One more thing from TH White/’s The Once and Future King:
“The best thing for being sad…is to learn something.
That is the only thing that never fails.
You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, You may lie awake listening to the disorder in your veins,
you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds.
There is only one thing for it then—-to learn.
Learn why the world wags and what wags it.
That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust,
and never dream of regretting.”
Truth entered a village naked as the day she was born. The villagers had one look at the naked truth and were afraid of the stark harshness and drove her out in anger and malice.
Dejected, the Truth wandered in the desert. Without food and nourishment, she weakened and would have soon died of loneliness. One day she got to the home of the Parable. Parable took her in, nursed her back to life. Soon the Truth was feeling well again. This time she returned to the same village clothed in a parable and was welcome and accepted with ease.
Source | Unknown
PONDER AND CONSIDER
Whenever, and wherever stories are told – be it through teaching, preaching, counselling, spiritual companionship, management – a chord is plucked within the understanding of the listeners. Often the story is heard by the ear, but listened to by the sub-conscious mind where its deeper meaning resides.
Readers themselves, I think, contribute to a book. They add their own imaginations, and it is as though the writer only gave them something to work on, and they did the rest.
— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who died in 1953
Three years ago The Best American Infographics was introduced by series editor Pulitzer Prize Awardee Gareth Cook. For this year’s edition Cook teams with “Brain Pickings” creator Maria Popova to produce The Best American Infographics 2015
The Best American Infographics 2015 by Maria Popova, Gareth Cook
As information architecture has become a vital element of new technologies annual does fulfill a real need. And doubly interesting is including Ms Popova whose web site Brain Pickings is one of the freshest and original resources in all of webworld.
Here’s a quick take on Maria Popova:
So what exactly is it that she does? Ms. Popova says she views her job as “helping people become interested in things they didn’t know they were interested in, until they are.” One entry might discuss how to find your true passion, with links to a talk by Alain de Botton, a book by the cartoonist Hugh MacLeod and a commencement address by Steve Jobs; another, how she asked an artist friend to illustrate thoughts on love from Susan Sontag’s diaries. Recently she recounted an aging Helen Keller’s visit to Martha Graham’s studio.Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art and a friend of Ms. Popova’s, said a good curator was someone whose own taste had somehow become the taste of millions. “What Maria has is the DNA of millions of people,” Ms. Antonelli said. “She somehow tunes in to what would make other people dream, or inspire them in a way that is quite unique.”
Dance Magazine’s 25 To Watch For 2020
“Breakout stars, paradigm shifters, game changers. Our annual list of the dancers, choreographers and companies that are on the verge of skyrocketing has a knack for illuminating where the dance world is headed. Here they are: the 25 up-and-coming artists we believe are ready to take our field by storm.” – Dance Magazine
How Banksy And I Got Away With Amazing Pranks
Steve Lazarides has now self-published a book of his photographs from the time he travelled the world tasked with making sure Banksy didn’t get arrested or duffed up and didn’t run out of spray paint. “I had the time of my life,” he says as he sits on the roof of his London office, talking about the man he calls Matey Boy. “We were lawless and did just what we wanted. Matey Boy had a political agenda that you can see very clearly in everything he does, but I just had a fucking blast.” – The Guardian
Scary Times For Producing TV
“When I got into producing television, the business model had been the same for about 70 years and, suddenly, in the last five years it’s completely different. And it looks like over the next five years it’s going to be completely different again. And nobody really knows.” – Toronto Star (CP)
“In the last few years, the number of FOIA lawsuits has risen
dramatically, much faster than the rise in FOIA requests. Anecdotal
reports suggest that delays in receiving responses to FOIA requests may
be increasing and a reason for rising litigation. TRAC’s FOIA Project,
with the help of a talented summer legal intern, explored the possible
impact that delays in receiving responses could be having. The study
found that the number of suits challenging agencies substantive
responses had not materially changed in the last four years. Their
numbers remained relatively small. Instead, most litigation occurred
when agencies failed to respond to FOIA requesters. Suits filed when
agencies failed to respond to FOIA requesters have skyrocketed. In more
than four out of every five suits the agency had failed to respond. The
statute provides that agencies need to respond within 20 business days.
However, in 2019 requesters waited an average of nearly six months (177
days) before filing suit when they failed to receive any response to
their request. In addition to not jumping into court quickly
when an agency didn’t respond, requesters actually waited an average of
over 30 days longer before filing suit in 2019 than they had in 2015. Where
agencies did provide a substantive response, average days between a
request and the filing of a suit was even longer – over 11 months (339
days). This period also increased between 2015 and 2019…”
Twitter is disturbingly right and alarmingly wrong...
Five Books – Best Books of 2019 – “Every year, we approach experts and ask them to recommend the best books that have been published in their field that year. Below you’ll find all our best books of 2019 reading lists as they are published on Five Books. (Our best books of 2018 and 2017 lists are also still available: those books are also well worth reading!). For subjects like philosophy, history, economics, and science these book recommendations have been specifically made for Five Books. For broad subjects like nonfiction and fiction, where there are so many books and topics it’s impossible for any individual to make a call on what the best books are, we tend to interview the chair of distinguished prizes, as they have systematically gone through all the books published that year to choose the very best. Either way, we can guarantee one thing: all the books below are very, very good books…”
The Limits Of Truth
There is a real risk that scientific fact will eventually be reduced to just another opinion, even when those facts describe natural phenomena—the very purpose for which science was developed. – The Scientist
Ten Top New Museums Of 2019
These ten museums opened in 2019. We’re not saying they’re the best, but they sure are fun buildings to look at. – Dezeen
The long, glorious history of beer. Consider the epic Gilgamesh: After seven jugs, our hero “was suddenly joyful, and sang aloud”
Kerouac waited by a newsstand all night for a forthcoming review of his book. “Its publication is a historic occasion,” the review began. It Only Got Better
Meritocracy is ruining everything,writes a Yale law professor. But take a step back: Does that merely reflect the Elitism of Academia
Jean Genet put the idea
of evil at the heart of his thinking. He inhabited the dualistic universe of monotheism even as he inverted its core values