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
Life is no straight and easy corridor along which we travel free and unhampered, but a maze of passages, through which we must seek our way, lost and confused, now and again checked in a blind alley. But always, if we have faith, a door will open for us, not perhaps one that we ourselves would ever have thought of, but one that will ultimately prove good for us.
— A. J. Cronin, born on this date in 1896
“Work is a good thing in small doses,” wrote Philip Larkin, who proved an efficient librarian. Today, however, labor often goes hand in hand with ... soul-crushing misery
The mythic personification of evil has been around for a long time, and our sense of its reality has not vanished with the steady march of rationalism All The Evil Deeds
Inside the wide-ranging search—led by economists and psychologists—for the elixir that turns good squads into great ones
In 1948, Hemingway set sail for Europe with more than 30 pieces of luggage and a royal-blue Buick convertible. He was in search of a second act Improbably, he found it
Ouch, but also, too real: "Every story is not a book. A story may be things that happened, embellished for interest, but that’s not a book. Many stories don’t get good until the end. Some stories — true ones even — are hard to believe. Other stories are just too short, don’t have enough tension, or frankly aren’t that interesting. The stories we tell that enrapture our friends and families may be extraordinarily boring to those who don’t know us. Those stories are not a book." …[Read More]
The Death of Truthby Michiko Kakutani: Kakutani is best-known as the long-reigning—and frequently eviscerating—chief book critic at The New York Times, a job she left last year in order to write this book. In The Death of Truth, she considers our troubling era of alternative facts and traces the trends that have brought us to this horrific moment where the very concept of “objective reality” provokes a certain nostalgia. “Trump did not spring out of nowhere,” she told Vanity Fair in a recent interview, “and I was struck by how prescient writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell and Hannah Arendtwere about how those in power get to define what the truth is.” (Emily)
BOOK REVIEW: 'The Corporation' by T.J. English - Washington Times.“Given the ubiquitous presence of bolita among Cubans of all classes and genders, it was perhaps inevitable that the game would thrive in the Cuban exile communities of Miami and Union City,” Mr. English writes. “The man whose name would come to be associated with this illegal activity in the United States had not been a seasoned bolitero, or bolito boss, back in Cuba. He had been a cop in the city of Havana during the reign of the Batista dictatorship. His name was Jose Miguel Battle y Vargas.”
The Atlantic: “”Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read” This has applications beyond books — it applies to TV, too, and for that matter, email newsletters. Ask me at 4 P.M.
what I emailed out that morning and it’s a 50/50 proposition whether
I’ll remember. The good news: that’s pretty normal, and arguably
appropriate for our digital age.
In the internet age, recall memory—the ability to
spontaneously call information up in your mind—has become less
necessary. It’s still good for bar trivia, or remembering your to-do
list, but largely, Horvath says, what’s called recognition memory is
more important. “So long as you know where that information is at and
how to access it, then you don’t really need to recall it,” he says.
Spanish flu Reuters. “Banco de Sabadell’s problems are spreading.”
“The most regretful people on earth,” the poet Mary Oliver wrote in contemplatingthe artist’s task and the central commitment of the creative life, “are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
“Invention,”Frankenstein author Mary Shelley wrote in contemplating how creativity works, “does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos” — the chaos of existing inspirations, properly comprehended and reconfigured into something new. Einstein termed this reordering “combinatory play.” But it is a process mostly unconscious, the product of which — the creative breakthrough we call originality — cannot be willed. It arrives unbidden, with an abruptness that often startles the very mind to which it alights — an exhilarating startlement the French polymath Henri Poincaré called “sudden illumination.” It constitutes the third stage in Graham Wallas’s pioneering 1926 guide to the four stages of the creative process — a moment Wallas described as “the culmination of a successful train of association, which may have lasted for an appreciable time, and which has probably been preceded by a series of tentative and unsuccessful trains.”
Award-winning
columnist says strife can spur best work
Humor columnist Mark Harmon says the satirist Art Buchwald loved
the Watergate scandal, because there was so much bizarre material that he could
get his column done in an hour and be on the tennis courts by mid-morning.
“I think a lot of humor comes from being aghast at something,”
says Harmon, who earlier this week won this year's National Press Club
humor-writing award for his work with the Knoxville News Sentinel.
Harmon says he's been pretty much non-stop aghast for the past
year and a half. That's helped him imagine a column cited by award judges
about Mitch McConnell in hell. (“You have a lot of
admirers here,” Lucifer tells McConnell in the column.)
A similar inspiration prompted another column set in a
psychiatrist's office. Sergey Kislyak, Russia's former ambassador to the United
States, was complaining that no one, like Michael Flynn or Jeff Sessions, can seem to remember meeting him. Here's one
exchange:
"Oh I didn't see you come in," said the receptionist.
