How the internet is changing chess (and by extension everything).
Corporate Buzzwords Are How Workers Pretend to Be Adults
IT LOOKS LIKE AN OUTTAKE FROM THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN: Coronavirus flight from hell for American Diamond Princess passengers, as seen in photos.
Corporate Buzzwords Are How Workers Pretend to Be Adults
A Travesty and a Disgrace’: Trump Quietly Issues Memo That Could Abolish Union Rights for 750,000 Federal Workers Common Dreams
How do you form new friendships as an adult?
With one in four of us said to be facing loneliness, could a form of online dating to find friendship be the answer?
What makes a haunting? You can be haunted by a ghost, sure, but you can also be haunted by guilt, grief, your country’s history, even your own anatomy. And sometimes it’s hard to say exactly what is doing the haunting—but the feeling is still there regardless, the presence of something just out of sight.
If you start thinking that only your biggest and shiniest moments count, you’re setting yourself up to feel like a failure most of the time. Personally, I’d rather feel good most of the time, so to me everything counts: the small moments, the medium ones, the successes that make the papers and also the ones that no one knows about but me. The challenge is avoiding being derailed by the big, shiny moments that turn other people’s heads. You have to figure out for yourself how to enjoy and celebrate them, and then move on.
Photograph by Esther Bubley, 1943, for the Office of War Information. So lonely, so forlorn. I would write a story about her, but I suspect her story has already been written many times before. (Algren’s “Is Your Name Joe?” comes to mind.)
‘What’s especially tragic about a mind that imagines itself as something separate, defensible, and capable of “efficiency” is not just that it results in a probably very boring (and bored) person; it’s that it’s based on a complete fallacy about the constitution of the self as something separate from others and from the world. Although I can understand it as the logical outcome of a very human craving for stability and categories, I also see this desire as, ironically, the intersection of many forces inside and outside this imagined “self”: fear of change, capitalist ideas of time and value, and an inability to accept mortality. It’s also about control, since if we recognise that what we experience as the self is completely bound to others, determined not by essential qualities but by relationships, then we must further relinquish the ideas of a controllable identity and of a neutral, apolitical existence . . . But whether we are the fluid product of our interactions with others is not our choice to make. The only choice is whether to recognise this reality or not.’
— Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
*Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World*
That is the new book by Daniel A. Bell and Wang Pei. It is perhaps not so novel to students of Jean Bodin and medieval political thought, or say Chinese history, but still the book crystallizes a moment and I consider its publication a matter of note. Here is one short bit:
But which hierarchical relations are justified and why? In our view, it depends on the nature of the social relations and the social context. As a method, we are inspired by Michael Walzer’s call for a pluralistic approach to justice. There is no one principle of justice appropriate for all times and places. Our main argument is that different hierarchical principles ought to govern different kinds of social relations. What justifies hierarchy among intimates is different from what justifies hierarchy among citizens; what justifies hierarchy among citizens is different from what justifies hierarchy among countries; what justifies hierarchy among countries is different from what justifies hierarchies between humand and animals, and…The sum total of our argument is that morally justified hierarchies can and should govern different spheres of our social lives…
The discussion of the Kama Sutra, and its notions of hierarchy, was interesting too.
wine in time
This spiral wine cellar made me weep with envy.
Slate – I’ve fought for a free internet for 30 years. Here’s where I think we went wrong, and right. By – “…I’ve come to believe our society should take reasonable steps to limitintentionally harmful speech, but I also find myself increasingly embracing a broader, more instrumentalist vision of freedom of speech than I typically championed in the 1990s. Back then, I was much more focused on encouraging tolerance and pluralism—the idea that an open, democratic society should be willing to let people say outrageous things, to the extent possible, because we ought to be strong enough in our democratic convictions to endure disturbing dissent. I still believe that, but here in 2020 I’m also haunted by the challenges we face everywhere in the world in this century, ranging from climate change to income inequality to the (not-unrelated) resurgence of populist xenophobia and even genocidal movements…”
“Adults who frequently attend religious services, pray with regularity, and consider themselves to be religious tend to exhibit longer telomeres than those who attend and pray less frequently and do not consider themselves to be religious.”
