It has been said of Kafka’s work many times that the thing to remember is that it is funny. Kafka was known to laugh uncontrollably when reading his work aloud to friends, and though that sounds more like anxiety than hilarity to me, the funny point endures. But what kind of funny is he? Borges described Hawthorne’s story ‘Wakefield’ as a prefiguration of Kafka, noting ‘the protagonist’s profound triviality, which contrasts with the magnitude of his perdition’. What kind of funny is he?…The comedy of scale is always simultaneously a tragedy of scale, if viewed from the proper angle, and as articulated in the famous words Kafka wrote on a postcard: ‘The outside world is too small, too clear-cut, too truthful, to contain everything that a person has room for inside.’
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event and its consequences. Whether it might have turned out differently, or whether it was all predetermined with the first word that came from the stranger’s mouth, is not the question. The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.”
The Haunting: How To Conquer The Shame Of Being A Writer
From: Chuck Palahniuk- Chimamanda Adichie – “The Danger of a Single Story”
- Lisa Bu – “How Books Can Open Your Mind”
- Amy Tan – “On Creativity”
- Billy Collins – “Everyday Moments Caught in Time”
- Elif Shafak – “The Politics of Fiction”
- Elizabeth Gilbert – “On Genius”
- Karen Thompson Walker – “What Fear Can Teach Us”
An essay about why the vocation of writing can sometimes feel shameful, and how to own that shame and then eventually conquer it.
Bees Grasp a Math Concept That Took Modern Humans a Long Time to Understand Inverse
CAN THIS STATE FINALLY PUT A PRICE ON CARBON? Wired. Note that the Financial Times advocated taxing carbon in 2007.
‘Shut the lights off, say no more’: Nursery rhyme prepares kindergartners for lockdowns Washington Post
Smart Phones Make Dumb People Left Hook
Chang Zi Qian, Co-Founder, and team, at Singapore-based legal knowledge company, Intelllex.“…A law firm’s most valuable assets are its clients, lawyers and knowledge. Of these, knowledge is arguably the least well managed. This can be partially attributed to the perception that knowledge is intangible. Its intangibility obfuscates its management, which in turn impinges on firms’ ability to measure the business impact of effective Knowledge Management (KM). In an earlier post, we established the importance of filtering information to extract for knowledge. In this post, we hope to add clarity on how to manage knowledge, and how to achieve success in implementing an effective KM strategy
Yehonatan Givati (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Of Snitches and Riches: Optimal IRS and SEC Whistleblower Rewards, 55 Harv. J. on Legis. 105 (2018):
The past decade has seen a dramatic shift in the enforcement of tax and securities laws, from an almost exclusive reliance on designated agents for the detection of violations of these laws, to a great reliance on whistleblowers, driven by the desire to obtain a reward. This shift has led to the payment of hundreds of millions of dollars in whistleblower rewards by the IRS and the SEC in recent years. Although legal scholars have devoted much attention to this shift in law enforcement, this literature has failed to explore one central question relating to the use of whistleblower rewards: How much should the IRS and the SEC pay whistleblowers? This Article fills this gap in the literature by developing a new economic model to capture the deterrent effect of whistleblower rewards.
A philosophy professor who moonlights as a mind-reader— a profile of Alexander George (Amherst College), his act, and its connection to his teaching
Dark web souks are so last year: Cybercrooks are switching to Telegram
TSB says 1,300 people lost money through fraud since IT meltdown – as it happened Guardian
Fight Club author 'close to broke' after accountant charged with fraud
A department known by some as 'Pale, male and Stale'." Retro photography is in vogue Economist
CityLab: “…The tragedy of the leaf blower is that it makes assholes of us all, users and neighbors alike. The aggressively un-civil nature of these devices is the stuff of legend, especially here at Atlantic Media, where The Atlantic’s esteemed national correspondent, James Fallows, has led an epic campaign against the Leafblower Menace. Those who want to explore all the moral and environmental arguments should consult his deep body of advocacy first. But the short version goes like this:
- The crude little two-stroke engines used by most commercial backpack-style blowers are pollution bombs. “Simplest benchmark: running a leafblower for 30 minutes creates more emissions than driving a F-150 pickup truck 3800 miles,” Fallows writes. “About one-third of the gasoline that goes into this sort of engine is spewed out, unburned, in an aerosol mixed with oil in the exhaust.”
- Those emissions—plus all the other fine-particulate crap that the blowers kick up—constitute a public health hazard for anyone in the vicinity, but especially for the poor bastard running the thing. In most cities and suburbs, those most afflicted are low-wage employees of landscaping companies, not residents or homeowners.
- THE NOISE GAAH MAKE IT STOP. A gas blower at full cry can exceed a 100 decibels for the operator (OSHA requires hearing protections at 85), as these Sacramento blower foes explain, and it carries for hundreds of feet in every direction, irritating all who dwell therein…”
Publishing Start-Up Will Put Its Novelists On Salary
De Montfort Literature, founded by hedge fund manager and Goldman Sachs alumnus Jonathan De Montfort, will offer authors a monthly salary starting at £2,000 as well as half the profits from their titles (after salary, production, and marketing costs).
Benedict Arnold's treasonseems not to matter much anymore. But it's fascinating: Spies and counterspies, suspense and close calls, a beautiful woman, Alexander Hamilton
5 Streaming Sites for People Who Want More Than Netflix p- Consumer Reports – These alternatives will appeal to fans of British TV, classic movies, horror, or other niche content: “When it comes to streaming video services, Netflix clearly looms large over its competitors, accounting for more than one-third of all peak-time downstream traffic, according to research firm Sandvine. Maybe that explains why you never hear anyone say they’re going to a friend’s house to “Hulu and chill.” But that doesn’t mean there are no worthy streaming alternatives. Here are five services for people with a taste for something different. Many offer free plans and access via computers, mobile devices, smart TVs, and streaming devices such as Apple TV and Roku. (You should also check our guide to all the major streaming services.)…” [h/t Pete Weiss]Teens are abandoning Facebook in dramatic numbers, study finds Guardian. Not news per se, save regarding the amplitude.Niall Ferguson wanted opposition research on a student. New Republic. “Scroll down past the Nial Ferguson snippet and you’ll find some other gems.”Conservative Stanford professor conspired to conduct ‘opposition research’ on student: report The Hill
Atlas Obscura: “For as long as libraries have been repositories of wisdom and knowledge, there has been a place on the shelf for cookbooks. In fact, many early cookbooks were more than just recipe collections—instructions for concocting medicine often jostled with dinner ideas for page space. Atlas Obscura has previously displayed ancient recipe collections, such as the Yale Peabody Museum’s Babylonian tablets, which contain theoldest known recorded recipes, and the New York Academy of Medicine’s 9th-century De re culinaria, the oldest surviving cookbook in the West. Cookbooks were once intended mainly for upper-class households. Only relatively recently did printing and educational advances make them more democratic. Today’s versions tend to hold well-lit photographs and elegant prose. But humanity has long turned to cookbooks for inspiration and entertainment, and whether sauce-stained or Gothic-lettered, cookbooks offer glimpses of humanity’s food history. Here is a collection of some of the oldest cookbooks from libraries around the world…”
Via The Atlantic – these breathtaking photographs will no doubt bring you back to the finale – “The National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest is underway, with entries being accepted for just one more day—the competition closes at noon, EDT, on May 31. The grand-prize winner will be awarded $10,000 (USD). National Geographic was once again kind enough to allow me to share some of this year’s entries with you here, gathered from three categories: Nature, Cities, and People. The photos and captions were written by the photographers, and lightly edited for style.”
