North Korean soldier defects to South: South's military
Mel B Opens Up About Her Suicide Attempt, Drug Use and Divorce ...
Exploring the dark mystery of suicide
Helen DeWitt, America's Great Unlucky Novelist - Vulture
The Anguished Comedy of Helen DeWitt
“If I could have sold off a suicide attempt,” she said in a 2008 interview, “I would have had more time for reading Spinoza.” Duh.” Link here, that is the excellent Helen DeWitt, interesting throughout
'STEPPING BACK FROM THE EDGE': Former reporter
and editor Laura Trujillo writes a powerful first-person longform about her
mother's suicide. From the story: "We’re not supposed to blame
ourselves when someone we love kills herself but often do anyway. What if I
hadn’t moved away? What if I’d kept quiet about my stepfather? What if I had
answered her phone call that morning?" USA Today editor Nicole
Carroll, who lost her grandfather to suicide, explains why "We need to talk about suicide more."
Nationalism Is Rearing Up Again And It Needs Hate To Survive. How To Transcend It?
Marriott says hackers left data of 500 million guests exposed
The hack could be the second biggest in history, with guests' passport numbers and credit card details potentially stolen.
Simone Weil considered it the highest existential discipline to “make use of the sufferings that chance inflicts upon us.”George Bernard Shaw saw suffering as our supreme conduit to empathy. “We suffer more in imagination than in reality,” Seneca observed before offering his millennia-old, timeless antidote to anxiety. And yet we do suffer and the pain incurred, whatever the suffering is grounded in, is real. How we orient ourselves to our suffering — or to the suffering, as Buddhist might correct the ego-illusion and reaffirm our shared reality — may be the single most significant predictor of our happiness, wellbeing, and capacity for joy.“Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve,” C.S. Lewis wrote in contemplating how suffering confers agency upon life, “and you find that you have excluded life itself.”
Ursula K. Le Guin on Suffering and Getting to the Other Side of Pain
The protagonist of Lightning Rods is a guy named Joe, whose surname, never given, might as well be Schmoe. He’s a particular sort of American Everyguy – a hapless door-to-door salesman who at age 33 has sacrificed the possibility of emotional or spiritual fulfillment on the altar of the most conventional sort of material success. Or, more accurately, has lost any ability to distinguish between the two. By day, Joe travels around failing to sell encyclopedias, and later vacuum cleaners. By night, he concocts baroque masturbation fantasies that fail to assuage his sense of failure. He should be out selling right now, he thinks. He should be a different and better person. “Which just goes to show,” DeWitt writes,
how blinkered we can be by our preconceptions. Because little though he knew it, it was the hours he spent trying to sell vacuum cleaners that were the waste of time, something he would remember with shame and self-loathing for the rest of his life. His well-meant efforts to develop an efficient masturbatory program, likewise, were completely misconceived. What he didn’t realize is that a genius is different from other people. A genius doesn’t waste time like other people. Even when he looks like he is wasting time he may in fact be making the most productive possible use of the time.
Joe’s particular insight is to take his favorite masturbation fantasy and not only bring it to life but monetize it. I wouldn’t want to spoil for you the pleasure of discovering that fantasy yourself. Nor would I want to give away exactly how – with the help of a future Supreme Court justice, an adjustable-height toilet, several pairs of PVC undergarments, and a dwarf named Ian – Joe manages to realize it. Suffice it to say, the genius is in the details. And, speaking of details, look again at the passage above. Notice the double entendre of “a genius doesn’t waste time like other people,” and the sly redundancy (i.e., time-waste) of the sentence that follows. Joe’s target demographic – office worker – gives DeWitt a chance to luxuriate in the eloquent dumbness of the corporate idiom. Her delight in nuggets like “orientated” and “product feature” and “bifunctionality” (and, come to think of it, “corporate culture”) is evident in every deceptively artless sentence.
Genius At Work: Helen DeWitt's Lightning RodsBest books of 2018: Economics Martin Wolf, FT. Michael Hudson’s “…and Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (see NChere and here) is, naturally, on Wolf’s list. Wolf summarizes: “The work of Assyriologists has shown that by the third millennium BC, the rulers of the ancient Near East understood the necessity of repeated debt forgiveness. The alternative was, [Wolf] writes, ‘economic polarisation, bondage and collapse’. The relevance of this history to the world of today seems clear: debt is necessary; too much debt is disastrous.” • I would have said the “clear” relevance is the need for a Jubilee.
n Job
control and social support often are critical components of employee health,
and therefore should be a top priority for management. However, many companies
today do not provide the autonomy, control, social connections and support that
foster physical and mental well-being.
n Studies
show that job control – the amount of discretion employees have to determine
what they do and how they do it—has a major impact on their physical and mental
health. In situations of low job control, people have less responsibility and
discretion, which undermines their feelings of competence and accomplishment
and ultimately contribute to anxiety and stress.
n Social
support – the family and friends you can count on, as well as close
relationships, contributes to health. Anything that pits people against one
another weakens social ties among employees and reduces the social support that
produces healthier workplaces. Encouraging people to care for one another,
supporting shared connection, and eroding workplace language that emphasizes
division between leadership and/or employees is important to facilitating
social support
“NO MATTER how much alphanumeric complexity you add to passwords, chances are they’re still not strong enough. Don’t worry, mine are even weaker. Against all advice, I’m only willing to deliver the bare minimum asked of me when it comes to mixing numbers, letters and symbols. I stupidly use the same passwords for multiples sites, I rarely change them (unless forced to), and I hide them in very obvious places. Any grade-school computer nerd could hack me on most platforms were it not for an extra layer of security: my YubiKey 5 (from $45, yubico.com). This encrypted device is a unique two-factor authentication system similar to what you’re already using (right?) to bolster your online security. If you’re not, here are the basics: When logging into a site with two-factor from a new device, entering a password triggers the site to text you a randomly generated code you then type in to complete a login. It seems foolproof at first—no phone, no code. But anything digital is ultimately hackable and online criminals have already found crafty ways to intercept texts.
The APS review panel member shares her observations of the public service and dwells on the role of business in contributing to the reform debate.
The passion for making a difference is the public service's greatest asset
Alison
Watkins
The APS review panel member shares her observations of the public service and dwells on the role of business in contributing to the reform debate.