"That happens a lot," replied Kislyak.
Press Club judges said Harmon has "a knack for taking
a simple idea or detail ... and spinning it into a highly creative
scenario.” Harmon, a journalism professor at the University of Tennessee, has
been spinning those scenarios since he was a columnist for Penn State's
Daily Collegian four decades ago. Harmon says he finds his search for
other, often absurd ways to tell a story to be satisfying, if not
therapeutic.
Harmon's two-fold goal: Make people laugh. And help people
consider another perspective.
A liberal who has spent his adult life in conservative
northwestern Texas and eastern Tennessee, Harmon says he uses humor to bring
people together.
“There’s no margin in treating political opponents as enemies,”
he says. That doesn't mean, however, that he won't use a hammer — in the
style of one of his idols, the departed Molly Ivins — to show hypocrisy or a lack of courage by
local politicians on issues such as climate change.
The Press Club award comes at a bittersweet time for Harmon. The
Knoxville paper, like many nationwide, has had cutbacks, and in late June, he
was among four contributing columnists to get the ax.
On Wednesday, however, he got a new venue for his column
— the weekly Farragut Press, in western Knox County. The gig came just in
time, Harmon says.
"Have you seen all these stories about Bigfoot Porn?" he asks. "What a time
not to be writing a column. It's just sitting there."
ANOTHER CONTROVERSIAL HIRE: The New York Times
is defending a just-hired technology writer after criticism of some of her early tweets. In a statement,
The Times said it had checked Sarah Jeong’s social media accounts before
her hiring to the editorial board. The Times said Jeong, from The Verge,
had in the past dealt with frequent online harassment by “imitating the
rhetoric of her harassers. … She regrets it, and The Times does not condone it.
… She understands that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The
Times.”
JEONG'S RESPONSE: The reporter, in a statement, characterized her unearthed tweets as satire,
adding, "I deeply regret that I mimicked the language of my
harassers." In one tweet, she said "it must be so boring to be
white." In another, she wrote: “White people have stopped breeding.
You’ll all go extinct soon. This was my plan all along.” A third read: "Oh
man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.”
Meanwhile, her coworkers on The Verge's editorial board strongly condemned online harassment of
journalists and applauded the Times for standing by Jeong.
ONCE BEFORE: In February, The Times had announced the hire of
Wired's Quinn Norton for the job, but within hours, she had departed after previous social media
postings of hers emerged. In those posts, she used offensive language
and admitted she was friends with neo-Nazis,
DEAD MEN WALKING: That story on John Kelly? Done. Dan Coats? In process. How one
newsroom is getting a jump on White House exits in the high-turnover Trump
administration — by writing the story early. “It’s sort of like
the old long-standing practice of having prewritten obits,” Los Angeles Times
Washington bureau chief David Lauter tells The New Yorker’s Charles Bethea.
MORE LAUTER:
The L.A. Times bureau chief has announced the hiring of Politico’s Jennifer
Haberkorn and the WSJ’s Del Quentin Wilber. “Great to be hiring again,” Lauter tweeted, after the LAT spent months in limbo before billionaire Patrick
Soon-Shiong finally wrested the the paper from Tronc
in June.
HELPING LOCAL NEWS: Facebook announced a $4.5 million investment to help local newsrooms retain subscribers,
build membership programs and match donations. That includes a $1 million gift
to News Match program for nonprofit newsrooms.
THE STORY SO FAR: Here’s a summary of a few subscription techniques via Facebook
that publishers have adopted, including a successful, opportunistic sign-up program by
the San Francisco Chronicle during the California primaries and NBA finals.
GRAIN OF SALT: Jemele Hill, the National Association of Black Journalists’
journalist of the year, has this advice for young sportswriters: Don’t
take social media too seriously — particularly the criticism. “It’s not life or
death.” said Hill, a senior correspondent and columnist for ESPN and The
Undefeated, at this year's NABJ convention in Detroit. (h/t Kevin Merida)
IN ANOTHER MOVE: Sherry Skalko, director of the Amplify project at the
Investigative News Network, is moving to become executive director of Injustice Watch.
What we’re reading
‘I LOVE YOUR DOG’: What happens when a reader becomes a stalker, tracking your
dog walks, noticing your Christmas decorations, coming to your door? “If anyone
were to shoot and kill you,” he said, “it would not be a loss at all!” Chilling story by Stephen Petrow for CJR. (h/t Matt DeRienzo)
JUST THE LATEST WRINKLE: Why the panic over blueprints to
build plastic guns on 3D printers? Well, they could evade metal detectors.
However, since the 1980s, “anyone can purchase the most lethal of firearms free from all legal regulations,” writes
Timothy Lytton for The Conversation.
