Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
"I’ve tried to read Karl Ove Knausgaard. But it is impossible… My Strugglelacks air. Literature needs a little air." Peter Handke
"In his fiction [David Grossman] has always been a serious writer, a dealer in big themes – too serious for my taste, I find his books lack air." Gabriel Josipovici
On Facebook, someone suggested that the song that hit Number 1 on the pop charts the week you turned fourteen defined your life ... Food for thought ...
Lesley Gore was mentioned and It made me remember few of her songs, recorded the same year, one that makes you think about showing off and name dropping : “You Don’t Own Me.”
Don’t tell me what to do. Don’t tell me what to say. And please when I go out with you, don’t put me on display.
Design Credit: Mimi McNamara “It is difficult to detect any significant difference between one piece and another. Nor is there any relief from the dominant tone of ‘uplift.’ The musical products of different parts of ... read more
For over six years, Stéphane Breitwieser, an ordinary Frenchman with an extraordinary love of art, trolled museums and private collections across Europe, helping himself to the pieces that caught his eye. He amassed a private collection of his own, to the tune of 239 pieces of art and priceless artifacts from 172 institutions totaling over a billion dollars. He was one of the most prolific art thieves in modern history.
In the three countries I’ve spent my life caring about—India, the U.K., and the United States—self-serving falsehoods are regularly presented as facts, while more reliable information is denigrated as “fake news.” However, the defenders of the real, attempting to dam the torrent of disinformation flooding over us all, often make the mistake of yearning for a golden age when truth was uncontested and universally accepted, and of arguing that what we need is to return to that blissful consensus. The truth is that truth has always been a contested idea.
The latest enthusiasm for eternal life largely stems not from any acid-soaked, tie-dyed counterculture but from the belief that technology will enhance humans and make them immortal. Today’s transhumanist movement, sometimes called H+, encompasses a broad range of issues and diversity of belief, but the notion of immortality—or, more correctly, amortality—is the central tenet. Transhumanists believe that technology will inevitably eliminate aging or disease as causes of death and instead turn death into the result of an accidental or voluntary physical intervention. …
"If the always-streaming, everything-on-demand state of TV right now has taught viewers anything, it's that very little about television is urgent. Sure, there are still a few watercooler shows, and events like the Oscars or the Super Bowl require real-time viewing, but everything else can be watched on an I'll Get to It When I Get to It basis. Short of one's peer group pressuring them into watching something right now no one feels they have to be caught up on everything. Killing Eve, however, was different." … [Read More]
Professor Matthew Jockers at the University of Nebraska, and later researchers at the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab, analysed data from thousands of novels to reveal six basic story types – you could call them archetypes – that form the building blocks for more complex stories. The Vermont researchers describe the six story shapes behind more than 1700 English novels as
“Stories seem to me to be the key to education, to social organization, to creativity, learning, consciousness, self-awareness — the whole works. I think it’s a fundamental differentiating capability of us humans. And machines don’t have it yet.” … Read More
