Be on your guard against a silent dog and still water.
~ Latin Proverb
What To Do When the Russians Come ;-)
In Speak Freely, Keith Whittington argues that universities must protect and encourage free speech because vigorous free speech is the lifeblood of the university. Without free speech, a university cannot fulfill its most basic, fundamental, and essential purposes, including fostering freedom of thought, ideological diversity, and tolerance.
Examining such hot-button issues as trigger warnings, safe spaces, hate speech, disruptive protests, speaker disinvitations, the use of social media by faculty, and academic politics, Speak Freely describes the dangers of empowering campus censors to limit speech and enforce orthodoxy. It explains why free speech and civil discourse are at the heart of the university’s mission of creating and nurturing an open and diverse community dedicated to learning. It shows why universities must make space for voices from both the left and right. And it points out how better understanding why the university lives or dies by free speech can help guide everyone―including students, faculty, administrators, and alumni―when faced with difficult challenges such as unpopular, hateful, or dangerous speech.
*From Keith E. Whittington, Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech
Analysis: Australia's cheating scandal is about more than cricket
Our cricketers are prime examples of economic man: paid millions of dollars, they are guns for hire
American who escaped al-Qaeda captivity in Syria says the FBI under Mueller and Comey ‘betrayed’ him and claims the latitude bureau tried to run an intelligence operation instead of rescuing him.
Matt Schrier, now 39, was taken hostage by Jabhat al-Nusra, a militant group aligned with al-Qaeda, while he traveled through Syria back in December 2012.
He claims he was tortured and beaten by Syrian rebels who accused him of working for the CIA and imprisoned him in dark cell for seven months until he managed to escape.
Following his return to the US, Schrier said he started investigating his abduction and claims to have uncovered a pattern of ‘betrayal’ from the FBI agents assigned to his case.
In an interview with Fox News’ The Story on Monday, Schrier said the FBI was monitoring his bank accounts after the terrorists used his money to purchase a dozen computers and tablets.
He claims the agents were trying to run an intelligence operation by trying to track the computers and learn more about the terror group’s activity.
The New York native says the FBI should have instead been investigating how to rescue him.
‘So they’re monitoring my financial records straight off the bat. They’re letting them steal this money. Why are they letting them steal the money, what’s the angle? Well, what are they buying? They’re buying laptops and tablets,’ he said.
ACTUALLY, SOME HAVE A LOT OF EMPATHY, AND USE IT TO MANIPULATE PEOPLE: It Might Turn Out Psychopaths Aren’t Completely Devoid of Empathy After All.
Don't underestimate the power of an impertinent question. That’s what drove Oriana Fallaci, whose interview subjects usually regretted giving her the time. “Being a journalist means being disobedient” Fallaci
Eight lessons on innovation from Obama’s administrative head.
Not everything went according to plan in a push towards online platforms and administrative efficiency during the Obama administration, but progress was made and a lessons were learned along the way
Why a national environment protection agency is essential.
Creating a Reserve Bank for the environment would help give environmental policy the priority it often lacks, writes University of Adelaide emeritus professor of medicine David Shearman.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, RETIRED? Legendary Miami Herald and AP writer Marty Merzer moved to Tallahassee, but he hasn’t stopped doing big take-outs. These days, the main beneficiaries are Merzer’s Facebook friends, who get to read stories such as this from a Saturday March for Our Lives protest. “It evoked the past and it had everything to do with the present,” he wrote, ”and maybe – maybe – it resonated with promise for the future.” (Hat-tip: Rex Saline)
NEWS YOU CAN USE: What’s Really Stored On That Microchip In Your Passport.
