similar works.”

A Deep Dive On The Culture Of The Comic ‘Dilbert’



Dilbert supposedly depicts work – a kind of Hotel California of work, where you can maybe go home from the office to complain about the office, but you’re coming right back in. But in the last few years … things changed. “The ability to detect irony is increasingly necessary for being alive in America. If you have not by now recognized on your own that the world has been careening through a too-salty first draft of The Onion, there is no helping you. Irony is especially important with Dilbert because the antagonist of Dilbert, at least for the first few decades, was the Pointy-Haired Boss. And there is no other person in the entire public consciousness who is more like the Pointy-Haired Boss than Donald Trump.”

 We Now Know Soy Can’t Reduce Heart Disease – But What Foods Can?

 Knob-tail geckos are some of the most fascinating lizards in the world.  Their large eyes, big heads, and small tails make for an odd combination resulting in a comical appearance

I am concerned that sex itself seems increasingly to be seen as dirty, and as a violation, a form of assault, so that we’re repackaging an old prudery in progressive wrapping paper. I am concerned that we are well on our way to demonising, if not criminalising, all male desire.


Best of July 2016

Image of a Smooth Knob-tailed Gecko



Consumers can smell that something is not right. They see in the media that unemployment is at a historically low level of about 5 per cent. But that is not their experience in the "real world". Instead they see a vast number of people in all age groups who are out of work or who are underemployed. The truth is unemployment, as calculated by the statistician, uses a methodology that is favourable to the government of the day. The "real world" unemployment figures are quantified by Morgan Research and show that almost one in five Australian workers (18.2 per cent) are either unemployed or underemployed. That's the reality in the world of consumers.
Australia's Big Freeze, part 4: today's winners may be tomorrow's losers

Ted: "I'm Trying to  Sell Some of My Bitcoin, and the Whole Process Is So Terrible, It's Almost Hilarious."










  • - Facebook Newsroom

    Sales Of Literary Fiction Are Plummeting In Britain: Study
         from The Guardian
      



    Why Write Fiction In The Age Of Endless Story?
         from Paris Review


    Kurt Vonnegut’s Basic Story Arcs
         from Aeon
  • - Wired

    • - Bloomberg


    *Sydney woman fighting for life after being pulled from the water at Yarra Bay
    Posted by at