— John Hersey, born in 1914

To be a writer is to sit down at one's desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone - just plain going at it, in pain and delight. To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over...

Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.
— Anne Frank, born in 1929

Botanic Garden's top 40 plants that will flourish in Sydney gardens

Tested over the last three years, the winners of what will now be an annual list include new varieties of "grandma" plants that have been bred to flourish in tough conditions.

If the Apollo missions brought us the age of consumer technology, Jill Lepore isn't impressed: "My country went to the moonand all I got was this lousy surveillance state

The knowledge illusion. Only rarely do we allow ourselves to glimpse the epistemological abyss gaping beneath our beliefs

Want to see how components of modernism become a source of lament? Enter the fallen world of motels. Geoff Dyer explains

Thirty years since Cass Sunstein's first steps as a public intellectual, the world has changed. But not his ideas, or his dreary prose

Is discussion overrated? Is it not as likely to generate bitterness, and division as it is to enlighten or foster consensus? To be or not

World's largest database uncovers Australia's secret reading passions

“The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.”

~ Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

I dream of a new apartment ;-) Kitchens might be the heart of the home, but bathrooms are definitely the muscle...

The story of Mrs. T and me—in a hundred words

by Terry Teachout

I’ve been following with interest a series of pieces that the New York Times describes as “Modern Love in miniature, featuring reader-submitted stories of no more than 100 words.” As my beloved Mrs. Turgently awaits a fresh pair of lungs at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, I thought I’d try to sum up the wildly improbable but nonetheless true story of our courtship and marriage in one hundred carefully chosen words.

For those who read this posting the other day without knowing anything about us, here is the miracle (no lesser word is strong enough) that happened to Mrs. T and me a decade and a half ago:

We met at a dinner party and fell in love at first sight. Then I learned that she had an incurable disease with a life expectancy of two years. Then I was stricken with congestive heart failure mere days before what was supposed to be our first date. I called her from the emergency room to break the date. Unfazed, she came to the hospital. We’ve been together ever since. Instead of dying on schedule, she fooled the doctors and lived. Now she needs a life-saving double lung transplant—and we’re counting on our luck to hold one more time.

Oh, yes, one more thing—we were both forty-nine years old at the time. Let that be a lesson to you!

Why Sotheby’s Was Bought

The purchase, by Mr. Drahi’s BidFair USA, returns the only publicly traded major auction house to private ownership after 31 years on the New York Stock Exchange. –The New York Times

When The Machines Get Smarter Than We Are, Things Will Change

David Chalmers: “Once we have a human-level artificial intelligence, there’s just no doubt that it will change the world. A.G.I.s are going to be beings with powers initially equivalent to our own and before long much greater than our own. To that extent, I’m on board with people who say that we need to think hard about how we design superintelligence in order to maximize good consequences.” – The New York Times

David Mitchell, author of the stunning Cloud Atlas, discusses writing,reveals that he is currently at work on "a long Japanese-Dutch historical novel set in the Napoleonic Era." Can't wait!

A maximum of one killer metaphor or simile per page should be ample, and watch out for the word "seem": it debases one's own currency, somehow. Think about how the writers who you love manage to make you love them. Prose that contains too many sentences beginning with the word "I" soon gets as tedious as people who begin too many sentences with the word "I".

AP – “Katie Jones sure seemed plugged into Washington’s political scene. The 30-something redhead boasted a job at a top think tank and a who’s-who network of pundits and experts, from the centrist Brookings Institution to the right-wing Heritage Foundation. She was connected to a deputy assistant secretary of state, a senior aide to a senator and the economist Paul Winfree, who is beingconsidered for a seat on the Federal Reserve. But Katie Jones doesn’t exist, The Associated Press has determined. Instead, the persona was part of a vast army of phantom profiles lurking on the professional networking site LinkedIn. And several experts contacted by the AP said Jones’ profile picture appeared to have been created by a computer program…”

Test your ability to tell a real face from a fake one at:http://www.whichfaceisreal.com/ and Generate your own deepfake faces at:https://thispersondoesnotexist.com

I was a really bad husband - but here's how it made me a better father

OPINION: At the core of it, I'm not happy I'm divorced. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. But it has taught me things I could have never learned otherwise

Is Orhan Pamuk a prophet or poseur?

