– Chuang Tzu
"Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.”
– Henry David Thoreau
We Are Not Who We Think We Are Foreign Policy
Some advice on escaping the trap of "losing weight" and how to approach the issues you have with your body in a more healthy way.
Yarra Csalt time with Evan, Gary and Gin Gin ...
George Orwell said, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”
One morning you wake up with more life behind you than in front of you, not being able to understand how it’s happened.
Fredrik Backman, Britt-Marie var här
We Are Not Who We Think We Are Foreign Policy
Some advice on escaping the trap of "losing weight" and how to approach the issues you have with your body in a more healthy way.
Yarra Csalt time with Evan, Gary and Gin Gin ...
Hollywood Talent Agencies Face Uncertain Times
Agencies are under growing pressure “to scale up and adapt to a changing media industry. The rise of streaming and the expected decline of TV packaging — where agencies collect fees for packaging talent on shows — combined with the effects of the longstanding writers boycott, have squeezed talent agencies, some of which have weathered high-level executive turnover, laid off workers and cut back on overtime pay for assistants.” – Los Angeles Times
Extreme Film Criticism (Can You Hang?)
Some film critics now differentiate themselves from amateurs through the practice of Extreme Film Criticism. In it, critics subject themselves to physical, film-related challenges that bear little resemblance to long-form criticism of decades past but would nonetheless intimidate most amateurs. Then they write about it. Landing somewhere between product placement and a fraternity hazing ritual, these pieces constitute a response to major shifts in the landscape of both the news media and the film industry, with serious implications for the life expectancy of criticism as a form, and perhaps for the individual critics themselves. – Los Angeles Review of Books
Marie Cécile and Guerma in their old fashioned hand written letter this week to their first cousin in bushfire damaged Australia noted that there was no snow this winter in Paris or Reims over the Christmas period ... Boomers are noticing dramatic climatic upheavals ... Even though science is rarely pure and seldom simple
Why Shouldn’t We Get To Choose How We Die? (And In What Style)
Many people no longer hold the kind of religious views according to which our time of death is not allowed to be of our choosing. There are an increasing number of countries where physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia is permitted in a medical context. But why think that the right to choose our ending is given legitimacy only, if at all, on health grounds? Why don’t we have the right to end our lives not just when we want to but to also do so in style? – Aeon
— Maurice Herzog, born on this date in 1919
Chronicle of Higher Education, The Unbearable Virtue Mongering of Academics:
Chronicle of Higher Education, The Unbearable Virtue Mongering of Academics:
Charming
and pugnacious, the literary critic and legal theorist Stanley Fish, at
81, remains one of the besieged humanities’ most prominent voices. His
new book, The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump
(2019), out last month from Simon & Schuster, brings his
combination of theory and polemic to a host of topical controversies.
Probably no one will agree with all of it, but, as ever with Fish, it’s
impossible to come away from his arguments without feeling one’s own
ideas become sharper.
Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed: Why I Won’t Let My Classes Be Recorded, by John Villasenor (UCLA):
In
early January, I received an email message from an audio-visual
coordinator at the UCLA School of Law asking whether I wanted my
spring-semester class to be recorded. More specifically, the message
informed me that all class sessions are recorded by default unless the
instructor opts out. I responded, as I have to similar messages in
previous years, with a request not to record my class.
It’s
not that I don’t recognize the advantages of recording. For a student
forced to miss class for a legitimate reason, such as illness, having
access to a video can make it easier and more efficient to catch up. I
also recognize that in large lecture-hall courses with hundreds of
students, opportunities for substantive student participation are
limited. ...
But
for smaller, highly interactive classes — my forthcoming law-school
class will have about 25 students and is designed to provide plenty of
student engagement — there are also reasons that the growing practice of
recording classes should give us pause. One is privacy: Not mine, which
I’ve long since decided doesn’t exist when I’m standing at the front of
a classroom, but that of the students. ...
Disney Drops “Fox” From 20th Century Fox Name
The Walt Disney Company bought most of Mr. Murdoch’s entertainment assets last year in a $71.3 billion deal. That included the 20th Century Fox studio and its art-house sibling, Fox Searchlight. On Friday, the employees at the main movie studio arrived to a new email format (@20thcenturystudios) without the Fox. A Disney spokesman confirmed that both labels would drop Fox from their logos. Disney had no further comment. – The New York Times