Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Solitary Twitter Voices

My first wife divorced me for religious reasons. She worshipped money and I didn’t have any ...
~ via Twitter


Story image for mount%20everest from Mamamia



“The Times Has Become a Book-Deal Factory”: With a Flood of Star Reporters Thinking of Book Leave, Management Delivers a “Wrist Slap”Vanity Fair 

Doing Justice by Preet Bharara FT. The deck: “An eloquent lesson that the law is only as good as those who lead it.” Erm, if men were angels, no government would be necessary




ANALYSIS: TRUE. Political Correctness Is a Tool for Socialist Censorship and Thought Control. And it was designed as such.



A Twitter user @3liza points out, the comic archetypes of the wife and wife guy are eternal, and always orbit each other, from the Commedia dell’arte to Married with Children. The league of modern wife guys are merely the latest gloss on the same joke, with more layers of irony.
And the ceaseless ability of men to be publicly ridiculous ensures it’s not going anywhere soon.






Hard core Irony on Twitter Cliff-wife meme explained quickly 

Camille Billops abandoned her four-year-old to become the artist she knew she was meant to be. Twenty years later, her daughter wanted to know: why did you leave me?"





Why have some prices increased since 1950 by a factor of four while other prices have decreased by a factor of four? Technology is making so many goods and services much cheaper than in the past–that seems to be the normal situation–so why do some industries seem not only to be not progressing but actually retrogessing? As Scott Alexander put it, why are some industries so weird?

Those are the questions that motivated my latest piece, a short book with Eric Helland just released by the Mercatus Center titled, Why are the Prices so D*mn High?

At the center of the action in the new Toy Story movie is a disturbing idea: that we must do absolutely everything we can to keep our children from being disappointed (by losing a prized toy, for example)


A saying from the Zohar: On the sixth day, having created man, God said to him: I have worked heretofore, now you shall continue.

A saying: Cain's true punishment? He unlearned the meaning of Shabbat.

The return of the scouts, discouraged and discouraging, provoked such distress among the tribes that Moses decided to commmemorate it every year. At every anniversary Moses ordered the Jews to dig graves for themselves and to lie in them overnight. The next morning heralds ran between the trenches, shouting: Let the living separate from the dead, let the living detach themselves from the dead!  On the fortieth anniversary all rose, for by that time all of them belonged to the new generation; they were worthy of entering the Promised Land, for to them, bondage was no longer a temptation.

Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God



In some sense. For me, what writers up until the period of late modernism could rely upon was the prestige implicit in the idea of literature. What contemporary writers, in my view, need to contend with, is the marginality of literature within our culture. Kafka did not believe in religion but he could still believe in art. That same belief in art today, if not grotesque, is based upon a great capacity for denial.
'How Refreshing it is to be Insulted': New interview with me at theNew Statesman. Juliet Jacques asked the questions.



Researchers Can Now Take A Single Image Of A Person And Make Video Of It Saying What They Want


The new paper by Samsung’s Moscow-based researchers shows that using only a single image of a person’s face, a video can be generated of that face turning, speaking and making ordinary expressions — with convincing, though far from flawless, fidelity. – TechCrunch




“San Francisco is the first American city to ban facial recognition software used by police and other agencies.Bloomberg QuickTake  [YouTube] explains why the technology’s advance is so alarming to regulators, the public, and even the people developing it.”