ONCE UPON A time, artists had jobs. And not “advising the Library of Congress on its newest Verdi acquisition” jobs, but job jobs, the kind you hear about in stump speeches. Think of T.S. Eliot, conjuring “The Waste Land” (1922) by night and overseeing foreign accounts at Lloyds Bank during the day, or Wallace Stevens, scribbling lines of poetry on his two-mile walk to work, then handing them over to his secretary to transcribe at the insurance agency where he supervised real estate claims. The avant-garde composer Philip Glass shocked at least one music lover when he materialized, smock-clad and brandishing plumber’s tools, in a home with a malfunctioning appliance. “While working,” Glass recounted to The Guardian in 2001, “I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him that I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”
That is from Katy Waldman in the NYT. You will find similar themes discussed in my earlier book In Praise of Commercial Culture. In her article I also enjoyed this part:
Edi Rama, the Prime Minister of Albania, sometimes feels his hand doodling as he contemplates a political decision. The art pours out to center and steady him. In 1998, Rama left a promising career as an artist in Paris to become Albania’s minister of culture. Now the country’s leader, he shows his loose, improvisatory drawings and sculptures in galleries around the world. “I found myself drawing almost all my working time whilst interacting with people in my office or on the phone,” he said in a 2016 interview. “I began to understand that my subconscious was being helped … by my hand to stay calm while my conscious had to focus on demanding topics.”
Report: Governments Increasingly Use Counterterrorism Laws as Means to Curb Human Rights
When I was a child I wrote…slightly morbid short stories that mixed real life with more fantastical elements. Here’s one: “Smokey was a stupid dragon. He couldn’t do anything right. One day he was looking for some food and got shot. The End.” [Photo proof attached!- The people who encouraged/inspired/mentored me to write are…my dad and his “brain stories” (stories from his head), my mum and conversations while she cooked, and the old ladies in my dad’s literacy classes and down at the market.
- I write in… my apartment, usually. In bed, at my desk, on the sofa. I like the idea of writing in a café but I get distracted very easily.
- I write...whenever I can! I often get ideas when I’m a passenger in the car or on the bus.
Meet a Kiwi Author: Bonnie Etherington
`Much that One Does Not Want to Know'
“We read, search, pick up one book after another & life becomes a febrile pursuit of knowledge.”
That was me when young. I felt ten steps behind the smart guys and could never catch up. Reading took on an industrialized aspect. I competed not with other readers -- I didn’t know any afflicted with my sort of culture-hunger -- but with myself. I felt anxiety when I didn’t know something, but good things can come from such neuroses. Many a gourmet begins as a gourmand. I came to understand that to recognize shoddy goods you first have to try them on. Why did I feverishly read James Baldwin and Joyce Carol Oates when I was young? So I don’t have to read them when I was old. The burden is lifted.
“But culture is to know that there is much that one does not want to know.”
The quoted sentences are from Michael Oakeshott’s Notebooks, 1922-86 (2014). The latter is the rarest sort of wisdom, hard-earned in my case. Vast fields of human endeavor leave me utterly indifferent, and today that’s just fine by me. I don’t care about economics, statistics and neuroscience. I’m glad other people do. There’s a good chance they don’t care about Henry James and Osip Mandelstam. In his next notebook entry, Oakeshott sounds a lot like Montaigne, who is always worth pursuing:
“We spend our lives trying to discover how to live, a perfect way of life, sens de la vie. But we shall never find it. Life is the search for it; the successful life is that which is given up to that search; & when we think we have found it, we are farthest from it. Delude ourselves that we have found it, persuade ourselves that here at least there is a point at which we can rest -- and life has at once become moribund. Just as to remain in love we must be continually falling in love, so to remain living we must be continually striving to live.”
[Added later, from Shirley Hazzard's Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples (2008): "The variety and interest of existence had struck us, through literature, as being more real than our factual origins. It was thus that pilgrimage had been set in motion."]
[Added later, from Shirley Hazzard's Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples (2008): "The variety and interest of existence had struck us, through literature, as being more real than our factual origins. It was thus that pilgrimage had been set in motion."]
