We Are Not Who We Think We Are

 “I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?” 
– 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

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

The Pesticide Industry’s Playbook for Poisoning the Earth The Intercept

George Orwell said, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”

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

For us the mountains had been a natural field of activity where, playing on the frontiers of life and death, we had found the freedom for which we were blindly groping and which was as necessary to us as bread.

— Maurice Herzog, born on this date in 1919


Chronicle of Higher Education, The Unbearable Virtue Mongering of Academics: 

Stanley Fish is skeptical of free speech, and dismayed by the ubiquity of Subarus.

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