Saturday, March 21, 2020

Naomi Klein: Crises Can Be Opportunities

The fish of words will swim through all the paper.



Before the 1600s, the workplace drug most commonly consumed in the West was beer. Then capitalism brought a craze for something new: Coffee 


Iconic Sydney beaches closed as restrictions enforced amid coronavirus crisis

Bondi, Bronte and Tamarama beaches have been temporarily closed amid confusion over the NSW government's attempts to enforce a limit of 500 people at beaches.



Naomi Klein: Crises Can Be Opportunities For Systemic Change


Crises like coronavirus are opportunities as well as threats. Naomi Klein writes that ideas that were heretofore beyond consideration can sometimes become possible – for example no-strings bailouts of big companies or medicare for all. Depends on how you treat them. – The Intercept

 Mae Martin: ‘It’s enriching to share things you’re ashamed of’

    
  At expats_cz Raymond Johnston lists
 20 great novels set in Prague: a reading list that spans 130 years of literature. 
       I'd be more encouraged if it wasn't described as: "A round up of some of the greatest novels about Prague written in the English language, by non-Czech authors, over the course of 130 years" if it didn't also include books not written in English -- though of course it's good to see some of those included, too ...


       The International Publishers Association has announced the shortlist for this year's Prix Voltaire, awarded for: "exemplary courage in upholding the freedom to publish and in enabling others to exercise their right to freedom of expression" 
       Publishing houses from Turkey, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Pakistan are in the running for the prize, which will be announced at the end of May. 


       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Kike Ferrari's Like Flies from Afar, due out shortly in English (from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and Canongate in the UK). 


 






I’m living in a sci-fi movie. In fact, you are too. We’re just further along in the plot than you are. A man buys food in a market in some little-known spot in China and Rome becomes a ghost town. It’s a strange movie and the popcorn tastes of hand sanitizer. This is Italy. Once it meant “pasta,” now it means “coronavirus.”   

       You may remember Ferrari from the profiles of him from a couple of year's ago -- Argentine cleaner's double life as prize-winning writer and the like -- and though it seems to have taken a while, they presumably helped revive this one (new Spanish and French editions came out) and also finally get him translated into English. 

Archaeologists in Russia have unearthed a huge 25,000-year-old circular structure built from the bones of at least 60 woolly mammoths. 

Google Blog: “…We’re partnering with the U.S. government in developing a website dedicated to COVID-19 education, prevention, and local resources nationwide. This includes best practices on prevention, links to authoritative information from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and helpful tips and tools from Google for individuals, teachers and businesses. We’ll be rolling out an initial version of the website late Monday, March 16, and we’ll continue to enhance and update it with more resources on an ongoing basis. We also continue to help people find timely and useful information through our products, including Search, Maps and YouTube. Right now on the Google homepage we’re promoting the “Do the Five” campaign to raise awareness of simple measures people can take to slow the spread of the disease, according to the WHO. In the first 24 hours, these tips have already been seen by millions in the U.S. We’ve added more useful information to our COVID-19 SOS Alerts, including links to national health  authority sites and a map of affected areas from the WHO…”
See also Gizmodo: “Google has announced that it’s partnering with the White House to create a national coronavirus website, which is totally related to whatever the hell the administration was talking about at Friday’s [Friday the 13th] press conference. There, President Donald Trump vastly oversold and misattributed an upcoming, supposedly Google-run project to build a “nationwide” coronavirus screening site to direct people to nearby “drive through” testing depending on their symptoms. In reality—as Google clarified in a frantic tweet just hours later—such a tool is barely in its trial stages at Verily, Google’s sister-company under the Alphabet umbrella, and it will only be useful for people in the San Francisco Bay Area for the foreseeable future. It purportedly wasn’t even intended to be publically available until White House staff dropped the ball. A person familiar with the matter told the New York Times that Verily’s pilot program (not a website—that’s still yet to be announced) is planned to launch Monday and can direct Bay Area residents exhibiting flagged symptoms to a total of three testing locations. While still absolutely commendable, don’t get me wrong, that’s still significantly different and scaled-down from what Trump and co. were selling…”  


“Emergency preparedness and prepping checklists for everyone – The Prepared is a  collection of free, obsessively-researched reviews of the best prepper gear and skills so you can protect your life, family, and home in an emergency. Our experts do the work so you don’t have to. No BS. No propaganda. All are welcome. “The Prepared is more like a curated wiki than a blog. And you may have noticed the lack of ads and other junk. The Prepared is supported by readers, and when you buy something we recommend, we may get an affiliate commission — but it never affects your price or what we pick.” 




What to read, watch and listen to when you’re quarantined
Every month Geraldine Doogue on Saturday Extra has a segment The Pick: what to read, watch and listen to. For this month two reviewers (Michael Wesley and Aarti Betigeri) review a number of works, including:
Peter Burke: A social history of knowledge (book, 2000).  Burke covers not only the creation of knowledge, but also its destruction – the craft of agnotology, the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt.
Christina Thompson Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia (book, 2019). A story of epic voyagers and extraordinary skills in navigation, long before Europeans ventured into the Pacific.
Samanth Subramanian How Hindu Nationalists are tearing India apart (Guardian article, 2020).  About how, on Narendra Modi’s watch, India is moving away from its secular constitutional roots.
Malcolm Gladwell Revisionist history (a series of half-hour podcasts) “Gladwell’s journey through the overlooked and the misunderstood. Every episode re-examines something from the past—an event, a person, an idea, even a song—and asks whether we got it right the first time.”