Stressed New Yorkers Take to Kava, ‘Nature’s Xanax’ New York Times
IN THE MAIL: How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Study finds online interest in sex rises at Christmas, with more births nine months later.
UNLESS YOU ARE RICH YOU CAN’T AFFORD IT: Inside the glam world of illegal high-stakes poker.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: The Top 10 Verified Twitter Account Meltdowns of 2017
“HOT PRIVILEGE:” People reveal the unbelievable things they can get away with if they’re attractive.
IN THE MAIL: How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease
21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Video-game addiction could soon be classified as a mental health disorder — can you prevent it?
CONSIDER YOURSELF FOREWARNED: North Korea soldier who defected had immunity to anthrax
"You need to have a great deal of sadness inside you in order to mourn for other people, and not only yourself....My breathing had grown regular again. But it was not nothing. I didn't know that it would ever be nothing — what person contemplates the details of her betrayal without feeling some combination of regret and humiliation, however far in the past?" A Separation, by Katie Kitamura has very little story to it, it was told by an unreliable narrator who's also cold and distant, it transpires in Greece, and it's a meditative look at the dissolution of a marriage and its minutiae.
It’s not about self-expression. The idea that everyone carries around a latent book awaiting optimal circumstances before entering the world accounts for much of the lousy writing that clogs the market. We know we will never compose a symphony or cast a life-size statue in bronze – too much equipment and specialized training and knowledge required. But any semi-literate twit can open a Word document and gush. Teachers abet this delusion, as do critics and publishers. Non-writers (in the professional sense) on rare occasions produce worthy books – think of Pepys, Dickinson, Yevgenia Ginzburg and J.A. Baker. But they are gloriously serendipitous freaks of nature, testimonies to human aspiration. The sentiment Bruce Bennett relates in “On Not Reading” (Just Another Day in Just Another Town: Poems New and Selected 2000-2016, 2017) both affirms the romantic notion of “Everyone’s a Writer!” and subverts it:
“I used to read a lot:
that Russian crew;
Kafka, Cortazar, Borges;
Nabokov too.
“Now all I do is write.
I feel left out.
I miss not knowing what
life is about
“As brought to us in books
those masters penned.
But I’ve grown too aware
How it must end
Not to try on my own
to make it stay
through words that get it down
in my own way.”
The argument (the speaker’s, if not Bennett’s) recalls “A Study of Reading Habits” and its well-known, out-of-context closing line: “Books are a load of crap.” Few, of course, can write without first having read. Every sentence acknowledges a forbear, even if the writer remains blithely unaware of his debt. There is no novelty and if there were, we would probably close the book on it. I’ve always thought the most respectable reason for writing is the desire to make something we want to read but can’t find in the library. If I were to stop reading, I too would “feel left out,” as Bennett tells us. Books are life. In another poem, “Of Making Books, Yet Again,” he writes:
“Why else would we beat head and heart
and fists against a wall?
In vain we vainly love our art,
and Vanity is all.”
Tom
Burton: benching talent brings worst of Washminster.
The sacking of Paul Grimes was another example of distinguished talent wasted on the grandstand of public life. Instead of learning from the best of Westminster and Washington, Australia has picked up the worst.
The sacking of Paul Grimes was another example of distinguished talent wasted on the grandstand of public life. Instead of learning from the best of Westminster and Washington, Australia has picked up the worst.
Be
responsive and don’t be rude: Nicola Roxon’s advice to public servants.
Not being upfront, treating the minister as an idiot: “these are the sorts of things that sap confidence quickly,” Nicola Roxon told Public Sector Week.
Not being upfront, treating the minister as an idiot: “these are the sorts of things that sap confidence quickly,” Nicola Roxon told Public Sector Week.
Don’t
assume integrity is innate, Fran Thorn reminds public servants.
Public servants must be alert to the possibility their colleagues are corrupt, says the former departmental secretary
Public servants must be alert to the possibility their colleagues are corrupt, says the former departmental secretary
Or do we misallocate talent when it comes to innovation? Here is a not so famous but very interesting paper by Murat Alp Celik:
The misallocation of talent between routine production versus innovation activities has a fi rst-order impact on the welfare and growth prospects of an economy. Surname level empirical analysis employing micro-data on patents and inventors in the U.S. between 1975-2008 combined with census data from 1930 reveals new stylized facts: (i) people with “richer” surnames have a higher probability of becoming an inventor, however (ii) people with more “educated” surnames become more proli fic inventors. Motivated by this discrepancy, a heterogeneous agents model with production and innovation sectors is developed, where individuals can become inventors even if they are of mediocre talent by excessive spending on credentialing. This is individually rational but socially inefficient. The model is calibrated to match the new stylized facts and data moments from the U.S. economy, and is then used to measure the magnitude of the misallocation of talent in innovation. A thought experiment in which the credentialing spending channel is shut down reveals that the aggregate growth rate of the economy can be increased by 10% of its value through a reduction of the misallocation. Socially optimal progressive bequest taxes that alleviate the misallocation are calculated, which serve to increase the growth rate of the economy to 2.05% while increasing social welfare by 6.20% in consumption equivalent terms.