Pitchfork Dan recently wrote a blog post titled “Back to the Blog,” which muses on a microtrend I’ve seen as well. Friends and writers, not thousands or probably even hundreds, but solid dozens, returning to old-fashioned weblogging as a way to get their thoughts in order, take ownership of their intellectual property, get away from the Twitter hubbub, stick it to Facebook, or any one of a dozen other reasons to write a blog.The “most open” people “liked” Tom Waits and Björk, the “least open” “liked” Luke Bryan and Jason Aldean, the “most extroverted” liked Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka Flame, and the “least agreeable” “liked” Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, Placebo, and Judas Priest.
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A group of high school friends has been playing an elaborate game of tag since reconnecting at a reunion almost 30 years ago. A few years ago, one of the players wrote a piece for The Guardian about the game.
Since we had busy lives and lived hundreds of miles apart, we agreed on three rules. First, we would play it only in February each year; second, you were not allowed immediately to tag back the person who had tagged you; and finally, you had to declare to the group that you were “it”.Now we are grown men, we don’t run like Usain Bolt, so subterfuge and collusion have become our weapons. Eleven months of the year are spent planning. Collaborating with a friend is where the fun is — we can spend hours discussing approaches.I was tagged spectacularly a few years back when a friend popped round to show me his new car. As I approached it, Sean sprang out of the boot where he’d been hiding and tagged me. He’d flown 800 miles from Seattle to San Francisco just to stop being “it” — to shrug off the “mantle of shame”, as we call it. My wife was so startled she fell and injured her knee, but she wasn’t angry; she was pleased to see Sean.
Hollywood, who knows a winning idea when they see one, has now based a movie on the game. Tag stars Jon Hamm, Ed Helms, Jeremy Renner, and Rashida Jones
What If Off-Duty Employees Unplugged? x Wall Street JournalThe Hudson Report: Ep 1 Michael Hudson (UserFriendly). “Left Out, a podcast produced by Michael Palmieri, Dante Dallavalle, and Paul Sliker, creates in-depth conversations with the most interesting political thinkers, heterodox economists, and organizers on the Left.”
As an art director in the 80s and 90s, Tom Martin created some of that era’s most memorable movie posters. In this post, Tony Pierce writes about the creation of seven of Martin’s most iconic posters, including those for Jurassic Park, Do The Right Thing, Twins, and Schindler’s List.
See also this massive online collection of movie posters and this other massive online collection of movie postersOn a very different Steven Spielberg film, Schindler’s List, some of the submissions that weren’t chosen as the final poster are as interesting as the one that was due to the fame of their designers.Tony Seiniger, Anthony Goldschmidt, and Bill Gold were among the designers who took a crack at the poster. And then there was legendary designer Saul Bass.“It was one of the high points of my career,” Martin says. “I was in a meeting at a sound studio and it was Saul Bass, Steven Spielberg, and myself, in a room, looking at Saul’s poster.”Even though Bass was well established at that point in his career he still fought for his ideas and pitched his posters to Spielberg with as much conviction as anyone.“There was still that competitive drive,” Martin remembers. “Saul was still competitive. He still wanted to be chosen, still… wanted that approval.”Unfortunately for Bass, his work ultimately lost out to independent art director Georgia Young who designed the final poster.
Antony and Cleopatra.
In the ruthless, ever-expanding empire of Rome, Shakespeare creates an astonishing portrait of a love too great for the world.12 – 21 April at Canberra Theatre Centre
Verona Burgess: leadership matters.
The public service might not be as popular as the national cricket team, but Australians clearly want moral leaders running important institutions of all kinds
Six and Out? What Australia’s cricket scandal tells us about integrity.
There's six golden rules of integrity and Steve Smith's ball-tampering plan breaks them all, writes ethical leadership expert Michael Macaulay
Half of Australians prefer online channels.
Efforts to push citizens toward online communication channels are working, according to the latest Unisys Connected Government Survey. Face-to-face contact is still preferred by 28% and 10% still reach for the phone first.