- One who bathes willingly with cold water doesn’t feel the cold
Hawaiian-themed mural of Scott Morrison painted over
A mural of the PM in Sydney's inner west has been painted over just three days after it popped up, but "it's already done some pretty special stuff," says its artist.
At Words Without Borders, "staff, contributors, and board members share their favorite works-in-translation of 2019 and the titles they’re looking forward to in 2020", in Our Favorite International Reads from 2019 (and What We'll Be Reading in 2020). Great to hear about some of these books to look forward to.
At The Paris Review's blog they offer another good personal list, The Paris Review Staff's Favorite Books of 2019.
- He who is unable to dance says that the yard is stony
It's basically limited to non-fiction, too -- though Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive does slip in.
- Wisdom is like a baobab tree; no one individual can embrace it
Mainly high-profile titles, and many by very high-profile authors -- though amazingly I have not only not read but actually not seen a one of these. (I mean, I've seen them in bookstores and libraries etc., but haven't taken one in hand and did not receive any of them as a review copy.)
The internet has been captivated by Sugriva and her use of Instagram, but some animal experts haven’t been so impressed
Party leaders have regaled the populace with how they will use seagoing forces to right historical wrongs and win the nation nautical renown. They must now follow through.It was foolish to tie China’s national dignity and sovereignty to patently absurd claims to islands and seas. But party leaders did so. And they did so repeatedly, publicly, and in the most unyielding terms imaginable. By their words they stoked nationalist sentiment while making themselves accountable to it. They set in motion a toxic cycle of rising popular expectations.Breaking that cycle could verge on impossible. If Beijing relented from its maritime claims now, ordinary Chinese would—rightly—judge the leadership by the standard it set. Party leaders would stand condemned as weaklings who surrendered sacred territory, failed to avenge China’s century of humiliation despite China’s rise to great power, and let jurists and lesser neighbors backed by a certain superpower flout big, bad China’s will.No leader relishes being seen as a weakling. It’s positively dangerous in China.
Small men can start big wars.
I’m currently reading Geoffrey Wawro’s A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire. It’s a great read on the Habsburgs’ political and military problems dating back to 1866, which I haven’t seen in such detail in any other WWI history. But it also reveals just how small some of the men were making Austria-Hungary’s and Germany’s biggest decisions.
WSJ.com [paywall – but includes a video that is free to watch] – You Might Be Buying Trash on Amazon—Literally. Dumpster divers say it’s easy to list discarded toys, electronics and books on the retailer’s platform. So we decided to try…”Just about anyone can open a store on Amazon.com and sell just about anything. Just ask the dumpster divers. These are among the dedicated cadre of sellers on Amazon who say they sort through other people’s rejects, including directly from the trash, clean them up and list them on Amazon.com’s platform. Many post their hunting accounts on YouTube. They are an elusive lot. Many The Wall Street Journal contacted wouldn’t give details about their listings, said they stopped selling dumpster finds or no longer listed them as new, didn’t respond to inquiries or stopped communicating. Some said they feared Amazon would close their stores. So the Journal set out to test whether these claims were true. Reporters went dumpster diving in several New Jersey towns and retrieved dozens of discards from the trash including a stencil set, scrapbook paper and a sealed jar of Trader Joe’s lemon curd. The Journal set up a store on Amazon to see if it could list some of its salvaged goods for sale as new. It turned out to be easy. Amazon’s stated rules didn’t explicitly prohibit items salvaged from the trash when the Journal disclosed the existence of its store to the company last month. The rules required that most goods be new and noted that sellers could offer used books and electronics, among other things, if they identified them as such…”
case you missed this New York Times series: Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret. The latest installment opens up a new big chapter with a whistleblower-provided (and large) dataset: Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy. Importantly, it shows that if you have a smartphone, your location data is not and can never be anonymized. It’s easy to figure out who you are and where you’ve been. (This also reveals how pretty much no one with a smartphone takes protective measures like using a Faraday bag a lot of the time, havig a burner smart phone and using it a lot to confuse things, or other “mess with them” strategies). However, I don’t know why this comes as a surprise.
Senior APS leaders continue to be risk averse and reluctant to embrace new ways of working. Excessive risk aversion has been identified in past reviews and in submissions to this review.444 It reflects a culture that rejects experimentation, innovation and learning from successes and failures. Research commissioned for this review found that:
… departments and agencies are often more concerned with reputational risk, seeking to pre-empt or divert criticism rather than learning from experience and feedback. 445