Economics’ Biggest Success Story Is a Cautionary Tale Foreign Policy. More on faux Nobelists Duflo and Banerjee.
National Geographic – Women – A Century of Change – “As we’ve told women’s stories, they’ve changed the world. To mark the centenary of U.S. women winning the vote, National Geographic launches a year-long project on women’s impact in the world…”
Greta Thunberg declined a climate award because the world needs more action, fewer awards CNN
Sexy witch. Sexy nurse. Sexy Mr. Rogers? Inside the sexy Halloween costume industrial complex. San Francisco Chronicle
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Are You Overdue for a Sexual Makeover?
Best wishes for the Liberal Party’s 75th birthday
Writing in The Conversation, Michelle Grattan reports on an interview with The Australian’s Tony Branson, in which Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull gave some rather frank comments on the occasion of the Liberal Party’s 75th birthday.
Abbott said he would like to return to Parliament. Turnbull, unsurprisingly, talked about Morrison’s intransigence on energy policy and the influence of a group of reactionary climate denialists on the Liberal Party’s policies.
Amazon’s facial recognition misidentified Boston athletes as criminals Daily DotBut where has art led us? To a time before the world, before the beginning. It has cast us out of our power to begin and to end; it has turned us toward the outside where there is no intimacy, no place to rest. It has led us into the infinite migration of error. For we seek art's essence, and it lies where the nontrue admits of nothing essential.B
Whenever the lost books are mentioned, I think of Kafka's Berlin notebooks confiscated by the Gestapo. If only Dora Diamant had given them to Max Brod! Her biographer Kathi Diamant has organised a search of archives in the hope they are somewhere in eastern Europe. It's a thrilling idea: new works by Kafka. And if I daydream about the moment a researcher opens a file and recognises Kafka's spidery handwriting, I wonder also about our uncertain relation to the works wedo have. It might be that silence, an apocalypse of sorts, rises up before us there, in every extant work. Is this why we seek the new?
Adding to the hoard might demonstrate a misunderstanding of what Kafka's work reveals to us or, worse, a betrayal. He wrote a story – The Silence of the Sirens – in which Odysseus puts wax in his ears so he could not be lured by the sirens' song. But Kafka adds a further twist on the classical story and says "the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence". With his ears blocked, Odysseus is the only one who fails to hear it. "And though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never." Perhaps the absence of Kafka's stories is their great gift to us and why he was so keen to destroy them.
