Monday, September 09, 2019

Old age is the busiest of them all

“There is no more painful human illusion than that you can catch up on lost reading in old age. Old age is the busiest of them all. Things you used to do effortlessly take you forever, provided you can do them at all.”
~ S.N. Behrman, People in a Diary: A Memoir

"It takes two flints to make a fire." 
--Louisa May Alcott



We are at our most powerful when we no longer need to be powerful...


Praga 1968, mostra fotografica.

In occasione del cinquantesimo anniversario della “Primavera di Praga”, attraverso la collaborazione tra l’Ambasciata d’Italia e l’Istituto Italiano di Cultura…
A report by Flamingo commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford University: “Younger audiences are different from older groups not just in what they do, but in their core attitudes in terms of what they want from the news. 

Putting into words what is beyond words …

Describing the indescribable | Jonathan Gaisman | Standpoint


On the road | Patrick Heren | Standpoint
Once across the border, I had to decide how to get back to New York. I had $36 in my pocket, a third of the Greyhound fare. Ed offered to lend me the money, but, in the grip of some Kerouac-ish fantasy, I opted to hitch-hike instead. Ed bade me farewell, I stuck out a thumb and about 10 am got my first lift, also to Houston

The Painted Bird review - savage, searing three-hour tour of hell  



Making a killing: the ethics of true crime

When content makers use real people’s lives and deaths to drive audience numbers, questions of accountability and exploitation become harder to ignore. Should watercooler content have this much influence over legal proceedings?
  


More Than Half of U.S. Adults Trust Law Enforcement to Use Facial Recognition Responsibly


But the public is less accepting of facial recognition technology when used by advertisers or technology companies: “The ability of governments and law enforcement agencies to monitor the public using facial recognition was once the province of dystopian science fiction. But modern technology is increasingly bringing versions of these scenarios to life. A recent investigation found that U.S. law enforcement agencies are using state Department of Motor Vehicles records to identify individual Americans without their consent, including those with no criminal record. And countries such as China have made facial recognition technology a cornerstone of their strategies to police the behaviors and activities of their publics. Despite these high-profile examples from fiction and reality, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that a majority of Americans (56%) trust law enforcement agencies to use these technologies responsibly. A similar share of the public (59%) says it is acceptable for law enforcement to use facial recognition tools to assess security threats in public spaces…” 

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”

 — Viktor Frankl29 and Beyond in Milano