I have a quote that I’ve kept in my Twitter bio for years. “Everything changes — don’t be afraid.” It’s a motto I’ve tried to live my life by, and it is, of course, from Deadwood
In old age, everything droops, wrinkles, falls out, detumesces, or dries up. But, as Susan Gubar explains, literary life continues... Recycled Teenagers - Geale Hirshorn Jordan ...
Jacqui C's loves LOve ACtually. Lindy West, a New York Times columnist, summons all of her brilliance to call a British character in the film Love, Actually, who learns Portuguese and flies to Portugal to propose to a woman who spent a summer cleaning the house where he was staying, “creepy.” The woman accepts the proposal in English, showing that she too took language lessons because she also fell in love with him.
Writing in 1956, Erich Fromm predicted the "disintegration of love in Western culture.” His words were prescient. We are falling out of love with love... How We Grew Bored With Love
New York Times op-ed: The Uncommon Power of Grace, by Peter Wehner (Ethics and Public Policy Center):
In old age, everything droops, wrinkles, falls out, detumesces, or dries up. But, as Susan Gubar explains, literary life continues... Recycled Teenagers - Geale Hirshorn Jordan ...
Jacqui C's loves LOve ACtually. Lindy West, a New York Times columnist, summons all of her brilliance to call a British character in the film Love, Actually, who learns Portuguese and flies to Portugal to propose to a woman who spent a summer cleaning the house where he was staying, “creepy.” The woman accepts the proposal in English, showing that she too took language lessons because she also fell in love with him.
New York Times op-ed: The Uncommon Power of Grace, by Peter Wehner (Ethics and Public Policy Center):
In his book What’s So Amazing About Grace? Philip Yancey describes a conference on comparative religions where experts from around the world debated which belief, if any, was unique to the Christian faith. C.S. Lewis happened to enter the room during the discussion. When he was told the topic was Christianity’s unique contribution among world religions, Lewis responded: “Oh, that’s easy. It’s grace.”
Lewis was right. No other religion places grace at its theological center. It was a revolutionary idea; as Mr. Yancey puts it, grace “seems to go against every instinct of humanity.” We are naturally drawn to covenants and karma, to cause and effect, to earning what we receive.
Grace is different. It is the unmerited favor of God, unconditional love given to the undeserving. It’s a difficult concept to understand because it isn’t entirely rational. “Grace defies reason and logic,” as Bono, the lead singer of U2, put it. “Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions.”
There’s a radical equality at the core of grace. None of us are deserving of God’s grace, so it’s not dependent on social status, wealth or intelligence. There is equality between kings and peasants, the prominent and the unheralded, rule followers and rule breakers. ...
In 2018 we said goodbye to Ursula K. Le Guin, Tom Wolfe, Philip Roth, V.S. Naipaul, and more than a few other writers. A look back at the year’s literary deaths... MEdia Dragons: NOTABLE LITERARY DEATHS IN 2018 A LAST GOODBYE TO THE AUTHORS, EDITORS, AND BOOK PEOPLE WE LOST THIS YEAR s
“What does Adam Smith’s moral philosophy owe to the literary discourse of his time?” A Berkeley dissertation by Shannon Frances Chamberlain
Benevolent Sexism and Mate Preferences: Why Do Women Prefer Benevolent Men Despite Recognizing That They Can Be Undermining? - Pelin Gul, Tom R. Kupfer.
The movie is set in 1889 as the town prepares to celebrate South Dakota joining the Union as the 40th state. What’s the film about, basically?
If you ask David, it’s about the passage of time. The toll of time on people. It’s mellowed some people and hardened others. And it’s about the town’s maturing and becoming part of the Union and what that event sets in motion, in a very personal way for the people that it brings in town and what ensues. The toll of time has not just struck Deadwood and the characters but all the people making it as well, you get to see the faces of people 12 years later. And it was really profound. Actors were crying at the table read — not necessarily from the script but the emotion of being back and doing something we all loved doing so much. You normally have a great experience and then it’s over. You don’t normally get the chance to do this in life. It was kind of a gift.
Deadwood Returns
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
Against Peter Jackson’s “They Shall Not Grow Old”
The Amazon War and the Evolution of Private Law
It’s well known that to boost their sales, sellers sometimes post fake 5-star reviews on Amazon. Amazon tries to police such actions by searching out and banning sites with fake reviews. An unintended consequence is that some sellers now post fake 5-star reviews on their competitor’s site.The Verge: As Amazon has escalated its war on fake reviews, sellers have realized that the most effective tactic is not buying them for yourself, but buying them for your competitors — the more obviously fraudulent the better. A handful of glowing testimonials, preferably in broken English about unrelated products and written by a known review purveyor on Fiverr, can not only take out a competitor and allow you to move up a slot in Amazon’s search results, it can land your rival in the bewildering morass of Amazon’s suspension system.…There are more subtle methods of sabotage as well. Sellers will sometimes buy Google ads for their competitors for unrelated products — say, a dog food ad linking to a shampoo listing — so that Amazon’s algorithm sees the rate of clicks converting to sales drop and automatically demotes their product.
What does a seller do when they are banned from Amazon? Appeal to the Amazon legal system and for that you need an Amazon lawyer.
The appeals process is so confounding that it’s given rise to an entire industry of consultants like Stine. Chris McCabe, a former Amazon employee, set up shop in 2014. CJ Rosenbaum, an attorney in Long Beach, New York, now bills himself as the “Amazon sellers lawyer,” with an “Amazon Law Library” featuring Amazon Law, vol. 1 ($95 on Amazon). Stine’s company deals with about 100 suspensions a month and charges $2,500 per appeal ($5,000 if you want an expedited one), which is in line with industry norms. It’s a price many are willing to pay. “It can be life or death for people,” McCabe says. “If they don’t get their Amazon account back, they might be insolvent, laying off 10, 12, 14 people, maybe more. I’ve had people begging me for help. I’ve had people at their wits’ end. I’ve had people crying.”
Amazon is a marketplace that is now having to create a legal system to govern issues of fraud, trademark, and sabotage and also what is in effect new types of intellectual property such as Amazon brand registry. Marketplaces have always been places of private law and governancebut there has never before been a marketplace with Amazon’s scale and market power. It’s an open question how well private law will develop in this regime.
FINTAN O’TOOLE. Saboteur in Chief (The New York Review of Books).
Writing about her friend the famously unpleasant Evelyn Waugh, Frances Donaldson reflected that. Continue reading
Curbed's 2018 architecture and design awards by @marklamster and @langealexandra
A Writer Heads To The Woods To Escape Noise. Here’s What She Learned
A writer I admire once told me, “few people have an imagination when it comes to their lives.” I loved this. It flipped the notion that everyone was doing life right except for me — the common refrain of my consciousness — squarely on its head. The fact that I had abandoned my career at 35 for a pipe dream, didn’t have a partner, and was leaving the greatest city in the world to spend the summer writing in a cabin alone wasn’t wrong, it was imaginative. – Medium
MUNGO MacCALLUM. Protecting buffoons.
According to at least one member of the New South Wales Liberal executive, Sally Betts, the member of Hughes, Craig Kelly, is a bully, a thug and a disgrace. Continue reading