The authors of the study believe theirs was the first comprehensive data-driven analysis of the relationship between religious practice and telomere length. And, being the first such analysis, the authors also acknowledged that their findings aren’t definitive and more study is needed.
‘[…] that famous thing called reality, to which one can get closer and closer, but never close enough, because reality knows how to slip away behind an infinite series of footsteps, levels of perception, false soundings. In the long run, reality turns out to be inextinguishable, unreachable. One can find out more and more about it, but never everything. But even so it’s advisable to try to find out a little more, because in certain investigations surprises can occasionally occur.’
Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque (trans. Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean)
Folks like to joke that there’s just too much TV to watch, but rarely do they back it up with facts. Now, they can. According to new data from Nielsen, there were 646,152 unique programs available in 2019 across network TV, cable, streaming services, and every other kind of outlet. – Wired
Our Central Need: Meaning
Viktor Frankl argued that literature, art, religion and all the other cultural phenomena that place meaning at their core are things-unto-themselves, and furthermore are the very basis for how we find purpose. In private practice, Frankl developed a methodology he called ‘logotherapy’ – from logos, Greek for ‘reason’ – describing it as defined by the fact that ‘this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man’. He believed that there was much that humanity can live without, but if we’re devoid of a sense of purpose and meaning then we ensure our eventual demise. – Aeon
Among the previous generation of American novelists, the sensibility closest to Houellebecq’s is Saul Bellow’s—passionately engaged but authoritative and judgmental, an essayist’s sensibility as much as a novelist’s. If his characters frequently hold crackpot opinions, jthat never make his novels feel like crackpot projects. Houellebecq, educated at the elite National Agronomic Institute, has a mastery of, and a curiosity about, the facts of science. He delights in them. There is a fussy statisticality about his writing: “The year 1970 saw a rapid growth in erotic consumption, despite the efforts of a still-vigilant sexual repression…. Naked breasts spread rapidly on the beaches of Southern France. In the space of a few months, the number of sex shops in Paris rose from 3 to 45.”
The Purpose Of Boredom
Let’s look more closely at the anatomy of boredom. Why is it so damned boring to be stuck in a departure lounge while our flight is increasingly delayed? We are in a state of high arousal, anticipating our imminent arrival in a novel and stimulating environment. – Aeon
This Composer Just Made History At The Oscars. Get To Know Her Music With These Seven Pieces
Hildur Guðnadóttir is actually three-quarters of the way to an EGOT: she has an Oscar (and a Golden Globe) for her score to The Joker and an Emmy and a Grammy for her music for HBO’s Chernobyl. “But it’s on her own, and in the occasional duo or trio setting, that Guðnadóttir has established her signature sound: a moving fusion of ambient drone and contemporary classical that places an emphasis on her exceptionally controlled tone; she’s capable of conjuring entire worlds out of just a few carefully chosen notes.” – Pitchfork
Do not disturb the snake orgies, Florida park officials urge.
“Katie Holten has created a New York City Tree Alphabet. Each letter of the Latin alphabet is assigned a drawing of a tree from the NYC Parks Department’s existing native and non-native trees, as well as species that are to be planted as a result of the changing climate. For example, A = Ash. Everyone is invited to download the free font, NYC Trees, and to write words, poems, messages, or love letters, in Trees. We’ll select some of these messages to plant with real trees around the city. JOIN US! * The New York City Tree Alphabet is an alphabetical planting palette, allowing us to rewrite the urban landscape by planting messages around the city with real trees. What messages would you like to see planted? Download the free font here or visitwww.nyctrees.org to write with Trees….”
Do not disturb the snake orgies, Florida park officials urge.