I am not so persuaded by the idea of buying your way into innovative circles with credentials, or the analysis of the inheritance tax, but nonetheless this should stimulate thought.
Zorba: Why do the young die? Why does anybody die?
Basil: I don’t know.
Zorba: What’s the use of all your damn books? If they don’t tell you that, what the hell do they tell you?
Basil: They tell me about the agony of men who can’t answer questions like yours.
Zorba: I spit on their agony.
—Michael Cacoyannis, screenplay for Zorba the Greek
It’s said that a stone placed in the crown of aDoryanthes will prompt it to flower. It can be four to six months until the crimson flower erupts from the tall stalk that has risen from the crown of the plant, and then the flower dies off. The large flower stalks, which can reach up to five metres tall, remain on the plant until they decay or are removed.
The illustration of the Doryanthes palmeri (giant spear lily) flower on the front cover of this issue of Landscape Architecture Australia, by botanical artist Mali Moir, beautifully captures ideas of time and change that are so central to designing with plants. The drawing is not a freeze-frame of some perfect full-bloom moment, but rather shows a beauty in both the life and death of the flower and asks us to accept one with the other.
Most-read articles of the year, few are about DT.
WHEN you work as an equity analyst at an investment bank, your task is clear. It is to comb all the statements made by corporate executives, to scour the industry trends and arrive at an accurate forecast of the company’s profits. Achieve this and your clients will be happy and your bonus cheque will have many digits.
But is all this effort worthwhile? Not as much as it used to be, according to Feng Gu and Baruch Lev, writing in a recent issue of Financial Analysts Journal*. The authors imagined that investors could perfectly forecast the next quarter’s earnings for all companies. They then assumed that investors bought all the stocks that they expected to meet or beat the consensus of analysts’ forecasts; and that investors could short (ie, bet on a declining price) the stocks of those that were predicted not to reach their estimates. They made their investment two months before the end of a quarterly reporting period and got out of their positions one month after the...Assets in the air
WHEN you work as an equity analyst at an investment bank, your task is clear. It is to comb all the statements made by corporate executives, to scour the industry trends and arrive at an accurate forecast of the company’s profits. Achieve this and your clients will be happy and your bonus cheque will have many digits.
But is all this effort worthwhile? Not as much as it used to be, according to Feng Gu and Baruch Lev, writing in a recent issue of Financial Analysts Journal*. The authors imagined that investors could perfectly forecast the next quarter’s earnings for all companies. They then assumed that investors bought all the stocks that they expected to meet or beat the consensus of analysts’ forecasts; and that investors could short (ie, bet on a declining price) the stocks of those that were predicted not to reach their estimates. They made their investment two months before the end of a quarterly reporting period and got out of their positions one month after the...Assets in the air
In holding the powerful accountable or giving voice to the silenced,
investigative journalism’s impact can be immediate as news breaks and
reactions pour in. Occasionally, an exposé creates a domino effect so
powerful and far-reaching that its full force only becomes clear months
later, or even years.
While worldwide protests like the Women’s March gave momentum to discussions of gender equality, it can be said that Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s decades of alleged sexual harassment — published in The New York Times on Oct. 5 — was the fuse that blew the doors off a larger movement.
According to Kantor, who broke the story after many months of investigating the allegations against Weinstein: “[The story] had this really bizarre quality ... half an open secret and half this hidden thing that people were terrified to talk about. That's also what made it tantalizing. That's also what made it seem really important to break."
In the following days and weeks, a slew of allegations from women — of harassment, abuse, and complicity by high-profile men, and of cover-ups by the corporations that employed them — led to a series of firings, dismissals, and resignations, from Congress and the media to Silicon Valley. Women and men united around the simple but powerful hashtag #metoo, sharing their experiences of abuse. The response demonstrated both the pervasiveness of harassment — and, as Kantor put it in an interview with CNN, “the magic of journalism.”
While worldwide protests like the Women’s March gave momentum to discussions of gender equality, it can be said that Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s decades of alleged sexual harassment — published in The New York Times on Oct. 5 — was the fuse that blew the doors off a larger movement.
According to Kantor, who broke the story after many months of investigating the allegations against Weinstein: “[The story] had this really bizarre quality ... half an open secret and half this hidden thing that people were terrified to talk about. That's also what made it tantalizing. That's also what made it seem really important to break."
In the following days and weeks, a slew of allegations from women — of harassment, abuse, and complicity by high-profile men, and of cover-ups by the corporations that employed them — led to a series of firings, dismissals, and resignations, from Congress and the media to Silicon Valley. Women and men united around the simple but powerful hashtag #metoo, sharing their experiences of abuse. The response demonstrated both the pervasiveness of harassment — and, as Kantor put it in an interview with CNN, “the magic of journalism.”
