David Thomson, “One Hell of a Life” (Guardian, December 1, 2006)
Creativity in captivity helps grey cells
"Often art brings people back from the brink of suicide."
“Do you feel trapped in a broken economic model?”
So starts George Monbiot’s Ted Talks presentation The new political story that could change everything. The political “restoration” story of 90 years ago was Keynesian, the restoration story since 1980 has been neoliberalism. Ever since the crisis of 2008 we have witnessed the failure of neoliberalism, but we have also witnessed political failure, because our politicians have offered nothing to replace it: “political failure is at heart a failure of imagination”. “We are a society of altruists, but we are governed by psychopaths”. Monbiot’s offering is a story about how the community can re-capture the commons – our common wealth.
Books will not Die
The Paris Review – “Increasingly, people of the book are also people of the cloud. At the Codex Hackathon, a convention whose participants spend a frenetic weekend designing electronic reading tools, I watch developers line up onstage to pitch book-related projects to potential collaborators and funders. “Uber for books”: a same-day service that would deliver library volumes to your door. “Fitbit for books”: an app that blocks incoming calls and buzzes your phone with reminders to get back to a book. That literary pedometer meets its real-world counterpart in LitCity: “Imagine walking down a city street and feeling that familiar buzz of a push notification. But instead of it being a notification on Twitter or a restaurant recommendation, it’s a beautiful passage from a work of literature with a tie to that place.” I thought back to the nineteenth-century guidebooks that inserted a snippet of Shelley next to their map of the Alps; the book has always been about bringing worlds together
RIP: The girl who executed Nazis after seducing them in bars dies aged 92.
Orangutan with human rights to begin new life in Florida BBC
Books will not Die
The Paris Review – “Increasingly, people of the book are also people of the cloud. At the Codex Hackathon, a convention whose participants spend a frenetic weekend designing electronic reading tools, I watch developers line up onstage to pitch book-related projects to potential collaborators and funders. “Uber for books”: a same-day service that would deliver library volumes to your door. “Fitbit for books”: an app that blocks incoming calls and buzzes your phone with reminders to get back to a book. That literary pedometer meets its real-world counterpart in LitCity: “Imagine walking down a city street and feeling that familiar buzz of a push notification. But instead of it being a notification on Twitter or a restaurant recommendation, it’s a beautiful passage from a work of literature with a tie to that place.” I thought back to the nineteenth-century guidebooks that inserted a snippet of Shelley next to their map of the Alps; the book has always been about bringing worlds together
RIP: The girl who executed Nazis after seducing them in bars dies aged 92.
Orangutan with human rights to begin new life in Florida BBC
