Almanac: George Orwell on suffering
“Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the... [read more]
If you go down to the woods today you may be in for a big surprise
Australia’s fauna have a fearsome reputation in other countries. A Scottish journalist sends a warning to tourists who may be tempted to wander into Australia’s forests.
When Savas Guven chatted with Eddie Hayson, police were listening
Mosman CEO Savas Guven jailed after concocting an "elaborate scheme" to get off a charge of driving while disqualified.
“Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the... [read more]
Here are the towns running out of water
Gardens are dead, people are skipping showers and water quality is worsening. ABC analysis finds the towns most at risk of running dry.
Why Do We Fetishize Books As Physical Objects?
We seem to project enormously intense feelings onto books, feelings that make us protective of them and furious toward those we perceive as threatening them. We think of our books as symbols of our taste, our intellect, our moral vigor. And when we hold books in such high esteem, those who treat them as objects rather than as symbols become infidels. – Vox
- Book murderer
- Is a lifetime too long?
- Banksy and banality
- SULTAN KNISH ON WHAT’S LEFT OF ENGLAND:Muslim sex grooming gangs, like drugs or prostitution, are too widespread to be enforced out of existence because, like college students and pot, the culture doesn’t accept that they are wrong.The police did nothing because these were not isolated crimes by criminals, but clashes of morals and values between two communities, one of which does not believe that child rape is wrong because its sacred texts tell it that Mohammed married Aisha and consummated his marriage when she was 9.There are nearly 2 million child marriages in Pakistan. The notion that a woman’s consent to sexual relations matters is an utterly foreign concept in a culture where unaccompanied women are fair game.The child rapists did not believe that their actions were wrong under Islamic law. And they weren’t.The Manchester City Council and the GMP just accepted this reality as they have accepted it so often. They buried the minutes, shut down the investigation, and walked away from the screams of the girls.They did it for multiculturalism, integration, and community relations. They did it for social justice.We know that no real action was taken because the girls were troubled. They didn’t matter. And their bodies and lives could be sacrificed for the greater good.The real tragedy is not that the rapists didn’t understand it was wrong. It’s that the UK no longer does.
- Mere
- Greatness of Beethoven
- Plagiarism in Russia
- Emporium of pirated e-books
- Reading Airbnb Magazine
- Book toilets
Examining The Arguments Over Jeanine Cummins’s ‘American Dirt’
The author got a seven-figure advance, the first print run is half a million copies, the book jacket features gushing blurbs by famous writers, and the book got loads of coverage in The New York Times. But then the Twitterverse came after it, observers called out plot points that strain credibility, and even Cummins herself said, “I don’t know if I’m the right person to tell this story.” And then Oprah got involved. – VoxStories Are An Oral Tradition. They Work Differently When You Don’t Hear Them
Once upon a time, none of these stories had yet been fixed on a page (or a clay tablet), but were carried in the physical bodies of the people who committed them to memory. Long before Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press, and 1,000 years before cloistered monks and their illuminated manuscripts, the principal storage facility for history, poetry, and folktales was the human head. And the chief means of transmitting that cultural wealth, from generation to generation, was the human voice. – LitHub
