Can money buy happiness revisited

On Twitter the other day, Ikea UK shared the official recipe for their iconic meatballs and cream sauce,— in the form of Ikea instructions naturally. As a midwesterner of partial Swedish heritage, this sort of thing is right up my alley.

It’s kind of amazing that society has collectively decided to give up all its secrets and control in the face of the pandemic — museums putting their collections online, filmmakers streaming their movies for free, people indiscriminately sending each other nudes, bands putting live performances on YouTube for free, and now this Ikea meatballs thing. The world has turned upside down. (via why is this interesting?)

Music That’s Perfect for Working

Thousands Of Flamingos Take Over India’s Largest City Amid Coronavirus Lockdown HuffPo

Cocaine for the masses." The growth of a coffee culture has been trailed, and sometimes advanced, by a coffee literature  

Death is scary. Arbitrary death is terrifying. The pandemic has Joseph Epstein considering the distinction

The Author Of A Book ABout Misogynistic Abuse Also Is Hit With A Mountain Of Online Abuse

The alt-right troll army has found, and targeted, the author of a book about abuse. She says, “I knew the book needed to be written – but I didn’t know it needed to be written this badly. The targeted attacks from men in the last week have been appalling. I will always centre women in my work and I will keep making misogynists uncomfortable.”  – The Guardian (UK)

Can money buy happiness revisited the new take is to hire a happiness agent. Sartre’s Stalinism. His relationship with the grislier aspects of the Soviet regime aren’t as black and white as his critics make out 

Physicist Brian Greene on Mortality, Our Search for Meaning, and the Most Important Fact of the Universe

“When you see all of those stories nested together in one narrative arc… it gives a deeper understanding of where we came from, and what’s happening at the moment, and ultimately where we’re going.”

Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in letterto his grief-stricken friend, the Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, in 1923 — the year he published, after a decade of work, his miraculous Duino Elegies.

“Call It the Tucker Carlson Wing of the GOP”: The American Conservative Wants to Be the Atlantic of the Right | Vanity Fair.


Since its 2002 launch under founding editor Scott McConnell, the magazine has pushed ideas few other conservative outlets considered, namely opposing America’s wartime economy and the ongoing engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan that fuel it. On domestic and trade policies, TAC’s editorial line has long opposed the international trade agreements championed by adherents of global-market capitalism who ran the party pre-Trump. “We really want…[a more] humane economy, as opposed to just whatever the Wall Street Journal editorial board wants, or big finance and big business want,” Burtka said during a phone interview from his Pennsylvania farm, from which he regularly commuted from to TAC’s offices in Washington, D.C., before the pandemic hit. “We really want to look at what types of economic policies would empower families and local communities…[and to be] good stewards of the environment.”

       The most recent addition to the complete reviewis my review of Wendy Lesser going In Pursuit of a Mystery, in Scandinavian Noir -- a book about her extensive reading of Nordic crime fiction and then travelogue of her first visit to Scandinavia. 
       (Lesser is the longtime editor of The Threepenny Review 

Wiradjuri writer Tara June Winch has pulled off a hat-trick at the 2020 NSW Premier's Literary Awards for her novel The Yield, taking home three major prizes, including the Book of the Year.

Awarding Winch's novel the top gong (worth $10,000) and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000), the judges described it as "a ground-breaking and wholly original work of fiction by one of our most exciting contemporary writers".

"Winch plays with form, shape, style, perspective and point of view in order to conjure three very distinct voices that speak to the past, present and future of our nation: Albert Gondiwindi, his granddaughter August and the nineteenth-century missionary Reverend Greenleaf."

Indigenous Australian author Tara June Winch wins Book of the Year at NSW Premier's Literary Awards

Literary awards prizes