Russell places at the heart of a fulfilling life the dissolution of the personal ego into something larger. Drawing on the longstanding allure of rivers as existential metaphors, he writes:
Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life
ANAO's potential hit list for 2018-19
The National Audit Office has released its 2018-19 audit work program. See the list of 87 potential audit areas ANAO is considering for the year ahead.
Differing views and solutions to national policy were encouraged based on the famous expression by Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong: "The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science"
More broadly, the ramifications of outsourcing government are profound. If this outsourcing fad turns out to be another failed experiment in government, the bureaucracy which once ran essential services will no longer be there; replaced instead by the likes of Big Four firms charging up to $1,5000 an hour for their work.
So much bureaucracy has already been outsourced to professional firms that government is being gutted of expertise. Meanwhile, the value of government contracts is heading through the roof.
The funding of homeless kids is managed by state governments where there is little public visibility vis-a-vis contract terms. In NSW, the relevant department is Family and Community Services (FACS)
“(We continue) to be subject to tenders by FACS and although I have lost out in a recent Out Of Home Care tender I have also played the game well enough to win a few too. The recent Out Of Home Care tender was managed by (Big Four firm) EY who, from the outset, were told by workers in the community sector that they had failed to get costing right.
The importance of fiction in modern times | Howard JacobsonTake the example of Tolstoy. The evangelist in him rubbed his hands when he read in a paper of a rich society woman’s disastrous affair with a cavalry officer and her subsequent death under the wheels of a train. Here was a biblical injunction to ram home. Thou shalt not commit adultery! But the novelist trumped the puritan and executed the most sympathetic of all studies of the erotic imperatives of love. Such victories of the involuntary over the willed aren’t inevitable: what matters is the war
Denino is twenty-three years old, and his job is broadcasting his life to thousands of obsessed viewers. He wakes up at two in the afternoon, then streams for between two and six hours at a time for the rest of the day. When I first met him, in January, he said that he was on track to make sixty thousand dollars that month, through sponsorships and donations from viewers.
Meet The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Head Voice Coach
"[Kate Godfrey studied] anatomy, 'from the nose down to the pubic bone'. She studied phonetics to be able to teach dialects. And she knows Shakespeare backwards, going through the plays in detail, looking up obscure words, picking up on a particular character's repeated use of imagery – 'usually animals, birds or death' – and teasing out rhetorical devices such as antithesis and alliteration. It's that last element of the three strands of voice work – parsing the text in the way that makes it sound rhythmical and comprehensible to an audience – that Godfrey says can be the most difficult." …[Read More]
Stories From Experts About the Impact of Digital Life
While many technology experts and scholars have concerns about the social, political and economic fallout from the spread of digital activities, they also tend to report that their own experience of digital life has been positive…Over the years of canvassings by Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, many experts have been anxious about the way people’s online activities can undermine truth, fomentdistrust, jeopardize individuals’ well-being when it comes to physical and emotional health, enable trolls to weaken democracy and community, compromise human agencyas algorithms become embedded in more activities, kill privacy, make institutions less secure, open up larger social divisions as digital divides widen, and wipe out untold numbers of decent-paying jobs. An early-2018 expert canvassing of technology experts, scholars and health specialists on the future of digital life and well-being contained references to some of those concerns. The experts who participated in that research project were also asked to share anecdotes about their own personal experiences with digital life. This report shares those observations…”
We’ve Reached Peak Screen. So Tech Companies Are Wondering What’s Next
Tech has now captured pretty much all visual capacity. Americans spend three to four hours a day looking at their phones, and about 11 hours a day looking at screens of any kind. So tech giants are building the beginning of something new: a less insistently visual tech world, a digital landscape that relies on voice assistants, headphones, watches and other wearables to take some pressure off our eyes.
No One (Older Than 25) Can Quite Figure Out Why Teens Love This Tweet About Gatsby
Seriously, Gen-Z: Why? Why do you love this tweet about a Gatsby-style party? (Come for the generation gap question; stay for the teens’ long takes on the tweet that somehow still don’t explain it, at all.)