Video: Isabel Allende on writing and feminism

Reading In an Age of Literary Overprodution

Roger Moore writing about Bond films!

Burning still: Fahrenheit 451
10 big-time directors tell cold war stories about first movies

"An invaluable guide to subverting the reading classes" reviewed:

Pierre Bayard is a Paris-based professor of French literature. As such, he is a practised charlatan, a literary bullshitter, a professional 'non-reader'. 'Because I teach literature at university level,' he says, regretfully, 'there is, in fact, no way to avoid commenting on books that most of the time I haven't even opened.'

The word “blog” is a portmanteau term for Web log or Weblog. In 1997 Jorn Barger, the keeper of Robot Wisdom, a Web site full of writings about James Joyce, artificial intelligence, and Judaism as racism (he’s reputedly a racist himself), coined the word “Weblog.” In 1999 Peter Merholz, the author of a Weblog called Peterme, split it in two like this—“We blog”—creating a word that could serve as either noun or verb. “Blog” was born.

Today there are, by one count, more than 100 million blogs in the world, with about 15 million of them active. (In Japan neglected or abandoned blogs are called ishikoro, pebbles.) There are political blogs, confessional blogs, gossip blogs, sex blogs, mommy blogs, science blogs, soldier blogs, gadget blogs, fiction blogs, video blogs, photo blogs, and cartoon blogs, to name a few. Some people blog alone and some in groups. Every self-respecting newspaper and magazine has some reporters and critics blogging, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker.

Every sport, every war, every hurricane brings out a crop of bloggers, who often outdo the mainstream media in timeliness, geographic reach, insider information, and obsessive detail. You can read about the Iraq war from Iraqi bloggers, from American soldiers (often censored now), or from scholars like Juan Cole, whose blog, Informed Comment, summarizes, analyzes, and translates news from the front. For opera, to take another example, you have Parterre Box, which is kind of campy, or Sieglinde’s Diaries and My Favorite Intermissions, written by frequent Met-goers, or Opera Chic, a Milan-based blog focused on La Scala (which followed in great detail the scandal of Roberto Alagna’s walkout during Aida a year ago). And that…

Here's fascinating talk by architect Joshua Prince-Ramus on the design of Seattle Central Library.

I made a visit there just today, as I do on many Saturdays. It's a remarkable building. Even after a hundred or so trips there it remains a compelling locale——abundance of smelly hobos and paucity of comfortable seating aside. When I moved to Seattle and was first learning my way around downtown I passed it by a few times before I realized it was a library. There's this ugly courthouse across the street that I took for the library and I felt no immediate need to cross its threshold. It was only after I'd been in town a few weeks and my mom insisted that I check out the new Koolhaas-designed library that it dawned on me that the least library-looking building downtown was in fact the library. A great building in a city sadly lacking great buildings. Still, this oft-cited flaw really gets my goat:

The second design flaw concerns the connection between the Book Spiral and the “Mixing Chamber,” ie what in an earlier day was the card-catalogue and information section. Or rather the lack of such connection. You can take an up-escalator from the Mixing Chamber, and you can take stairs down from the top of the library where there is a reading room to the bottom-most floor of the Book Spiral, but then ….but then…”Hey, how do I get out of here?” There is no down-escalator and no stairs from anywhere in the Book Spiral to the Mixing Chamber. If the elevator are running slow, well too bad. The only other alternative, which was opened up for the library opening, is an emergency stairwell (“Alarm Will Sound”). This flunks a fundamental tenet of architecture 101: you have to be able to get from here to there.
-City Comforts

Are your employees preparingto quit?

n According to a recent study drawn from 32+ million employee survey responses across 125 countries, changes in employee engagement and loyalty can be signs indicating whether an employee is planning to leave, and these changes may start up to 9 months before an employee quits.

n During this nine month period, organizations have the opportunity to spot the warning signs and act on them to prevent employee departures. What’s happening beneath the surface?

- People leave unchallenging work, not a challenging workload.

- People leave when they can’t discuss pay, not because they feel they’re under-rewarded.

- People leave managers: not colleagues, nor company culture.

- People leave when they don’t see a path for personal development. ]